Week 3 - Reading Summary

Doolittle, E. (2018). Off the grid. In Gerofsky, S. (Ed.), Geometries of liberation. Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72523-9_7

In Off the Grid, Edward Doolittle explores, through many examples, how grid-based representations of space can fail and challenges readers to consider other perspectives outside of Euclidean geometry for representing space. Grid-based systems are common in dominant culture and have a sense of “familiarity and comfort” (Doolittle, 2018, p. 102) and can be extended from the spatial to the temporal, such as marking out time on clocks and calendars. He argues that the uniformity of the grid can place artificial perceptions of equality on spaces and links the grid to concepts of “control and ownership” (p. 104). Failures of the grid-system include when geology is uneven or has sudden changes (an example of Hamilton, Canada where a grid-based map can’t incorporate the Nigara Escarpment’s 100 meter drop) or is round (projections of the earth ultimately skew, distort, or eliminate distances and features). Failures also happen with two or more grid systems meet, such as how the grid system imposed on the Six Nations is incompatible with the grid systems of the surrounding areas causing people to get lost driving when entering the reserve from these other grids.

Doolittle explores non-Euclidean geometry systems (explored in other chapters of the book from which this chapter originates). One example is Riemannian geometry which allows for inter-spaces as well as “accepting all kinds of straight and curved grids as equally valid ways to measure space” (p. 111) in a “democratization of frames” (p. 111). He also asks the readers to consider Indigenous ways of knowing as alternates to the grid. For example, in respect to time, rather than relying on clocks or calendars, Indigenous ways of farming may look to the timing of the sun during the day and the patterns of temperatures to know when harvest time is. In connection to land, defining territory may rely on demarcations related to land features and movement of water (e.g., a whole drainage basin) and incorporate fractal geometry rather than a grid system; in fact, imposing the grid may reduce territory size artificially (see the example of the Grand River Mohawk territory, p. 114). Doolittle offers a discussion of chaos theory as an example of a complex dynamical system that can be used to understand things like climate change and even teachable moments. He speaks of how non-Euclidean geometries, including Indigenous perspectives, may have their greatest influence in how they may “free the human mind from rigid and dogmatic viewpoints” (p. 117) and allow the seeing of problems in new ways that allow for new solutions, that we may be “opening our eyes and widening our perspective to see the world as it is, not as we might just imagine it to be.” (p. 119)

 

Here are some quotes additional to the ones included in my summary that I made note of:

“Too often, the specific life, qualities, and character of a particular place become subordinated to the forcefully imposed “evenness” and uniformity of the grid geometry.” (p. 104)

“To paraphrase Leopold Kronecker, the Creator gave us shapes; straight lines are the work of man.” (p. 104)

“You can smooth out bumps on the ground and remove rocks and stumps, but you can’t fill a valley with a hill, and you can’t move a mountain.” (p. 104)

“By allowing all grids on a n equal basis in a kind of democratization of frames, Riemannian geometry allows us to look past the particular grid we may be using, to refocus on the actual underlying geometry of the situation.” (p. 111)

“We must look through the structures imposed by our minds to the reality that lies below the surface grid we have drawn on top of it.” (p. 113)

“Examples of more down-to-earth complex systems in which chaotic control may applay are transformations in the context of education where we have the notion of the teachable moment, in which a few small “bursts” at the appropriate time might accomplish more than months of haranguing…The non-trivial question is how to identify those critical moments.” (p. 116-117)