Critical GIS as a tool for social transformation

Pavlovskaya, Marianna

doi:10.1111/cag.12438

Cited by 56 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…What are the changes that emerge after the mapping of an Indigenous territory? Admittedly, maps and GIS are tools for social transformation (Pavlovskaya 2018). But to what extent does this actually occur?…”

Section: Debating the Future Of In And Through Indigenous Mapsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fixing the territory, a turning point: The paradoxes of the Wichí maps of the Argentine Chaco

Preci

2020

Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes

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Indigenous mapping is a powerful political tool for long‐marginalized populations to create visibility and establish land claims. In the case of Argentina, a country that was built on a denial of the presence of Indigenous peoples in the national territory, the emergence of these maps stemming from participatory processes coincided with the recognition of these communities' territorial rights in 1994. However, this mapping of Indigenous territories freezes extremely dynamic and complex socio‐spatial realities just as it inflects their representations. In this paper, I reassess the weight and the role that Indigenous cartographic representations play in the evolution of these populations' spatial capital. Paradoxically, they give rise to more contradictions than they clarify. These paradoxes demonstrate the varied relationships different generations maintain with their territory, just as they concern its structure and its cartographic form. Therefore, based on the case of the Wichí of the Argentinian Chaco, this paper contributes to the understanding of contemporary issues of indigeneity by adopting a critical approach to Indigenous cartography. Whereas in Argentina cartographic knowledge is undergoing a process of decolonization, this does not apply to the legal system or to society as a whole.

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Section: Debating the Future Of In And Through Indigenous Mapsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fixing the territory, a turning point: The paradoxes of the Wichí maps of the Argentine Chaco

Preci

2020

Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes

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“…Warren (1995), for example, emphasizes that GIS is seen as inseparable from the social, political, economic, and cultural conditions within which it exists, and has built a critical GIS curriculum that offers compellingly rich examples of a technology that is thoroughly embedded. Pavlovskaya (2018) takes this approach a step further, teaching critical GIS as a tool for social transformation. She, in particular, suggested ways in which critical GIS can question the status quo of technology and social power by creating what she calls “spaces of possibility” (Pavlovskaya 2018, 41).…”

Section: Critical Gis Pedagogiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching creative geovisualization: Imagining the creative in/of GIS

Jung

2020

Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes

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• Creative and critical engagements with GIS and critical GIS pedagogy highlight the convergence of geography, arts, and humanities. • Teaching critical and creative forms of GIS helps students embrace and generate various modes of data and analysis that value representation in different ways. • The integration of the creative in/of GIS points towards a new form of qualitative, affective, and creative GIS and geovisualization. Creative geovisualization is situated at the intersection of geography, arts, and digital humanities with a particular emphasis on visualization and mapping that preserves, represents, and generates more authentic, contextual, and nuanced meanings of space and people with an artistic and humanistic perspective and approach. This is a creative expansion in critical GIS practices and a new alternative to traditionally sciencerooted approaches to GIS and mapping. Reflecting the experience of teaching a "creative geovisualization" course in an interdisciplinary curriculum, I demonstrate how critical and creative scholarship with mapping and geovisualization is introduced in the classroom and is illuminated in the students' creative practices. The class encompasses key epistemological and methodological groundings of creative geovisualization-including non-representational theories; critical cartography and GIS; the convergence of geography, arts, and humanities; psychogeography; and qualitative and affective geovisualization. Empirical examples of students' works illustrate the blending of different modes of creative engagements with GIS and geovisualization and specific ways to work with various forms of embodied, relational, interpretive, and expressive geographies. GIS and mapping become creative as they continue evolving in process, and it is time that we deeply (re-)imagine "the creative" in/of GIS in critical GIS pedagogies.

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“…Beyond functionality, critical accessibility mapping builds on the interventions of "critical GIS" to pursue activist, epistemological, and pedagogical projects that reconceptualize the meaning of data-rich mapping. 24 Objective or descriptive data becomes interrogative data. Participatory data collection becomes critical crowdsourcing.…”

Section: Disability Justice As Countermapmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping Access: Digital Humanities, Disability Justice, and Sociospatial Practice

Hamraie¹

2018

American Quarterly

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Critical access theories and digital projects, by contrast, approach access as an "interpretive relation between bodies" rather than an objective quality. 3 Critical accessibility mapping acknowledges compliance as a foundation for the material and conceptual dimensions of digital humanist, activist work, similar to what Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip (cited in the epigraph) call "tactical biopolitics." But this practice goes farther than compliance, using humanistic tools to unsettle the modes of "subjectification," in the Foucauldian sense, that inform compliance mapping. 4 Using what I call "sociospatial practices," critical accessibility mapping reconceptualizes data, crowdsourcing, and public participation. This practice thus treats access as an open-ended process, a negotiation, and an intersectional and multimodal issue, rather than an easily achievable end point. This essay offers accessibility mapping as a critical method for the digital humanities, American studies, and critical disability studies. My primary example is Mapping Access, a critical design and participatory digital mapping project that uses campus spatial documentation to generate more politicized and intersectional interpretive relations surrounding access. The project's purpose is not to produce an objective spatial representation but to enroll broad publics in the iterative, troubled work of defining and detecting access. I argue that Mapping Access offers a new method of sociospatial practice, with distinct benefits over compliance mapping: it recognizes marginalized experts; redefines data, crowdsourcing, and public participation; offers new stories about disability and public belonging; and materializes the principles of disability justice, an early twentieth-century movement emphasizing intersectionality and interdependence. Each section of this essay uses one iteration of Mapping Access to discuss broader conceptual, practical, and methodological issues. First, I trace the project's emergence through functional needs and conceptual debates about compliance. Second, I show how digitization and digital humanities methods led to questions about spatial reading, thick mapping, crowdsourcing, and multimodality as collective labor processes. Finally, I conclude by discussing opportunities for critical accessibility mapping as "convivial design," a never finished and always troubled project of access experimentation.

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Critical GIS as a tool for social transformation

Cited by 56 publications

References 50 publications

Fixing the territory, a turning point: The paradoxes of the Wichí maps of the Argentine Chaco

Fixing the territory, a turning point: The paradoxes of the Wichí maps of the Argentine Chaco

Teaching creative geovisualization: Imagining the creative in/of GIS

Mapping Access: Digital Humanities, Disability Justice, and Sociospatial Practice

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