Led by alumni resident Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, who is working on a book about the exploration of place-names in the city, and essayist Garnette Cadogan, whose essay “Round and Round” describes his 24-hour walk through New York’s five boroughs, this workshop will explore how any city contains many ways to be mapped, and how our maps forge stories to make sense of the places we live. To conceptualize the relation between mapping and walking, we will walk Governors Island, concluding with a self-mapping exercise to explore how walking can function as both barometer, revealing the cultural and social character of our surroundings, and as mediator, creating a bridge between data and stories.

This event will take place off-site at Governors Island, Nolan Park 8B, which is accessible via ferry from Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Price: Free ($10 Suggested Donation)

Audience: Open to all.

Materials: Materials will be provided.

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose work often focuses on place, race, and how human difference is thought about and acted on in the world. He is the author of Island People: The Caribbean and the World, and co-editor, with Rebecca Solnit, of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas. Jelly-Schapiro teaches at NYU and is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Believer, The Nation, and Artforum, among many other publications.

Garnette Cadogan is an essayist who served as editor-at-large of Nonstop Metropolis. Currently a Scholar in Residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, his essay “Black and Blue” (aka “Walking While Black”), first published in Freeman’s, has been much anthologized and published in several languages. He is at work on a book about walking.