Looking “Beyond” Power? J.B. Harley's Legacy and the Powers of Cartographic World-Making (original) (raw)
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Reflecting on J.B. Harley's Influence and What He Missed in “Deconstructing the Map”
Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 2015
We never met Brian Harley, nor heard him speak, but his ideas deeply influenced our thinking, writing, and teaching about maps and mapping. His argument that maps function as social texts has a powerful force: after all, maps clearly do much more than simply store spatial data and communicate information. Harley's writing, along with work by Denis Wood, John Pickles, and Matthew Edney, opened up many routes for map studies beyond the technical, the cognitive, and applied functionalism. This body of scholarship, which we now recognize as ''critical cartography,'' was important as it helped to integrate the map as a significant object of inquiry back into the intellectual mainstream of the social sciences and humanities.
Introduction: The Limits to Deconstructing the Map
Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 2015
This special issue marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of J.B. Harley's “Deconstructing the Map” (1989), which has had a major influence in the fields of critical cartography, the history of cartography, and human geography more generally. Over the last quarter century, this essay and related works have also been widely cited by scholars from a broad range of disciplines across the social sciences and humanities, serving as a key reference for those seeking to theorize the spatial politics of maps and mapping. Through such citational practices, “Deconstructing the Map” has acquired a canonical status as one of the classics of critical cartographic theory, yet the limitations of its theoretical and methodological analyses are widely acknowledged even by Harley's strongest supporters. The contributors to this special issue discuss their own critical engagements with this foundational text as well as the extent to which Harley's work still resonates with c...
Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age, 2018
This chapter discusses the proliferation of the ‘map trope’ as the favoured representational and navigational tool for contemporary spatial narratives and analyses. However, it contextualises such excess within the broader exhaustion and death of cartography (Wood, 2003) observed in the field of geography. In so doing, the author distinguishes different forms of critique or ‘postures’ (Agamben, 2015)—which can be alternatively couched in terms of ‘exhaustion’ or ‘excess’—through which the resurgence of mapping theories and practices is generally debated in the field of critical and cultural geography. To illustrate such theoretical clashes, two caricatures are recruited, that of the ‘exhausted geographer’, who restlessly criticises maps and their power even though acknowledging their representational limits, and the ‘the geographer of the excess’, who considers mapping more enthusiastically and investigates it as a more than representational tool and other than a uniquely political means of spatial control and ordering. The author attempts to set a dialogue and a comparison between diverse exhausted and excessive positions on mapping in order to advance a different medium of theory which explore—both speculatively and practically—contemporary mapping through an affirmative but nonetheless critical lens.
An introduction to critical cartography
This paper provides a brief introduction to critical cartography. We define critical cartography as a one-two punch of new mapping practices and theoretical critique. Critical cartography challenges academic cartography by linking geographic knowledge with power, and thus is political. Although contemporary critical cartography rose to prominence in the 1990s, we argue that it can only be understood in the historical context of the development of the cartographic discipline more generally. We sketch some of the history of this development, and show that critiques have continually accompanied the discipline. In the post-war period cartography underwent a significant solidification as a science, while at the same time other mapping practices (particularly artistic experimentation with spatial representation) were occurring. Coupled with the resurgence of theoretical critiques during the 1990s, these developments serve to question the relevance of 1
Deconstructing the conservative map. On the renaissance of geography in the twenty-first century
Boletin De La Asociacion De Geografos Espanoles, 2015
The title of this article could suggest an extension of J.B. Harley’s research into maps and cartography from a postmodern approach and this paper could indeed be understood in that sense though not exactly from the point of view of the ichnographic function of the map. This article shall endeavour to explore the idea of the map as a process, as a rhetorical and at once political instrument, and a metaphoric image of the spatial turn. The spatial turn (Soja, 2011) marks a return to spatial and political discussion in our world. But this return is made on the triumph of the «conservative map» as explained here. Brian Harley was the first researcher to propose a deconstruction of the map (Llado, 2012) and to point out the extraordinary power of this action in disclosing its true meaning. A lot can be learnt from this action. But the question is what map is to be deconstructed? What is proposed here is an unmasking of the «conservative map». In 2009, Robert D. Kaplan published an artic...
A Critique of "Critical Cartography"
As a slogan, “critical cartographer” could not be more ambiguous. The multiple connotations of the adjective critical include thoughtful questioning—certainly worth promoting—as well as the obsessive faultfinding and self-serving sense of superiority of whiny academics who delight in implying “I’m critical and you’re not.” Although any canvass of the academic literature would finger societal impact as the prime focus of “critical cartography,” the aesthetic and perceptual impact of cartographic design is no less compelling a theme for critical scholarship. Insofar as participatory action research and public participation GIS are legitimate, socially beneficial instruments of a left-leaning agenda, perhaps “critical cartography” should be relabeled “progressive cartography” and its tenets recast accordingly.
Harris, L. (2015). Deconstructing the Map After 25 Years: Furthering Engagements with Social Theory
In this brief essay, I aim to first detail and celebrate several aspects of Harley’s interventions, noting a few features of the text that remain highly apposite, particularly from my perspective as a scholar of nature-society and social justice. The main interest of this reflective essay, 25 years after the publication of Harley's important essay, is to consider several points of engagement that might help us move beyond some of Harley’s key insights and invitations. In particular, building on Harley's advance to bring social theory to cartographic discussions, what other frontiers and social theoretical influences that might offer productive points of engagement for ongoing work in this field? In particular, I highlight potential intersections with feminist and queer theory (notably the work of Butler), with nature-society work—notably interest in posthumanism and the “more than human,” as well as potential insights from postcolonial scholars and concepts.