Overcoming barriers to climate dialogue through cartography: An example from Maasai land
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Pearce, M.
1UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS Email: margaret.pearce@ku.edu
Abstract
How can cartography connect connect two conflicting knowledge systems in the same mapped space, to illuminate areas of difference and common ground? In Indigenous communities worldwide, there is an urgent need for effective, cross-cultural dialogue on climate experience and adaptation strategies with external, non-Indigenous stakeholders at the regional, national, and transnational levels. Cartography is uniquely suited to fostering such dialogue where previous strategies have failed because of its capacity to clearly express cultural categories and spatialities through systematic structures of graphic vocabulary and grammar. In this paper I present a model for the use of cartography to forge climate dialogue across two Maasai communities in Tanzania and Kenya, from the particular challenges of cross-cultural cartographic fieldwork to symbolization design and map layout.
Keywords
climate; cartographic language; dialogue