John Pickles on Harley and Friday Harbor

Jeremy Crampton and I interviewed John Pickles on the subject of Brian Harley and Friday Harbor. This was just published in a special issue of Cartographica, "Deconstructing the Map: 25 Years On", organized by Reuben Rose-Redwood. Provided you have rare access privileges, you can download the interview here. If not, send me an email.

Crampton, Jeremy W., and Matthew W. Wilson. 2015. "Harley and Friday Harbor: A Conversation with John Pickles."  Cartographica 50 (1):28-36. doi: 10.3138/carto.50.1.06.

An excerpt follows...

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WILSON: So after his death, how did the conversations on GIS and the map as ideology lead toward Friday Harbor? 

PICKLES: The conversation Brian and I had was certainly part of a whole series of similar and broader conversations occurring at the time in the discipline. The question of GIS and critical cartography was always located for me – and I think for many of the people I interacted with at Friday Harbor – in bigger questions of instrumentalism and discipline. In one way or another, the initial arguments between colleagues like Peter Taylor and Stan Openshaw were taken up by a wide range of geographers who were interested in what was then being referred to as post-positivist epistemologies, whether Marxian, hermeneutic, feminist, realist, or relativist. I have mentioned the Penn State group. There were others. One important group was assembled around Eric Sheppard and others at Minnesota, including Michael Curry, Trevor Barnes, and many more. Eric and Michael, in particular, were central to the Friday Harbor meeting. 

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