From Washington Irving to the Hudson River School, 19th-century anthropomorphizing narratives of haunted, restorative, and romantic nature grew to define the image of the Hudson Valley far into the future, even while the region has drastically evolved under these stories' feet. Now, as the highly socioeconomically, culturally, and ecologically diverse region marches deeper into a deindustrialized and COVID-shaped 21st century, the future is gray and malleable. Children dream, activists organize, planners plan, developers develop, and politicians promise, yet everyone is speculating, grasping at strings for what comes next.

This project principally focused on redesigning a SUNY Racism, Classism, and Sexism course at Ossining High School alongside Jillian McRae and Samuel North (teachers at Ossining High School), Joyce Sharrock Cole (the Ossining Village Historian), and Cornell University's Just Places Lab. This curriculum for the 2022–23 school year will utilize creative mapmaking to root social constructs in local experience and dream of local and regional transformation. The gallery exhibit involves the curation of student-made maps alongside planning documents, architectural renderings, and artistic depictions of the Hudson Valley. The exhibit explores how spatial imaginations are produced from communities in the Hudson Valley, and how the experiences and imaginations of local youth relate to the plans and rhetoric of powerful institutions within the Hudson Valley's financialized, racialized, and stratified socioeconomic structure. Beyond the Hudson Valley, the exhibit encourages us to learn to question how the way in which a place is told shapes its identity, its communities, its development, and its future.

Within the classroom, maps are a key medium towards conveying students' spatial experiences, dreams, and imaginations. At the beginning of the school year, we start with genealogical mapping to help students understand their roots, and power mapping, to explore the networks of interpersonal and interorganizational relationships that the students have in Ossining. Once we have this grounding, then we discuss how Ossining's story is told through different media outlets and begin to explore the practice of cartography and the historical power of maps. After that, we will begin to apply our mapmaking approach to the exploration of gender, sexuality, and sexism in Ossining, including exercises such as mapping gendered spaces in the high school. Throughout the school year, students will continue to be trained in hand-drawn and digital mapmaking skills through the exploration of how race, class, gender, sexuality, and environmental issues have affected the area in the past and present.

Later in the school year, the curriculum will turn towards the future. Students will explore different methods of shaping the future, including urban planning, political activism, real estate, speculative fiction, and music, all through exposure to how these practices are currently shaping the future of Ossining and the Hudson Valley in the present day. Then, students will engage in expressing their desired futures for Ossining and the surrounding region through the methods of future-shaping that appeal most to them. This process will take special influence from fantasy maps and speculative fiction, to encourage students to think radically and freely, and ask questions such as: Where are there dragons, and where are there rainbows? Where does their world end and where does it begin? What does the community look like in 2100? In 3000?

By the end of the school year, students' maps will be collected into a website that encapsulates the class's vision of their community's identity and its future, and can be circulated within the local community and with local changemakers. Hopefully, the students' maps and dreams can help answer the questions of "What is Ossining, and what do we want?," and can influence how the future of the town and the region is imagined.

Bio:
Kellen Cooks was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and raised in Ossining, New York. He still calls the Hudson Valley home, and the region is the focus of his undergrad thesis, which revolves around how speculative narratives have shaped the identity of the Hudson Valley from the past to the present, and how environmental speculations influence the region's future through their collective imagination and their development and governance structures. In this exploration of spatial narratives, he is developing a curriculum kit and plan alongside Jillian McRae, Samuel North, Joyce Sharrock Cole, and the Just Places Lab that utilizes creative mapmaking to represent Hudson Valley teenagers' present understandings of their community and dream of their community's future.

During his time at Cornell and after, Kellen would like to dream alongside communities about equitable and decolonial futures and work towards making those dreams a reality within their landscape, especially with communities that often lack the privilege to turn their spatial dreams into a reality. This career goal could translate into housing policy and justice work, high school teaching, getting a Ph.D., community organizing, or politics. He is not quite sure yet, and wants to keep himself flexible as he explores career pathways focused around spatial justice.

In his free time, Kellen likes singing R&B and Indie music, exploring new and familiar places, hanging with friends and family, reading sci-fi, and watching his beloved Knicks.