Research seminar: Free the Map: Towards a new cartography of borders and migration

A world map is a visual story that aims to represent a perspective on reality. One would then expect multiple visual narratives depicting the various aspects, actors, and international relations that shape our world. However, since the 16th century, the standard atlas — conceived by Gerardus Mercator in the colonial era for purposes of discovery (read: conquest) and widely used in education, politics, and media — has predominantly conveyed a single visual narrative: which state governs where. As a result, a world map still typically depicts distinct, imaginatively homogeneous communities, confined within national borders that are misleadingly represented as thin, continuous lines. And, tellingly, migration, in standard cartography, is portrayed as an abnormality invading these bordered boxes, often represented by oversized, red arrows — the language of a hostile invasion see also our article Henk van Houtum and Rodrigo Bueno Lacy, ‘The Migration Map Trap. On the invasion arrows in the cartography of migration’, Mobilities 15 (2020), 196-219.

It is remarkable that this colonial state-centric cartography has become so normalized — hegemonic even — that it is mistaken for objectivity and neutrality, even though it represents a historically skewed and geographically flawed perspective on the world. The consequences of this territorial trap are far-reaching. It reduces the world’s geographical complexity to static, territorial containers on a map and obscures history, dynamic relational geographies, legal interdependencies, demographic diversity and lived experiences. And it reinforces imperial land grabbing and nativist and nationalist power interests: 'us here’ and ‘them there’.

In this lecture, based on my recently published book Free the Map: From Atlas to Hermes. A New Cartography of Borders and Migration (nai010, 2024), I will first unravel the impact of this hegemonic state-centric cartography on our current understanding of borders and migration. Then, I will present an overview of existing alternative cartographic representations that powerfully and convincingly humanize and mobilize the map, which I categorize as counter-mapping, experience-mapping, and connectivity-mapping. These approaches not only challenge the notion of borders as mere lines and migration as unidirectional arrows but also map human experiences, discriminatory (in)hospitalities, socio-economic relationships and connections.

Henk van Houtum is Professor of Geopolitics and Political Geography at Radboud University Nijmegen and coordinator of the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research. He writes and teaches on the cartography and geopolitics of borders, bordering, and migration. His new book is Free the Map: From Atlas to Hermes. A New Cartography of Borders and Migration (nai010, 2024).