Thinking/Making Geographic Representation

An intervention piece co-authored by my seminar participants has been published at Antipode! Read here.

Following a seminar in critical and social cartography at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, course participants set about writing a manifesto of sorts, a provocation in the thinking and practice of geographic representation. Our seminar discussions charted a renewal of geographic representation alongside the advancement of neogeography, the saturation of location-based services, the marketization of geodesign, the reconfiguration of the humanities toward the spatial and the digital, and the drumbeats of ‘big data’, the ‘death of theory’, the ‘quantified self’, ‘smart cities’, and ‘cyberinfrastructure’. In addition to identifying these various stratifications, we examined the destratifying potential of (more-than-)representational geographies, to ask: where and when are the moments of fracture, of potential deterritorialization? How might we examine the histories of these reterritorializations in mapmaking, to inform our social and critical cartographies? [ read more ]