Map Up, Down, and Around: Working Through the Cartographic Implications of Critical Practice
Topics:
Keywords: countermapping, critical GIS, cartography, mapping up
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Eric Robsky Huntley, MIT
Asya Aizman, MIT
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
Abstract
Critical GIS has tended to take the subject of the GISciences—and their relationship to power—somewhat for granted. Cartography and cartographers are powerful, even as the mapped are subject to their power plays. This paper will consider what it could do for mapping practice to consider the directional situatedness of mapping practice, not only in the sense of reflecting on the map-maker’s power but also on their position relative to the mapped. In other words: to see power as relational and intersectional rather than endowed by one’s disciplinary or technical training (cf. Táíwò 2022; Taylor 2017).
This paper will present both a contemporary survey of counter-mapping and a series of maps, produced by the authors in the context of a project that seeks to document institutional landlordism in Greater Boston. As Shelton (2022) has noted, such maps require richer GIS. . . but we argue that this calls for a renewed visual and cartographic practice as well, presenting our early attempts at a relational cartography of property.We build on existing work in human geography and experimental cartographies, particularly work around ‘geographic imagination systems’ (Lally and Bergmann 2021; Bergmann and Lally 2021), topological space (Martin and Secor 2014), and interventions in critical GIS that emphasize relational geographies (Shelton 2022). Our contribution will be to take mapping practice as not only an epistemic project but an aesthetic one, examining how cartographies that map up, down, and around (to invoke Laura Nader’s influential framing) might differ in their use of visual and cartographic rhetoric.
Map Up, Down, and Around: Working Through the Cartographic Implications of Critical Practice
Category
Paper Abstract