Welcome to the collaborative workspace for the Mapping Cultural Space fellowship seminar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies!

This site holds the collections, exhibits, and maps produced by the students and fellows participating in the seminar over the 2014-2015 academic year.

This course is a year-long bi-weekly interdisciplinary seminar on the production, representation, and significance of cultural space. Eurasia, a region encompassing Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia, provides fertile ground for our exploration of the ways in which mapping (and related forms of spatial analysis) can produce new insights into the relationships among and between cultural sites, systems, and practices. We are particularly interested in urban space and the physical – mappable – infrastructures that shape cultural life.

Key Questions

Design and Goals

The primary goal of this course is to build skills in cultural mapping and analysis, an intellectual framework whose diverse application is acquiring momentum in many fields across the university, and to apply these skills toward developing an original project that makes an argument about cultural space in these terms and using these tools.  We want you to acquire a broad competency in this vibrant but complex emergent field of study.  You will gain hands-on experience using historical and conceptual maps of all types -- physical, digital, technical, conceptual, and artistic.

The seminar takes a regional focus -- Eurasia -- whose territories make up an enormous swath of the world.  Since we are hosted at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, we mean primarily the post-Soviet sphere or former “Soviet bloc.”  We also consider adjacent Eurasian cultures such as Turkey, Mongolia, and Afghanistan.  We welcome trans-national or post-socialist or global studies frameworks for analyzing cultural space, as well as work that examines hybrid or unstable conditions, porous or blurry borders.