Nerve V. Macaspac

CURRENT RESEARCH

Spaces of Peace: Peace Zones and Unarmed Civilian Protection

My current research project examines peace beyond the dominant definition as absence of violence and peacebuilding as a state-centric project. Specifically, I investigate the phenomenon of community-led peace zones to better understand the kinds of work required from civilian communities in protecting their own lives during an active armed conflict, particularly if state or non-state armed actors fail to do so or are the sources of violence toward civilian communities. I use the term insurgent peace to refer to community-led peacebuilding and unarmed community self-protection that are rooted upon a set of internal norms, territoriality and placemaking practices, relations of interdependence with state and non-state actors, and the politics of refusal that allow community members to prevent conflict-related civilian deaths and displacement. 

Indigenous Geopolitics

Indigenous geopolitics refers to a set of social and spatial practices enacted by Indigenous Peoples in refusing state and non-state violence toward Indigenous communities and re-inscribing Indigenous space within the nation-state and global geopolitical order. In this research, I propose the concept of indigenous geopolitics as a framework to better understand the ways in which Indigenous Peoples navigate political violence, armed conflicts, and other forms of social and environmental injustice. I argue that the daily and sustained work required of Indigenous Peoples in protecting their own lives and territories is geopolitical work, drawing from a set of Indigenous knowledge, jurisprudence, and practices that disrupt or challenge the respective spatial logics and geographic or territorial imaginations of state and non-state armed actors. As Indigenous Peoples promote their survival and protection amid political violence, armed conflicts, changing climate, and other forms of social and environmental injustice, they question, challenge, and circumvent dominant geographic imaginations, geopolitical projects, and claims about international relations, peace, global environmental justice, and nation-state territoriality. Indeed, Indigenous Peoples are much more than simply active agents. Fundamentally, the survival and defense of Indigenous Peoples territories are geopolitical processes that re-work, transform and decolonize power relations between Indigenous Peoples, state, and non-state actors.

Mapping the Archive

Scholars in the fields of critical GIS and critical archival studies emphasize that neither maps nor archives are neutral or apolitical. Historically, cartographic and archival practices were necessary to enforce territorial and extraterritorial control and colonial expansion. Maps and archives were deeply implicated in colonial and imperialist invasion, occupation and violence, primitive accumulation and racialized dispossession, nation-building and statecraft, historical erasure, and denial of justice over colonial, racialized or genocidal violence. More recently, the respective fields of critical GIS and critical archival studies recast digital geospatial and archival practices and tools as terrains of power, agency, resistance, and political change amidst a broad range of historical and geographic concerns. This collaborative research and co-authored report places the two fields in dialogue to better understand how critical digital GIS and archival practices reimagine both GIS and the archive as fields of knowledge, communities of practice, and as transformative processes where place, memory, and justice are inscribed and contested while also reimagining geospatial and archival knowledge production through ethical collaboration and care.

Re-imagining the Philippines as a Site of American Geographical Inquiry: Implications to the History of Geography

The history of geographic thought in the United States (U.S.) remains silent on the relationship between the emergence of Geography as an academic discipline, on the one hand, and U.S. extraterritorial and colonial expansionism in the Philippines at the cusp of 19th and 20th centuries. Narratives of the history of Geography, David Livingstone reminds us, often center on the role of the discipline to societies in the past or its functions to nation-states. However, rather than asking what the discipline of Geography did to the Philippines, I ask the reverse: How did the Philippines as a site of geographical inquiry during American colonialism shape – or could shape – the discipline? As early as 1902, the U.S. Bureau of Insular Affairs under the War Department in Washington published the Pronouncing Gazetteer and Geographical Dictionary of the Philippine Islands, United States of America, with Maps, Charts, and Illustrations that is among the earliest works of ‘regional geography’ published in the United States. The over 900-page Gazetteer includes detailed statistical data about the economy, illustrations and descriptions of the islands, and classification of the local population that focuses on what American colonial administrators, specifically David P. Barrows, later serving as the president of the University of California, refer to as “non-Christian tribes.” In this research, I review, examine and analyze documents and primary source materials from the David P. Barrows papers, 1890-1954 at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley to better understand the processes through which the American acquisition of the Philippines under the 1898 Treaty of Paris as a consequence of the Spanish-American War could provide rich historical evidence in revealing hidden geographies of early American Geographic knowledge production and implications to our understanding of the past, present and future intellectual and methodological traditions of the discipline of Geography.

Mapping the Geographies of the “Digital Divide”

Since 2015, the number of neighborhoods within a commercial corridor in New York City that have access to free Wi-Fi have increased significantly. The increase in the access to free public Wi-Fi is largely due to LinkNYC, a communications network across New York City’s five boroughs. Each of these Links provides free, encrypted gigabit Wi-Fi to anyone with a smartphone within 150 feet. While this innovation appears promising in closing the so-called digital divide—over 45% of total households and composed mostly of Asian, Hispanic and Blacks are in poverty and without mobile broadband connection—we know very little of the geography of LinkNYC specifically in relation to the lack of affordable housing, gentrification and continuing legacies of redlining. This research examines the geographies of LinkNYC by mapping, visualizing and analyzing the socio-spatial patterns of LinkNYC communications network and what these tell us of the intersections between digital divide, urban inequality, and surveillance and racial capitalism.