From the cartographic gaze to contestatory cartographies

Abstract

Rene Descartes declared in the 16 th Century that the world was now dominated by the visual, a notion that would be seen as defining the Enlightenment (Descartes, cited in Potts, 2015). As the increased dominance of seeing and the desire to visualise the world cohered with the production of increasingly accurate tools of measurement and the advent of the printing press, cartography emerged as a discipline, often used as tool of oppression and dominance. Cartographic visualizations, afforded the creator, and user, a Gods eye view of the world. Following others (See Casas-Cortés et. al., 2013;Koch, 1998), this chapter refers to this way of seeing the world from above as the Cartographic Gaze. First, the chapter briefly examines the historical emergence of the Cartographic Gaze before turning to a discussion about how the proliferation of geographic imaging technologies and digital tools simultaneously further embedded this gaze into mapping practice, while also diffusing such practices of mapping to broader populations. Discussing the rise of participatory mapping and counter mapping under the rubric of contestatory cartographies, the chapter presents some of the challenges that face those attempting to create alternative maps of their worlds, and the ways in which they become entrapped by the pervasiveness of the Cartographic Gaze. We use the term participatory mapping to refer to methodologies for map-making based around the participation of those who the map will represent. And we employ the term counter mapping to reference those mapping practices that explicitly seek to expose and challenge power relations. In specific, we look at how the colonizing origins of the Cartographic Gaze limit what it is possible to do with these alternative mapping practices. The Emergence of the Cartographic GazeWhile maps have long been used by states as tools of control, a theme that can be traced back to the Babylonians (Finkel, 1995), the 16 th Century saw this on an unprecedented

Humanitarian ignorance: towards a new paradigm of non‐knowledge in digital humanitarianism

“…A key example of the presentation of data is processes of mapping, now viewed as a vital tool in humanitarian responses to crises, where geotagged photographs, social media posts, aerial imagery from drones, and other forms of data are used to piece together documentation of communities in need (Specht, 2020). These maps present themselves as accurate and objective pictures of reality while being projections from a specific vantage point (Specht and Feigenbaum, 2018). Maps are used to present needs and document humanitarian impacts and responses.…”

Resilience is “always more” than our practices: Limits, critiques, and skepticism about international intervention

“…54-57) illustrates how the platforms, symbols, metrics and schemes used by digital humanitarians tend to rely on certain types of knowledge production and misrepresent other forms of knowledge production, like "collective memory," "affective geographies," or indigenous representations of nature that do not conform to "Cartesian space." Though digital maps show multi-layered, reliable, and upto-date information with unprecedented concreteness and dynamism, critics note that information is still remote from indigenous practices and cosmologies (Specht & Feigenbaum, 2019).…”

Did You Find the World or Did You Make it Up? Media, Communications and Geography in the Digital Age

“…The authors in this issue found themselves confronted with the traditional cartographic order of the world that has forced many peoples into an imperial logic under the no-win situation often referred to as Map or Be Mapped (Paglen, 2008). Both Kent (2018, this issue) and Duggan (2018, this issue) grapple with the notion that cartography is not only poor at describing the qualities of the relationships of everyday life, but also forms power traditionally being used as an instrument of both colonialism and the contemporary geopolitical ordering of the world (Specht and Feigenbaum, 2018;Paglen, 2008). These issues are both alleviated and compounded by the growth in the number of privately owned sensors, not only harnessing Global Positioning Systems (GPS), but also sound-level, light and accelerometer sensors.…”