On Critical Cartography
Reflection on a talk at the University of Miami and Future Plans
I’ve been scarce here on the Making Maps Substack. The last posting was about an invited talk in early December at the University of Miami, as part of VizUM 2025: Critical Cartography, alongside Annette Kim. That was a great experience.
I’ve not thought about the big picture of “critical cartography” for some time, and the Miami talk forced me to figure out something I could say that touched on its past and future. After all, I’ve been there (“critical cartography”) since the 90s.
Critical Cartography is not easy to define. It sort of literally emerged in the ‘90s with Harley and continental philosophy applied to maps and mapping. But it joined already existing “traditions” such as Denis Wood’s work, Nancy Poluso’s counter-mapping, and many other ideas. After the early 90s, geovisualization, indigenous mapping, participatory mapping and GIS, art mapping, community geography, and many more ideas got swept into some kind of big ole’ ball of everything we now call critical cartography.
I sort of loathe trying to force critical cartography into being something more specific, fearing that might cut off possibilities, alienate some folks with a focus on a “required” set of theories (eg, continental social theory), alltogether missing the importance of critical cartography - whatever it is - as a pluralistic, hard to pin down set of intellectual ideas and, importantly, really cool and important applications.
But, loath or not, I sat down at Cup O’ Joe, got seriously caffeinated, and tried to envision a way to approach critical cartography that was pluralistic, smart, applied, and focused on the importance of visual understanding.
I had to cast back to my undergraduate days (and my Philosophy and Political Science majors). My undergraduate and graduate time at UW Madison - David Woodward, Brian Harley, Matthew Edney - my time at Penn State - Denis Wood - Denis Cosgrove - so many neat folks with incredible ideas.
I had to dredge out ideas that resonated with me over the years - stuff I thought was necessary for some reason, even if I never did anything with it in my research or publications. This material was historical, it was contemporary, it was theoretical, it was applications, it was particular thinkers, writers, terms, concepts, articles, and books I have in my collection (“some day I’ll need this”), and 30+ years of notes and bits and pieces of stuff I wrote down thinking it must be important.
And, incredibly, into my head popped a big picture, philosophical, applied, and organized in a way that suddenly made sense (to me at least) out of a whole bunch of stuff, some of which has been called critical cartography and some of which has escaped that label.
My absence from Substack reflects about five months of serious work and thinking, sopping up all my research time (about 15-20 hours a week), leaving me with the December Miami talk and, just 2 days ago, a 75-page book plan.
It is the most sustained experience of “flow” I’ve ever had:
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of Flow, or “optimal experience,” describes a mental state of deep immersion, effortless focus, and energized involvement in an activity, often called being “in the zone,” leading to peak performance and intrinsic enjoyment.
In these weird, anti-intellectual, neo-liberal times, I have no idea if any publisher would take on a book like this, but I’ll look into it in the new year.
Maybe it’s an intellectual memoir or text or academic tome or handbook or Substack Special… I don’t know. Regardless of what happens, it feels good to have pulled together. I think this project is more than just self-aggrandizing, but that remains to be seen. I feel a bit like a Forrest Gump kind of character, who just happened to be around people who were and are fundamental to whatever critical cartography is, over the past 30+ years (since my brain emerged as an undergraduate).
I did capture a bit of this in my “article” Reflections on J.B. Harley’s ‘‘Deconstructing the Map’’ (it’s my annotated handwritten notes (as a goofy young grad student) on that article with my modern annotations) published in 2015 in Cartographica as part of a collection of various critical cartography folks reflecting on Harley and his impacts.
I’ll update you in the new year.
A Neet Review of Making Maps, 4th Edition
The 4th edition of a textbook like Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS usually does not get reviewed, but one is forthcoming in Cartographic Perspectives, Issue #108. The author of the review is Lisa Gaetjens. It’s linked here as a “pre-print” on Research Gate.