Critical Cartography 1AC – Draft
1acs in this file are drafts, will be completed by teams reading this argument and
released as soon as completed. There will definitely be a neg supplement and
probably and aff one as well.
Contention One
SQ exploration begins from landed geographic spaces locking in marginalization of the
Earth’s oceans
Anderson, Senior Lecturer Human Geography, University of Cardiff and Peters,
Lecturer Human Geography, Aberystwyth University, 2014
[Dr. Jon, Dr. Kimberley, February 2014, Ashgate, “Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the
Ocean,” http://www.ashgate.com/pdf/SamplePages/Water-Worlds-Human-Geographies-ofthe-Ocean-Intro.pdf, accessed 6-27-14, J.J.]
Accordingly, within human geography, greater interest has been paid to the land: to cities, towns,
streets, homes, work places, leisure centres, schools – the places which are seen to be crucial to our
everyday existence (Peters 2010: 1263). Furthermore, according to Steinberg, the marginalization of
the maritime world is further compounded due to difficulties researchers face in accessing areas of
the sea which are inhospitable, detached from the shore, physically unstable and immensely deep
(1999a: 372). This inaccessibility has resulted in a vision of water worlds, projected by scholars, artists
and writers, which is abstracted and distanced from reality. As Steinberg puts it, ‘the partial nature of
our encounters with the ocean necessarily creates gaps’ in how the ocean is understood (2013: 157).
Consequently, the physical liveliness of oceans and seas are often reduced to romantic metaphors in
paintings, novels and other literary and art sources. Together, these reasons have resulted in a largely
‘landlocked’ discipline (Lambert et al. 2006: 480). However, over the past decade, geographical
research has cast off its terrestrial focus and has begun to voyage towards new, watery horizons. This
book brings together scholars concerned with the manifold human geographies of the sea, acting as a
first ‘port of call’ for those interested in taking research offshore, as well as offering exciting new
theoretical and empirical interventions in thinking about our water world. This book contends, along
with Lambert el al (2006), that water worlds must move from the margins of geographical
consciousness and inquiry (see also Peters 2010, Steinberg 1999a, 1999b, 2001). This means, to echo
Steinberg in the Foreword to this volume that we must not simply study the seas and oceans as ‘other’
or ‘different’ spaces; but instead start thinking from the water. With this in mind, this book aims to
chart new representations, understandings and experiences of the sea, plotting water worlds that are
more than a ‘perfect and absolute blank’.
Status quo geographical processes focus on the empirics of ocean and exploit it for
human use
Steinberg, Florida State University Political Geography Professor, 2001
[Philip E., The Social Construction of the Ocean, page 10, Google books, PAC]
Most recently, the International Geographical Union launched its OCEANS program, dedicated to
holistic study of the ocean as an integrated system (Vallega 1999; Vallega el nl. 1998), The Geographical
Review (1999) devoted an issue to the Oceans Connect program which is built around the idea that
oceans define world regions rather than divide them, and The Professional Geographer (1999) devoted
a focus section to the geography of ocean-space wherein it is urged that the social and physical
aspects of the sea be analyzed with reference to each other and to the land-based processes that
interact with marine phenomena.
Nonetheless, despite the past and present significance of the world-ocean to modern society, and
despite these calls for a holistic geographical accounting of human interactions with the sea, relatively
little research has been conducted on the historical geography of the ocean as a space that, like land,
shapes and is shaped by social and physical processes. Within the discipline of geography per se, most
marine research has been of an empirical and applied nature (for reviews, see Psuty et nl. 2002;
Steinberg 1999d; West 1989). Within the social sciences more generally, the bulk of research has
focused on one or another use of the marine environment, but not on the ocean as an integrated
space that is a product of - as well as a resource for - a variety of human uses. Following a review of
traditional perspectives on the ocean, this chapter presents a territorial political economy approach for
analyzing the geography of ocean-space.
