Isaac Rivera receives the AAG Digital Geographies Outstanding Dissertation Award

Anonymous — Fri, 17 May 2024 18:00:58 +0000

Isaac Rivera receives the AAG Digital Geographies Outstanding Dissertation Award Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/17/2024 - 12:00

Incoming Geography faculty member, Isaac Rivera has received the Outstanding Dissertation award from the Digital Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers. His dissertation is entitled: "Mapping the Terms of Freedom & the Ongoing Refusal of Settler Imaginaries".

Abstract: Originating in Denver, Colorado in 1907 and exported as a national holiday in 1934, Columbus Day enacts the logic and institutionalization of conquest. Yet despite the seemingly totalizing imaginary of ongoing settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples continue to resist erasure. Mapping the Terms of Freedom & The Ongoing Refusal of Settler Imaginaries, traces the making and unmaking of settler imaginaries in Denver and the ways in which the city’s Indigenous communities choose to represent their stories of resistance to the world. I connect the way institutions of knowledge maintain settler imaginaries in place through the entanglement of visual and digital knowledge practices in settler colonialism. Using ethnographic, archival, and participatory research methods, I trace self-determined Indigenous representations of strength through the community curated (Re)Mapping Native Denver art exhibit that maps Indigenous geographies and dismantles the logics implicated in the settler imaginary. Held at Denver University (DU) in 2021, the (Re)Mapping Native Art Exhibit stood as a site of public facing education, demonstrating the liberatory power of retelling geo-history on the terms of Indigenous peoples.

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Insurgent Cartographies

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 19:23:03 +0000

Insurgent Cartographies Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/19/2024 - 12:23

Isaac Rivera
Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Geography
��Ƶ Boulder

Abstract

Insurgent cartographies are an expression of knowing the world from the standpoint of place. This talk delves into the concept of insurgency and its expressions as a modality of cartography and cultural memory, exploring the task for enacting anti-colonial pedagogies oriented towards liberatory geographies. This study begins through geo-historical analysis of the making and abolition of Columbus Day as a state holiday in its place of origin in Denver, Colorado, underscoring the coalitional capacities of Indigenous world-making practices that envisioned the undoing of the colonial celebration and its maintenance on geographical imaginaries. Using the (Re)Mapping Native Denver art exhibit as a case study in the making of Native counter-cartographies, a study on Native Denver’s ongoing efforts for institutional accountability, I show the radical possibilities of enacting insurgent cartographies from within the colonial University. I will conclude with a discussion on bridging the geo-humanities and geo-social sciences, acknowledging the necessity of both to realize liberatory futures. The insurgent cartographies enacted in the (Re)Mapping Native Denver art exhibit demonstrate the ongoing ways in which Indigenous movements choose to tell their stories of resistance and resurgence, reorienting geographical information systems (GIS) and the art of geography itself.

Bio

Dr. Rivera is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow for Faculty Diversity with the ��Ƶ Geography Department.

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