| dc.description.abstract | United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) calls the ongoing Syrian conflict “the biggest humanitarian emergency of our era.” Since 2011, violence has led to nearly 220,000 lives lost, 6.5 million Syrians have been internally displaced, and over 4 million have fled across borders into Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt. Western media have documented Syrian border crossings and stories through riveting journalism, interviews, photography, and maps. While the written and photographic reporting of Syrian stories uses captivating imagery and testimonials to convey the traumatic experiences of individuals, the expression of these experiences in the accompanying cartographic coverage is limited. Western media cartographic practices commonly aggregate refugees into flow lines and proportional symbols and simplify border experiences into homogenous black lines. These and other mapping conventions silence the experiences of individual Syrians, and negate the emotions, perils, and geopolitical issues inherent to border crossing experiences, while ignoring the multitude of non-traditional borders that refugees encounter in addition to the international border. I ask the following research question: How can the cartographic portrayal of Syrian peoples’ border crossings be improved to better represent their experiences? Through a critical feminist lens, I analyzed contemporary cartographic methods in 86 maps published by Western sources, interviewed seven humanitarian workers, and developed an alternative mapping technique that more accurately reflects Syrian border crossings. By rendering Syrian border stories and experiences visible with cartography, my work enhances interaction between critical cartography, border studies, and critical, feminist perspectives and gives Syrians a geographic voice as yet unavailable to them through conventional cartographies. | |