Our social constructions of the ocean – implications include viewing the ocean as
something to be exploited rather than explored
McAteer, web editor intern with international human rights NGO, Front Line
Defenders 13
(Christopher, 3/8/13, “Social Constructions of the Artic Ocean-Space”,
http://www.christophermcateer.com/2013/03/08/the-social-constructions-of-arctic-ocean-space/,
accessed 6/29/14) NM
In The Social Construction of the Ocean, Steinberg considers there to be three major social
constructions of ocean-space throughout history: A great void; Land-like; and a placeless force-field.
These are social constructions in that they arise from the manner in which the ocean is actually used
by societal units. These social constructions are derived from three discursive constructions:
Development; Geopolitical; and Legal. The development construction considers, “the sea as a space
devoid of potential for growth and civilization” (Steinberg 2001, 35). The geopolitical construction sees
the sea as an area that is external to the territory of political society, which is complimented by the
legal construction, which considers, “the sea as immune to social control and order” (Steinberg 2001,
36). Steinberg states that the great void construction of the ocean considers the ocean to be a
separating space which is immune from state power and is to be traversed. He makes an allusion to
the Indian Ocean circa 500B.C.-C.E 1500: “Societies of the Indian Ocean viewed the sea as a source of
imported goods, but the sea itself was perceived as a space apart from society, an untameable
mystery” (Steinberg 2001, 45). He asserts that, in the great void construction, territory ends at the
shore and that the sea cannot be bounded or possessed, it can merely be conceived as a vast and
dangerous expanse that may be used for transport: “The sea was perceived as distance, not territory”
(Steinberg 2001, 52). The land-like social construction views the ocean as a resource which can be used
in everyday life. It is a resource of food and connection and, being an integral part of everyday life, is
suitable for territorial claims and exertions of power. Steinberg believes this model to fit with the
interaction of society and ocean-space seen in Micronesia up until recent times. He claims that, “For the
Micronesias, the ocean is seen primarily as a resource provider, divided into distinct places, much as
continental residents view their land-space” (Steinberg 2001, 52-3). In this construction the ocean is
viewed as one may view a highway: it did not divide societies within Micronesia, but rather connect
them and was a fundamental part of common heritage and daily experience. Steinberg’s third social
construction of ocean-space is that of a placeless force-field. This is a construction that holds oceanspace as an arena of competition and potential militarism. Societal units vie for power on land, using
the ocean as a buffer against potential threat, separating potentially rebellious colonized areas from
the hegemonic base of a single, strong empire. What is sought is not control of the ocean, which is not
viewed as land-like, but rather stewardship. The historical ocean-space that Steinberg draws on here is
the Mediterranean Sea, particularly during the Roman period (c. 300 B.C.-C.E.500). The ocean-space
construction in this model sits somewhere between a freedom/enclosure dichotomy: “Rome
constructed the Mediterranean as a “force-field,” a placeless surface that belonged to no one but
upon which powerful states could intervene do as to steward its resources for the national interest.
The placeless force-field construction is perhaps the closest of the three to the manner in which UNCLOS
seems to consider ocean-space, particularly with regards to EEZs: “Within an EEZ… a coastal state may
claim policing rights, but not full sovereign authority, in the interest of stewarding the zone’s living
and non-living resources” (Steinberg 1999, 261). It is also similar to the position the US has taken with
regards to the world’s oceans since the Second World War. On the other hand, the great void
construction also seems to exist to a degree today, particularly within the mechanisms of postmodern
capitalism. Steinberg states that, “With the [postmodern capitalist] era’s emphasis on movement and
speed, the dominant element of postmodern capitalism’s ocean-space construction is a continuation
of the great void ideal that characterized the industrial capitalist era” (Steinberg 2001, 164).
Status quo geographers view the ocean as ontologically distinct from human society
Steinberg, Florida State University Political Geography Professor, 2009
[Philip E., “Oceans,” International Encyclopedia of Human Geography,
http://philsteinberg.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/iehg.pdf, accessed 6/27/14 JO]
The ocean has failed to attract attention from more than a handful of human geographers for three
likely reasons: first, despite the fact that geographers have long critiqued the idealization of the state
as a naturally occurring, organic entity, geographers (and, more generally, social scientists) still have
tended to conceive of the world as a universe of state territories. As a space that lies primarily
external to the territory or sovereign authority of individual states, the ocean thus has appeared as a
space that is external to the space-creating processes of society.
