“In this public lecture, University of Alberta’s current Writer in Residence J.R. Carpenter will share questions which have long pervaded her work. Questions about place, displacement, migration, and climate change. Questions which are mostly unanswerable. Questions which Carpenter continues to try to answer anyway, increasingly through dialectic, dialogic, and collaborative processes. Because speaking about the unspeakable with someone comes as a relief. Drawing together examples from cartography, philosophy, poetry, media theory, and her own work, Carpenter implores us all to ask questions about the loss, desire, and violence implicit in the systems of imperial measurement which underpin the ways we conceptualize and operationalize space.”