Information sovereignty and GIS: the evolution of “communities of interest” in political redistricting

Governmentality as Epistemology

“…Specific techniques of (bio)power typically entail data collection and examination (as in statistical analysis) to discern patterns, which can be acted on-regulated, manipulated. Examples of critical research that engage biopower include the use of geographic information systems (GIS) in political redistricting (Forest 2004), geocoding in census-taking and mapping (RoseRedwood 2006), uses of machine-readable identification codes (Dodge and Kitchin 2005), cartography as a spatialization of race (Crampton 2007), the use of maps in urban restructuring under colonialism (e.g., Legg 2007), the use of statistics in U.S. state formation in the nineteenth century (Hannah 2000), examination of the relevance of Foucault's (1980bFoucault's ( , 2000a engagement with the medicalization of society to population and medical geography (Philo 2001(Philo , 2005Legg 2005), and contemporary issues of biomedicine in the global economy (Braun 2007;Rose 2007). Biopower as a technique of power relies on data collection and analysis precisely because the target of power is an aggregated body, a population, that requires efforts to organize and sustain it.…”

Analysis and Configuration of Boundary Difference Calculations

“…Geographic information systems (GIS) have long been applied in resolving municipal/local boundary conflicts (e.g. US political redistricting) [10]. This approach utilises both GIS and GPS in presenting and resolving boundary disputes.…”

Negotiating GIS and Social Theory in Population Geography

“…As such, choropleth mapping fed into “a rationality of calculability of populations” (Crampton 2004, p. 43), which, following Foucault (1991) has been central to modern governmental projects. Such issues are of continued contemporary relevance, as evidenced by Forest (2004) who uses a governmentality framework to examine the construction of political enumeration units during the redistricting process in Texas, finding that the construction of political (or even ‘neighborhood’) space frequently privileged partisan political interests over meaningful geographical representations of local communities.…”

“…The use of such data feed into the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP), which warns the results of geographical analyses may be a function of the scale or spatial arrangement of the areal units of analysis themselves rather than the geographical phenomena under study (Openshaw 1984b). As such, the results of spatial demographic analyses with GIS will reflect and be influenced by the specific spatial perspective inherent in the data, at the expense of alternative spatial and scalar frameworks that may better represent the perspective of the population (Brown and Knopp 2006; Crampton 2004; Forest 2004).…”