Doing Critical GIS

Download PDF

Mahmoudi, Dillon, and Taylor Shelton. 2022. “Doing Critical GIS.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 21 (4): 327–336. doi:10.14288/acme.v21i4.2247 ACME open access

Abstract

This special issue emerges from a two-day workshop of the same name, held on April 1^st and 2^nd, 2019, in Baltimore, Maryland. Inspired by the continued growth and purchase of theories and practices of critical mapping, this workshop began from the provocation: “what should the doing of critical GIS look like?” Avoiding any single, universalizing answer to this question, the diversity of contributors to this special issue is mirrored in the diversity of their responses. ​​Through examinations of indigenous, queer, and feminist mapping practices, new theoretical framings for critical mapping and new technologies for producing non-Cartesian maps, and approaches to participatory data collection and mapping (and the limitations thereof), the collected papers each present their own partial perspective on expanding what doing critical GIS can, and ought to, look like. Despite the variety of approaches offered up by the special issue’s constituent papers, this introduction frames these contributions through a focus on two general themes that run throughout these papers: (1) the mapping of presences, absences, and relations, and (2) rethinking the processes of mapping. Or, put slightly differently, what we map and how we map. Ultimately, while the papers in this special issue offer a number of different paths forward, there are similarly many paths still untaken when it comes to doing GIS critically, which offer countless opportunities for continued growth in this work moving forward.

Notes

In 2019, Taylor Shelton and I organized a series of events at Red Emma’s Bookstore and Cafe. This paper is the attempts to bring together many of the themes we saw in the presentations. We focus on “what” we map and “how” we map. For example, how might we think about absences and presences on a map? Why is it that, for example, poverty are present in some places and absent in others⁠—and what is the relationship of those two (this is one of the core questions of the Relational Poverty Network)? And what is the process of critical mapping? Towards what end?

Doing Critical GIS Workshop and Conference

The full schedule and itinerary is available from the 2019 workshop and conference. UMBC hosts the workshop and conference website.

ACME Vol 21 No 4 Doing Critical GIS

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies hosts the special issue. Major appreciation to the incredible ACME collective for working with us and the authors during COVID to get these papers out.

Doing Critical GIS (this article)
Dillon Mahmoudi, Taylor Shelton

What Can GIS Do?
Nick Lally doi:10.14288/acme.v21i4.1972

Situated Mapping Visualizing Spatial Inequality between the God Trick and Strategic Positivism
Taylor Shelton doi:10.14288/acme.v21i4.1941

Digital Cartographies of Displacement Data as Property and Property as Data
Erin McElroy doi:10.14288/acme.v21i4.1959

Mapping for Whom? Communities of Color and the Citizen Science Gap
Dillon Mahmoudi, Chris L. Hawn, Erica H. Henry, Deja J. Perkins , Caren B. Cooper, Sacoby M. Wilson doi:10.14288/acme.v21i4.2178

Mapping Violence against Indigenous Women and Girls Beyond Colonizing Data and Mapping Practices
Annita Hetoevehotohke’e Lucchesi doi:10.14288/acme.v21i4.1962

Pressing Pause, “Doing” Feminist Mapping
Meghan Kelly, Amber Bosse doi:10.14288/acme.v21i4.2083

Toward Queering the Map 2.0 A Conversation with Michael Brown, Larry Knopp, and Bo Zhao
Jack Swab, Jack Jen Gieseking doi:10.14288/acme.v21i4.1968

Toward a Fourth Generation Critical GIS Extraordinary Politics
Sarah Elwood doi:10.14288/acme.v21i4.1968