Over the past two decades, a growing number of geographers and cartographic historians have critically examined maps as products imbued with power, the social contexts of map production, and the intimate involvement of cartography in Western imperialism and the enlightenment project. More recently, a few scholars have applied critical approaches to studies of map use and 1
The geography of homelessness is often characterized as containment in marginalized spaces of cities or as placelessness necessitating continuous travel. These characterizations, which reflect discourses about`the homeless' as an imagined deviant homogeneous group, have had substantial effects on policy formation and critiques of punitive turns in urban governance. Suggested policy responses frequently assume straightforward relationships between power/powerlessness and mobility/immobility binaries that do not appropriately portray actual mobility patterns of homeless individuals. Through focus groups and structured interviews, this paper examines the daily mobility of homeless adults in Long Beach, California, to identify the ways in which the everyday travel of homeless individuals compares with these`imagined' characterizations and with national US household travel patterns. Results show that homeless mobility is highly spatially constrained and structured by sociocultural relations of stigmatization, economic productivity, and personal responsibility that are reflected in the operational conventions and institutional practices of transportation and social welfare systems. Nonetheless, during the course of a day, homeless individuals move among spaces where they experience varying levels of inclusion and exclusion, thus complicating static, homogeneous characterizations. This analysis contributes to both the urban transport and social geography literatures by demonstrating the value of combining sociocultural approaches to the study of mobility with more typical transportation geography analyses of individual travel behavior.
Tourism maps remain underexamined in geography. Despite recent trends in critical cartography and tourism studies that redefine the relationship between space and representation, these geographic texts are rarely explored for their intertextual relationships with the spaces they claim to represent. In this article, we argue that tourism maps and other representations play an important role in the production of tourism spaces. We begin with an examination of the parallel trends in critical cartography and tourism studies and then push these intial theoretics further by integrating theories of identity, space and representation. We define tourism maps, spaces and identities as inter-related processes rather than final products. The creation of maps as processes inevitably includes the ambiguities introduced in the production of spaces and the formation of identities by changing social contexts. These ambiguities are readable in maps and they permit us, and potentially other map readers, to understand the spaces and identities of tourism in ways not fully circumscribed by a map's immediate production context and purpose. To explore this theoretical argument further we read one tourism map for the inter-related, ambiguous and therefore contested processes reproducing, but never fully fixing, tourism spaces and identities.
This report examines how social geographers are engaging with the questions that robots and robotic technologies provoke. First, it discusses Marxist analyses of machines and troubles the role that robots play in social production and reproduction. Second, robots as actors in assemblages of sociospatial relations are interrogated for their role in state violence. Third, the dynamic change brought about by smart cities and their algorithmic subjects is discussed. The concluding section is speculative, discussing robots and the ethics of care. This report asks social geographers to reimagine their social geographies in relation to the role of robots in everyday life.
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