As part of Syracuse Symposium 2007, Laura Kurgan, director of the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL) at Columbia University, and Eric Cadora, director of the Justice Mapping Center in Brooklyn, will speak at the Syracuse University School of Architecture on Wednesday, Oct. 24, at 4:30 p.m. in the main auditorium of the school's home, The Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St. The lecture, titled "Mapping Justice," is free and open to the public. A reception and exhibition opening of "Mapping Justice: Million Dollar Blocks" will follow at ThINC's Company Gallery at 1 Lincoln Center, Ground Floor.
Kurgan and Cadora contend that criminal justice, social welfare and economic development policies are intimately related to particular jurisdictions, neighborhoods and locales in our society. This lecture offers an informative and compelling exploration of the use of geographic information systems for research and practice in community and institutional corrections.
In addition to her role as SIDL director, Kurgan teaches architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and serves as Director of Visual Studies at Columbia. SIDL is currently collaborating with the Justice Mapping Center on a project called Graphical Innovations in Justice Mapping in selected states -- Arizona, California, Kansas, Louisiana, New York and Rhode Island. Kurgan has followed the declassification of satellite imagery and GPS technology in a series of research projects across the significant political events of the last decade. This work, which has been exhibited internationally, is collected in "You Are Here: Post-Military Technology and the New Landscape of Satellite Images," forthcoming from Zone Books.
Cadora is project co-director for Graphical Innovations in Justice Mapping. He is a community justice consultant and a program officer for the After Prison Initiative of the Open Society Institute, a grant-making program created to promote social and criminal justice policies that place reintegration and public safety equity at the center of the criminal justice mission. Cadora has helped to fashion the After Prison Initiative's grant-making agenda in four priority areas: Justice Reinvestment, New Leadership Development, National Re-Entry Policy Reform and Reduction of Civil Barriers to Reintegration.
The "Mapping Justice" lecture is co-sponsored by the SU School of Architecture, ThINC Gallery, and the SU Department of Geography. The exhibition runs Oct. 18-Dec. 1. A panel discussion related to the exhibition will be held at the gallery Nov. 9.
For more information, contact Mary Kate O'Brien, communications manager of the School of Architecture, at (315) 443-2388
or mcobrien@syr.edu. For information on parking, call (315) 443-8238.
