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Thatcher, Jim, Luke Bergmann, Britta Ricker, Reuben Rose-Redwood, David O’Sullivan, Trevor J. Barnes, Luke R. Barnesmoore, et al. 2016. “Revisiting Critical GIS.” Environment and Planning A: Economy & Space 48 (5): 815–24. doi:10.1177/0308518X15622208
Top image: taking the ferry to Friday Harbor, WA from Anacortes, WA. Bottom image: participants enjoying sun as we debrief and discuss next steps.
I also updated the Critical GIS entry in the Encyclopedia of Human Geography.
Summary
This paper recounts many of the insights and discussions from the Revisiting Critical GIS conference/workshop in 2014. At this event, thirty researchers met at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories to revisit the spirit of ‘critical GIS’ in approaching questions both emerging and enduring around the intersection of the spatial and the digital. While the 1993 gathering at Friday Harbor, like much early work in critical GIS, can be read as ‘peace talks’ brokered between warring factions, with wary GIScientists and cautious Human Geographers on opposite sides of the table (Schuurman, 2000), more than a decade into the 21st-century, our meeting drew an open field of scholar-practitioners bursting with questions, varied experiences, and profound concerns.