Editing worlds: participatory mapping and a minor geopolitics

Cartography and geopolitics have a troubled relationship. While maps have been complicit in the worst excesses of colonial venturing and Cold War politicking, they have also been deployed as inscriptions of recalcitrance and resistance. Yet regardless of the ends to which they have been deployed, ma...

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1. autor: Gerlach, J
Format: Journal article
Język:English
Wydane: Wiley 2015
Hasła przedmiotowe:
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author Gerlach, J
author_facet Gerlach, J
author_sort Gerlach, J
collection OXFORD
description Cartography and geopolitics have a troubled relationship. While maps have been complicit in the worst excesses of colonial venturing and Cold War politicking, they have also been deployed as inscriptions of recalcitrance and resistance. Yet regardless of the ends to which they have been deployed, mapping and cartography are creative, aesthetic performances and sometimes outwardly experimental and artistic. To what extent then, might contemporary forms of cartographic practice be producing spaces that are simultaneously creative and geopolitical? This article employs the wiki-based OpenStreetMap as a fieldwork intervention in exploring how online, virtual, crowd-sourced cartographies can be conjured as ‘ethico-aesthetic projects’ (Guattari 1995) that valorise creative processes in negotiating emergent problems, politics, events and spaces. It shows how OpenStreetMap is at once a technology, a set of performances and a series of communities that allows users to create and alter maps, thereby generating capacities to edit worlds. The article explores how these capacities inflect geographical imaginations while being generative of a minor geopolitics. ‘Minor’ in this context alludes not to scale or tenor, but instead refers to the non-representational registers of cartography so as to spotlight the unspoken, anticipatory geopolitics of mapping.
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spelling oxford-uuid:d0502ac0-21c2-4b0d-9185-19ae9683fba52022-03-27T07:49:04ZEditing worlds: participatory mapping and a minor geopoliticsJournal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:d0502ac0-21c2-4b0d-9185-19ae9683fba5GeographyEnglishOxford University Research Archive - ValetWiley2015Gerlach, JCartography and geopolitics have a troubled relationship. While maps have been complicit in the worst excesses of colonial venturing and Cold War politicking, they have also been deployed as inscriptions of recalcitrance and resistance. Yet regardless of the ends to which they have been deployed, mapping and cartography are creative, aesthetic performances and sometimes outwardly experimental and artistic. To what extent then, might contemporary forms of cartographic practice be producing spaces that are simultaneously creative and geopolitical? This article employs the wiki-based OpenStreetMap as a fieldwork intervention in exploring how online, virtual, crowd-sourced cartographies can be conjured as ‘ethico-aesthetic projects’ (Guattari 1995) that valorise creative processes in negotiating emergent problems, politics, events and spaces. It shows how OpenStreetMap is at once a technology, a set of performances and a series of communities that allows users to create and alter maps, thereby generating capacities to edit worlds. The article explores how these capacities inflect geographical imaginations while being generative of a minor geopolitics. ‘Minor’ in this context alludes not to scale or tenor, but instead refers to the non-representational registers of cartography so as to spotlight the unspoken, anticipatory geopolitics of mapping.
spellingShingle Geography
Gerlach, J
Editing worlds: participatory mapping and a minor geopolitics
title Editing worlds: participatory mapping and a minor geopolitics
title_full Editing worlds: participatory mapping and a minor geopolitics
title_fullStr Editing worlds: participatory mapping and a minor geopolitics
title_full_unstemmed Editing worlds: participatory mapping and a minor geopolitics
title_short Editing worlds: participatory mapping and a minor geopolitics
title_sort editing worlds participatory mapping and a minor geopolitics
topic Geography
work_keys_str_mv AT gerlachj editingworldsparticipatorymappingandaminorgeopolitics