Population Research Discovery Seminars

Co-Sponsor(s):

Population Health Initiative

 

The death of a loved one is one of the most challenging episodes in a person’s life. This experience becomes even more complicated when someone dies in the context of migration. Beyond the emotional shock, family members and friends might have to hold posthumous ceremonies at a distance, organize the corpse’s repatriation, and deal with their own need to grieve from far away. In this research, I aim to shed light on the potential of mapping for revealing these intimate and heterogenous posthumous geographies. To do so, I have deployed three different cartographic strategies. First, I designed a series of narrative maps to focus on postmortem mobilities. These maps reveal that the movement of bodies continues to be influenced by emotional and economic decisions after death. They also display the local and global networks of communication and support triggered by the demise of a migrant. Second, I mobilized a mapping approach dedicated to charting the personal and the emotional (i.e., sensibility mapping) to represent the very intimate moments associated with the experience of death in the context of migration. Finally, I introduce the concept of “mapping-ofrenda” as a form of mourning and remembering. This third project emphasizes the value of the mapping process and the opportunity it offers to turn memories into maps. It also illustrates the importance to reconnect with the past and with relatives from afar. As a whole, I consider deep mapping as an intimate and non-replicable practice, as a desire and a never-ending task that calls for a diversification of mapping forms and practices to reflect and face the challenges of engaging with difficult stories. This work also establishes postmortem cartographies of mobilities, grief, memory, emotions, and solidarity as essential components of the geographies of death in migratory contexts.

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José Alavez is an Assistant Professor in the UW Department of Geography. His research brings together critical cartography, digital humanities, pluriversal design principles, and Global South approaches to transnationalism, exile, and diaspora. Dr. Alavez focuses on co-creating collaborative and creative mapping practices and representations that reveal the ongoing and multiscalar geographies of migration across the Americas. Prior to joining the University of Washington, Dr. Alavez worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Healthy Regions and Policies Lab, where he co-led the development of a community-focused data visualization toolkit on social determinants of health grounded in human-centered design and design justice principles. His postdoctoral work also included co-creating workshops alongside community and grassroots organizations to co-design ChiVes, a dashboard for environmental justice in Chicago. Additionally, Dr. Alavez co-produced in-depth interviews for the U.S. COVID Atlas as a means to humanize and complement its quantitative data. He holds a Ph.D. from Concordia University’s Geography, Planning, and Environment Department. For his doctoral dissertation, he employed deep mapping methodologies to study the stories of individuals who endured the death of a loved one in the context of migration. This work illustrated how deep maps, through multiple analytical and artistic displays, reveal that death in the context of migration is not the end of a story, but the beginning and extension of many others. Dr. Alavez from CONACYT’s Research Center of Geospatial Information and a BA in Human Geography from the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City.