Presented in conjunction with the course Workshop II CMS-951 taught by Catherine D'Ignazio

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Wood will speak about his approach to critical cartography and his latest research that centers around a Zapotec community in the Sierra Juarez near Oaxaca, Mexico. This work, to be published under the title "Weaponizing Maps", examines how Indigenous Participatory Mapping gets turned into a method for making maps that support state and military interventions into Indigenous life.

Featured on Ira Glass’ This American Life, Denis Wood is one of the most sought-after experts on the significance and meaning of maps. Wood loves maps and loves to talk about them though he is skeptical about many of the uses to which they are put. Wood is the author of
the bestseller, "The Power of Maps" (1992) and the latest version "Re-thinking the Power of Maps" (2010). He also curated the award-winning exhibition of maps at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design
Museum in 1992, and its even more popular incarnation at the Smithsonian in Washington the year after.

Wood is also a well-known social scientist and an artist. He has published over 60 articles in a variety of journals that range from Industrialization Forum to The Journal of Environmental Psychology. During the ’70s, Wood co-authored the bestselling "World Geography Today", and in the ’90s the respected "Home Rules". His "Five Billion Years of Global Change" was published by Guilford Press in 2004 and "Making Maps", co-authored with John Krygier, also Guilford Press, was published in 2005. His latest publication "Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas" (2010) represents twenty years of -- creatively and idiosyncratically -- mapping his neighborhood of Boylan Heights in
Raleigh, NC.