Second, human geographers (and, again, social scientists more generally) have tended to view societies
as occurring in place. Key social activities, such as production, reproduction, and consumption, as well
as the cultural forms that support these activities, traditionally, have been associated with discrete
places or territories . Movement typically has been viewed as a derivative activity that occurs simply
because an individual or a commodity requires relocation from one society-place to another, and little
attention, therefore, has been directed toward the spaces across which this movement occurs. Thus,
notwithstanding the ocean's substantial economic value as the space across which the bulk of the
world's commerce flows, it has received little attention from human geographers.
Third, human geographers traditionally have viewed nature as ontologically distinct from society.
Although geographers have long focused on the intersection between nature and society (examining,
for instance, the way in which a places nature and its society impact each other), this emphasis on the
intersection between nature and society has tended to direct human geographers’ attention away
from spaces of nature that fail to display a clear human presence . Thus, as a space that is without
permanent human habitation and that long was thought to be immune to human impact, the ocean
typically has escaped the attention of human geographers who study nature-society relations.
Understanding the politics behind mapping is necessary to avoid the environmental
neglect of “un-mappable” areas—The ocean is disproportionately affected
Harris, University of Wisconsin Geography department professor, and Hazen,
University of Minnesota Geography professor, 2006
[Leila M. and Helen D., “Power of Maps: (Counter) Mapping for Conservation,” ACME: An International
E-Journal for Critical Geographies, Volume: 4, Issue: 1, page 99-129, JO]
Which areas are preferentially selected for protection is not only a function of cultural or economic
imperatives, but may also be influenced by the relative ‘mappability’ of different areas. For instance,
grasslands are not only considered less ‘majestic’ than other landscapes (see discussion in Cronon,
1995), but are also less definable in carto-geographic terms than, for example, a lake or an island, and
may therefore be neglected by conservation designations. The preference for the protection of forest
over dry land and grassland ecosystems that can be seen at the global scale (Hazen and Anthamatten,
2004) may also be, in part, a reflection of the fact that forests are often a ‘mapped’ feature, whereas
grasslands and dry lands are invisible on all but the most specialized of maps.8 As yet another example
of the importance of ‘mappability,’ consider the frequency with which jurisdictional boundaries define
at least one edge of a protected area. In such cases, the already mapped boundaries of contemporary
states act to delimit protected area boundaries, discouraging planners from using less easily
"mappable" boundaries in making their decisions. As a result, most protected areas remain limited to
the confines of just one political state, although the number of ‘transboundary protected areas’ is on
the rise (Zimmerer et al., 2004). Finally, the case of marine ecosystems is also notable in this respect,
with data limitations, mobile features, and other considerations contributing to the difficulty of
mapping and managing oceans (see Steinberg, 2001). This perhaps helps to explain why marine
ecosystems have not seen the same proliferation of protected areas over the past twenty years that
has occurred in terrestrial areas. While nearly seventy percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by
ocean, in 1997 less than 20% of global protected areas included marine ecosystems (UNEP 2005).
Ecological crisis
Darder, Professor of Education, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign 10
(Antonia Darder, “Preface” in Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, & Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy
Movement by Richard V. Kahn, 2010, pp. x-xiii)
It is fitting to begin my words about Richard Kahn’s Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis:
The Ecopedagogy Movement with a poem. The direct and succinct message of The Great Mother Wails
cuts through our theorizing and opens us up to the very heart of the book’s message—to ignite a fire
that speaks to the ecological crisis at hand; a crisis orchestrated by the inhumane greed and economic
brutality of the wealthy. Nevertheless, as is clearly apparent, none of us is absolved from complicity
with the devastating destruction of the earth. As members of the global community, we are all
implicated in this destruction by the very manner in which we define ourselves, each other, and all
living beings with whom we reside on the earth.
