Unmapping The Map

Maps are ubiquitous in day-to-day life, yet they are often viewed as objective representations of reality rather than tools created by people within social contexts. In interviews with nine students and faculty on Western Washington University’s campus, I investigate the roles of institutional authority and social knowledge in the creation and interpretation of maps, as well as the conflict between those two aspects. Many participants identified weaknesses that the maps they used had, but they still found those maps to be reliable on the whole. However, when asked to create maps, they expressed that inaccuracies jeopardized the usefulness of the map as a whole. Social knowledge is at times more useful when it comes to navigating spaces, and yet it is often delegitimized, both by more “official” maps and by the people who hold that knowledge.