In Cartographies of Mobility: Traveling Circus and Landscape Production, students will investigate how landscapes are produced by movement as much as by settlement. Devin Jernigan's research treats the circus as an itinerant spatial system, investigating the relationships among mobility, public space, infrastructure, spectacle, and territorial change. This course will test his theories of maps and the American traveling circus. A city of canvas, animals, and waste erected each morning and dismantled by midnight in a new town daily. It ran on rail grades and weather it could not outrun. The seminar is half mapping, half discussion in cartographic history and cultural geography: how a map argues while hiding its author, how the hinterland was drawn to serve the city, what counts as landscape when nothing stays in place. Students will georeference sources, run network and service area analyses, work with time-based data, and build spatial arguments that hold across scale and time.
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