Tonya Haynes

Public health is built on maps. But when it comes to diabetes in the Caribbean, many existing maps are alienating, incomplete, and full of errors. Yet remedying these misrecognitions is not simply a matter of more granular data either. Maps have long been instrumental tools for colonial and imperial power. This creates double binds in mapping the most basic facts of what is happening to people. We envision this project as a collective attempt at counter-mapping diabetes care from the Caribbean. With a focus on making visible the planetary and embodied legacies of sugar – and highlighting the ways women are already mapping their own care – we propose a platform for unorthodox map-making and community art that recognizes people not as public health “risks” or targets, but as knowledge-bearers offering insights from what they have learned by managing to hold up entire worlds.