An Anticolonial Land-Based Approach to Urban Place: Mobile Cartographic Stories by Refugee Youth

This article introduces a mobile Global Positioning System app created by refugee girls in the United States as a social justice- and community-oriented media art project that provides visual and oral countermapping stories that reflect an anticolonial orientation in their presentation of the city of Buffalo, New York. Through collaborative work with refugee girls in a community media art educational setting in Buffalo, I centered our projects on challenging settler colonial geographies by presencing subaltern stories of place. I use a land-based, critical race educational approach to guide my understanding of the youths’ subaltern stories of place in relation to settler colonialism. This anticolonial mobile cartographic story app highlights land pedagogy; the young refugees’ palimpsest-like, subaltern stories of urban spaces, which serve as testimonies to their lived experiences; and countermapping, which challenges and rewrites the imperatives of settler cartographies.