As part of a research project entitled "Dangerous Geographies: The social abandonment of racialized women in South LA and Vancouver's Downtown Eastside", I am experimenting with different mapping software in order to counter some of the crime mapping trends in mass media web platforms (specifically, the LA Times' Homicide Report). 'Dangerous Geographies' analyzes the fact of and response to the murder of over 100 African-American women in South LA and 60 women (majority Indigenous) in Vancouver between 1987 and 2010). I analyze these cases mostly in terms of two things: 1. how they tell a story about city life and social abandonment - i.e. the withdrawal of social services and the increase in crime-seeking policing, the absence of addiction care, the criminalization of sex work - and 2. how they draw out public narratives of the disposability of Black and Indigenous women. At HASTAC 2016, I would like to talk about how countermapping practices - e.g. annotating crime maps with multimedia content, drawing out data that lays out structural obstacles to living a less threatened life - might push back against the way that crime mapping reinscribes a fatalistic collapse of blighted neighbourhoods and ruined women.
