CWU geography professor featured on NPR Marketplace

Central Washington University Professor of Geography Dr. Sterling Quinn was a guest last week on National Public Radio’s (NPR) Marketplace program for a conversation about how online map companies have historically dealt with landmark name changes.

The interview, hosted by Stephanie Hughes, centered around Google’s recent decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and change Mount Denali to Mount McKinley, based on recent executive orders signed by President Donald Trump.

Quinn explained that while most big online map companies put out detailed policies regarding naming and borders when the services were first introduced, certain cultural realities have forced them to rethink those approaches in the years since.

“Their statements changed over time, to talk about how their changes would support the company’s mission or local market expectations, and that was actually closer to the truth of what they started doing,” Quinn said in the interview. “So, over time, their statements about how they handled disputes have kind of gone away, and we just see little glimpses in them now and then, like the posts that Google put on X last week explaining how it was going to handle this change.”

Quinn fosters critical thinking around these concepts in his classroom, urging students to read maps within their contexts and draw their own conclusions about the author’s intent.

He said he likes to encourage his students and others, when they view maps, to think about the motives and objectives of those who created the map, rather than viewing a map as an objective, scientific truth — or as the only way to see the world.

“There are multiple ways to depict and show the world, and map makers have to make decisions all the time about what things they include in the map, how much prominence they give each thing, the labels and language that they use when describing things,” Quinn told Hughes. “And as students learn how to make their own maps and read maps, they think more deeply about those topics.”

The entire Marketplace segment is available on the NPR website.