In Racialized Space: Children Map the Post‐Apartheid Landscape, Reed presents a participatory mapping project with rural youth in South Africa's Eastern Cape. The analysis of the maps demonstrates that intergenerational legacies of racial oppression are critical to children's conceptions of space and place.  

Can children's maps shed light on legacies of structural inequality? 

Related Materials

• Divided cities: South Africa's apartheid legacy photographed by drone

• The Adorable Maps Today’s Cartographers Made as Kids

• Participatory Mapping

Discussion Questions & Activities

1. How would you define a map? What is it supposed to look like? What is the purpose of a map?

2. Ask students to map the place they currently live—this can be done either from memory or as a homework assignment. Tell them to include a key of important features, but otherwise, leave the decisions about what to map up to them!

3. What kinds of features did you include in your map? Why did you include them?

4. Can you think of what you didn’t include? Why?

5. How does your map compare to those of your classmates?

6. What might we learn about you from your map? Do you think we can tell things like socioeconomic class, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, age? Use this as an opportunity to discuss with the class what kinds of things maps reveal and don’t reveal. Maps are not politically neutral!

7. The maps in the article are done by rural South African children. What features suggest to you, if any, their ages?

8. Do you think their urban counterparts would make similar maps? Why or why not?

9. The article suggests that race plays a critical role in the way these children experience the landscape. How do the maps support this argument? What do you think of the idea that race can be reflected in a map?