Migration, the Archive, and the Map

Abstract

In recent years, archiving and countermapping have emerged as popular and powerful instruments to represent unauthorized migrations and criticize contemporary border regimes. This resulted in a variety of political projects involving academics, migrants, and advocacy groups, using archiving and mapmaking as vectors of dissensus and affirming politics. This parallel between maps and archives is not just a contemporary trend; it speaks to their longstanding relationship throughout political modernity, as well as the overlap between the archival and cartographic critiques over the past century. This article reviews contemporary projects that mobilize this nexus to challenge contemporary border regimes. In doing so, I direct attention to how their goals, methods, and designs align with different conceptual approaches to archives and maps. The analysis explores the contributions of geographic thought to this conceptual framework, and it encourages further reflection and participation from geographers in projects making political interventions through archival and countermapping methods.