GGIS Colloquium | Mapping the Border Otherwise: Participatory Counter-Mapping and Storytelling in the Paso del Norte Borderlands
- Sponsor
- Geography & GIS
- Speaker
- Dr. Eda Özyeşilpınar, Illinois State University
- Cost
- This talk is free and open to the public with a Zoom option.
- Registration
- Zoom RSVP
- Contact
- Geography & GIS
- geography@illinois.edu
- Originating Calendar
- Geography & Geographic Information Science
Mapping the Border Otherwise: Participatory Counter-Mapping and Storytelling in the Paso del Norte Borderlands
This talk focuses on Dr. Özyeşilpınar’s recently published co-authored book, Border Mapping: A Participatory Community Design of the Mexico–US Borderlands, centered on the El Paso–Ciudad Juárez region, historically known as Paso del Norte.The project moves beyond examining how borders are rhetorically constructed and lived to actively engage with how borderland residents represent and map the border and this space on their own terms. Drawing on participatory community mapping, the book challenges institutionalized, hegemonic cartographic discourses that frame the border as a site of danger, fear, and violence, which produce borderland residents through racialized narratives and stereotypes.
Instead, it foregrounds storytelling and counter-mapping practices developed by borderland residents, highlighting how lived experiences, memories, and cultural knowledge reshape representations of space. Grounded in cultural rhetorics and decolonial methodologies, the project positions participatory mapping as a relational, story-driven form of rhetorical knowledge-making that reimagines bordering, belonging, and everyday life across the borderlands.
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Dr. Eda Özyeşilpınar is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the Department of English at Illinois State University. Her research and teaching focuses on border rhetorics, digital-cultural rhetorics, and global histories of rhetoric, with particular attention to non-Western and underrepresented traditions. Informed by feminist, comparative, and decolonial methodologies, she examines transnational border imperialism and the ways border artivism (art + activism) critiques and resists bordering violence, while also tracing global activist rhetorics that connect feminist and queer movements in Türkiye with broader transnational contexts.
Her award-winning research has appeared in leading journals and collections in rhetoric and composition, including Rhetoric Review and Review of Communication. Her co-authored book, Border Mapping: A Participatory Community-Mapping Design of the Mexico–USA Borderlands, explores decolonial participatory mapping as a rhetorical intervention into settler-colonial cartographies of the borderlands.