Everywhere we look there are glaring signs of political systems and social structures that propel us
toward unsustainability and extinction. In this historical moment, the planet faces some of the most
horrendous forms of “man-made” devastation ever known to humankind. Cataclysmic “natural
disasters” in the last decade have sung the environmental hymns of planetary imbalance and reckless
environmental disregard. A striking feature of this ecological crisis, both locally and globally, is the
overwhelming concentration of wealth held by the ruling elite and their agents of capital. This
environmental malaise is characterized by the staggering loss of livelihood among working people
everywhere; gross inequalities in educational opportunities; an absence of health care for millions; an
unprecedented number of people living behind bars; and trillions spent on fabricated wars
fundamentally tied to the control and domination of the planet’s resources.
The Western ethos of mastery and supremacy over nature has accompanied, to our detriment, the
unrelenting expansion of capitalism and its unparalleled domination over all aspects of human life.
This hegemonic worldview has been unmercifully imparted through a host of public policies and
practices that conveniently gloss over gross inequalities as commonsensical necessities for democracy
to bloom. As a consequence, the liberal democratic rhetoric of “we are all created equal” hardly begins
to touch the international pervasiveness of racism, patriarchy, technocracy, and economic piracy by the
West, all which have fostered the erosion of civil rights and the unprecedented ecological exploitation
of societies, creating conditions that now threaten our peril, if we do not reverse directions.
Cataclysmic disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, are unfortunate testimonies to the danger of ignoring
the warnings of the natural world, especially when coupled with egregious governmental neglect of
impoverished people. Equally disturbing, is the manner in which ecological crisis is vulgarly exploited by
unscrupulous and ruthless capitalists who see no problem with turning a profit off the backs of ailing
and mourning oppressed populations of every species—whether they be victims of weather disasters,
catastrophic illnesses, industrial pollution, or inhumane practices of incarceration. Ultimately, these
constitute ecological calamities that speak to the inhumanity and tyranny of material profiteering, at the
expense of precious life.
The arrogance and exploitation of neoliberal values of consumption dishonor the contemporary
suffering of poor and marginalized populations around the globe. Neoliberalism denies or simply mocks
(“Drill baby drill!”) the interrelationship and delicate balance that exists between all living beings,
including the body earth. In its stead, values of individualism, competition, privatization, and the “free
market” systematically debase the ancient ecological knowledge of indigenous populations, who have,
implicitly or explicitly, rejected the fabricated ethos of “progress and democracy” propagated by the
West. In its consuming frenzy to gobble up the natural resources of the planet for its own hyperbolic
quest for material domination, the exploitative nature of capitalism and its burgeoning technocracy
has dangerously deepened the structures of social exclusion, through the destruction of the very
biodiversity that has been key to our global survival for millennia.
Kahn insists that this devastation of all species and the planet must be fully recognized and soberly
critiqued. But he does not stop there. Alongside, he rightly argues for political principles of engagement
for the construction of a critical ecopedagogy and ecoliteracy that is founded on economic
redistribution, cultural and linguistic democracy, indigenous sovereignty, universal human rights, and a
fundamental respect for all life. As such, Kahn seeks to bring us all back to a formidable relationship with
the earth, one that is unquestionably rooted in an integral order of knowledge, imbued with physical,
emotional, intellectual, and spiritual wisdom. Within the context of such an ecologically grounded
epistemology, Kahn uncompromisingly argues that our organic relationship with the earth is also
intimately tied to our struggles for cultural self-determination, environmental sustainability, social and
material justice, and global peace.
Through a carefully framed analysis of past disasters and current ecological crisis, Kahn issues an urgent
call for a critical ecopedagogy that makes central explicit articulations of the ways in which societies
construct ideological, political, and cultural systems, based on social structures and practices that can
serve to promote ecological sustainability and biodiversity or, conversely, lead us down a disastrous
path of unsustainability and extinction. In making his case, Kahn provides a grounded examination of
the manner in which consuming capitalism manifests its repressive force throughout the globe,
disrupting the very ecological order of knowledge essential to the planet’s sustainability. He offers an
understanding of critical ecopedagogy and ecoliteracy that inherently critiques the history of Western
civilization and the anthropomorphic assumptions that sustain patriarchy and the subjugation of all
subordinated living beings—assumptions that continue to inform traditional education discourses
around the world. Kahn incisively demonstrates how a theory of multiple technoliteracies can be used to
effectively critique the ecological corruption and destruction behind mainstream uses of technology and
the media in the interest of the neoliberal marketplace. As such, his work points to the manner in which
the sustainability rhetoric of mainstream environmentalism actually camouflages wretched neoliberal
policies and practices that left unchecked hasten the annihilation of the globe’s ecosystem.
