The Harm Mapping Project Poster Display

We are excited to begin honoring Sexual Assault Awareness Month by highlighting the work of the Lafayette Gender-Based Violence Research Lab and their Harm Mapping project. The multi-phase project examines the geography of gender-based violence on campus with the goals of better understanding the spaces and places that students have experienced gender-based harms and/or feel vulnerable to experiencing such harms, and providing recommendations to campus leadership regarding ways to modify the built environment to help prevent future harms from occurring and to increase students' feeling of safety on campus. The project, which began in fall 2022, engaged over 500 Lafayette students in a participatory mapping exercise where individual students were provided with a blank map of campus and were instructed to use stickers to mark on the campus map where they have experienced gender-based violence. The lab worked with a cartographer to visualize the data, and collectively the team created 7 proportional symbol maps using feminist design principles.

These maps will be on display beginning Monday, March 31 through Friday, April 4 from 11-1 each day in Farinon Atrium.