Maps play a principal role in the representation and comprehension of spatial knowledge. They are tools created with particular skill, technology, language and method for the purpose of recording and reproducing space. Maps, therefore, have forever been embedded in spatial politics. … The epistemological troubling of maps as representations of power-knowledge created a set of new mapping practices to be used in empirical research and in broader strategies for advocacy and justice work (Crampton and Krygier 2006). A set of these new practices called ‘counter-mapping’, refers to the map-making process in which communities challenge the state’s formal maps, appropriate its official techniques of representation, and make their own alternative maps.
This list of readings traces the theoretical strands in critical cartography that destabilize the map (and the mapping process) as tools of colonialization, and follows research that utilizes maps as critical and applied methodologies that enhance social justice work.
Comments by Einat Manoff