Mapping Meaning

Through experimental workshops, exhibitions, and transdisciplinary research, Mapping Meaning promotes a radical reconsideration of the role humanity plays in a more-than-human world. Inspired by a photograph from 1918 depicting an all-female survey crew, this ongoing project is rooted in five-day workshops that take place biennially at biological field stations in the USAmerican West.

This page highlights the third Mapping Meaning, which focused on the development of an abcBLITZ.

Minidoka Project, Idaho 1918, Photo from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, of the U.S. Department of the Interior — Minidoka Project, Idaho 1918, Photo from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, of the U.S. Department of the Interior

abcBLITZ

The term “BioBlitz” was first coined in 1996 by U.S. National Park Service naturalist Susan Rudy and is used to describe an intense period of biological surveying. Generally occurring over a 24-hour period, a BioBlitz aims to record as many species of plants, animals, microbes, fungi, and other organisms as possible within a designated area.

Mapping Meaning 2014 utilized the concept of BioBlitz as a model for thinking about what it means to “experience”, “assess”, “know” and “teach” place. Mapping Meaning expanded this model to create an abcBLITZ, where abc stands for aesthetics, biology and culture, as well as the metaphorical building blocks of “life/language.” In essence, the abcBLITZ is a focused way to think about interdisciplinary pedagogy — recognizing not only the importance of biodiversity but also the cultural and artistic histories central to any holistic understanding of a place. This was also a way to experiment with what Mapping Meaning might collectively create. We are currently working on a field guide or manual so others interested in place-based integrative education can adapt this to their needs and local environment.

Overarching questions:

How do we create alternative models that are imaginative enough to be open and easily adapted to local environments?

If "land is the text” how do we read our surrounding and create meaning around a place that is multidimensional? How do we translate that meaning so it is transformative, rather than simply enlightening?

Aesthetic Blitz

Walking with Pictures

Carmina Sánchez-del-Valle and Trudi Lynn Smith

In this session participants received images printed on postcard-sized cards, and writing/sketching tools. Some of the images were tourist images and iconic views of areas and landmarks of the Canyonlands National Park while others depicted life in the park, and were difficult to re-locate.

Hiking to False Kiva

Participants were asked to keep field notes – written or sketched or both - overlaid on the images provided.

Sharon Mansur, Dance Performance and Toni Wynn, Poetry Performance

To view video excerpt please click on photo for link.

Password: mappingmeaning

BioBlitz

Edible Explorations on The Colorado Plateau

April Bojorquez

In this session participants discussed the history of native ecologies and then went on an exploration to identify and collect edible plants of the Colorado Plateau. This culminated with a culinary experience connecting participants to food practices that exist outside of industrial agricultural systems and offering another lens for how we approach social and environmental ecologies.

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Scale and Site

Sylvia Torti and Linda Wiener

Cultural Blitz

Cave Springs Trail

Melanie Armstrong & Jen Richter

In this session participants hiked the Cave Springs Trail in the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park. This scenic area includes several important cultural and archaeological sites such as a historic cowboy camp with an open-air cooking area as well as Ancestral Pueblo pictographs. During this cultural blitz participants were introduced to regional issues relating to intersections and conflicts between cowboy, Native American and government (National Park) cultures.

To date there have been four Mapping Meaning workshops:

2010: Dixie National Forest, Red Canyon, Utah

2012: Capitol Reef Field Station, Utah

2014: Canyonlands Research Center, Utah

2016: Santa Cruz Island Reserve, Channel Islands National Park, California

The 5th workshop will coincide with the launch of the Mapping Meaning Journal as well as the 100-year anniversary of the photograph from 1918 that helped inspire the project.

2018: The Taft-Nicholson Center, Montana

For further information on Mapping Meaning please visit the main page.

Photo Credits: Krista Caballero, Trudi Lynn Smith, Sharon Mansur, Carmina Sánchez-del-Valle, Sree Sinha

Mapping Meaning: abcBLITZ

Mapping Meaning

abcBLITZ