The Map is not the Territory: The Limitations and Power of Mapping 

Presented live via Zoom with time for Q&A. Pre-registration is required.

Click here to register

Between our experience of the world and our knowledge of the world lies the map. Whether the purpose of a map is to locate a source of food to gather, to display a territory ripe for exploitation to a faraway monarch or to determine the name of that great ski run you took, the transmission of spatial knowledge is a universal human art. The drive for accuracy and truth in a map cannot escape the fact that someone is doing the driving. It is never the map, and always her, his, their map. Why create a permanent artifact out of a subjective, culturally relative means of communication that could hardly scratch the surface of the real experience no matter the level of detail? Who is the map for? How are issues of inequality and access involved/addressed in historic and contemporary mapping? 

Dr. Keul serves as the director for the BA in Tourism Management and Policy at Plymouth State University. He is trained as a tourism geographer and his research focuses on the production of tourism spaces at the confluence of land and water. He has written about tourism and geography covering a variety of topics including: black bears in Texas, large swamps in the US South, beaches on the New England coast, and resource development in the globalized Arctic. Throughout his research he applies critical theories addressing political economy and ecology. Alongside his academic and administrative duties, Keul also coaches pole vault for the PSU track team. 

Presented as part of the Museum’s summer exhibition: Wayfinding: Maps of the White Mountains. The Virtual Summer 2021 Speaker Series was made possible with support from New Hampshire Humanities, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities. Learn more at www.nhhumanities.org