IN-PERSON ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

This paper introduces a process for using textile-based methods of critical mapping research with high school students, framed around a participatory mapping workshop with 826 Boston’s Youth Literary Advisory Board (YLAB) in April 2026. We designed this workshop to facilitate a co-creation process with eight young writers who had recently completed a 30-page libretto depicting students and teachers navigating a cultural crisis over the burning and banning of politically outspoken texts. Our approach reads the libretto as a speculative fiction document within the legacy of feminist, Black, and queer speculative fiction (including the works of Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin). Building on critical geographers and postcolonial urban planning scholars such as Katherine McKittrick and Ashley Dawson, we interpret this operetta as a commentary on re-emerging trends of free speech and critical media suppression, and as a warning about what is to come if resistance to incipient threads of fascism in the United States are not taken seriously. The urgency of this message from 14–18 year-olds is not lost on us. We then mine the ties between Boston’s spatial history, architecture, and political climate that surfaced when students were invited to map their fictional setting overtop of the city’s existing geography. Our analysis presents insights about the differences between digital and analog mapping (and particularly between drawing-based and craft-based practices like sewing and stitching). Drawing on Sletto, Novoa, Vasudevan, Elwood, and Noxolo, we argue that the intimate making practices historically framed as feminine or domestic generate a distinct form of collective ownership over geographic representation, proposing facilitation strategies that foster inclusive knowledge co-creation and more equitable planning practices.