True to its promise, the book cautions that any anti-hegemonic resistance movement that claims social
justice, universal human rights, or global peace must contend forthrightly with the deteriorating
ecological crisis at hand, as well as consider possible strategies and relationships that rupture the
status quo and transform environmental conditions that threaten disaster. A failure to integrate
ecological sustainability at the core of our political and pedagogical struggles for liberation, Kahn
argues, is to blindly and misguidedly adhere to an anthropocentric worldview in which emancipatory
dreams are deemed solely about human interests, without attention either to the health of the planet
or to the well-being of all species with whom we walk the earth.
Plans
The United States federal government should substantially increase its critical
cartographic exploration of the Earth’s oceans.
Affirm a substantial increase in critical cartographic exploration of the Earth’s oceans.
Critical cartographic exploration of Earth’s oceans should be substantially increased.
No plan
Contention Two
Counter Cartography is key to see past the objectivity of representational maps
Stallmann Freelance Cartographer and GIS analyst, ‘12
(Timothy, 2012, Alternative Cartographies: Building Collective Power, p. 63-65, Accessed 6/30/14, ESB)
Maps are not, have never intended to be , exact mirrors of the Earth’s surface. Simplification,
generalization and data refinement are key tools in the process of Western scientific cartography. It is
at the same time important to understand that traditional cartography still functions very much
through a logic of representation. Map icons, for example, may or may not be designed in order to
resemble, but they consistently are designed in order to represent. Representational maps work
because they function as part of (material) chains of resemblance which co-constitute the territory
which they claim to represent. This logic of representation is what makes it possible to point at a map
and say something like: “this is Raleigh,” “that is the Ferry from Hatteras to Ocracoke,” or “the darker
purple areas have a higher median income.” These statements depend on institutions, practices,
relationships, bulldozers, annexation lawsuits, and census forms which discipline both spaces and
people. Re presentational cartography attempts to make invisible the institutions, practices,
relationships, and people who do the work necessary to keep chains of representation smoothly
functioning. The institutions, practices, technologies and bodies underlying representational
cartography claim, in Donna Haraway’s language , “the power to see and not be seen, to represent
while escaping representation.” 12 What escapes representation is oftentimes the object of countercartography – the ways these systems function to maintain and increase a hierarchical distribution of
wealth, how they distribute life chances in ways which make it harder for marginalized communities
to exercise autonomy, how they violently impose the territorial will of the few on the many , and their
“perverse capacity – honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism,
colonialism, and male supremacy – to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in
the interests of unfettered power.” 13 Counter-cartography, growing out of social movements which
situate themselves in opposition to the unfettered power of individual states, of multinational
corporations, of border regimes, neoliberalism or capitalism, opposes both the material of chains of
representation and the “this-is-that-is-there” logic of maps which they make possible. Where
representational cartography make s statements about a defined territory, nonrepresentational 14 counter- cartography aims to ask questions and open conversations. A nonrepresentational map is not a map which says nothing, nor is it one which has no connection with any
outside. Rather, non-representational mapping uses relations of what Foucault calls
similitude. 15 Graphic objects on the map plane have relations of similarity with material objects, but
also with other graphic objects, with words and with ideas. Similitude explodes the unidirectional
real → representation arrow of the Western map into a multitude of connections both within and
outside the map plane.
Aff helps overcomes privileged elite land-based thinking
Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cardiff, UK,
Peters, Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, UK., 2014
[Dr. Jon, Dr. Kimberley, February 2014, Ashgate, “Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the
Ocean,” http://www.ashgate.com/pdf/SamplePages/Water-Worlds-Human-Geographies-ofthe-Ocean-Intro.pdf, accessed 6-27-14, J.J.]
In sum, this book re-centres the oceans and seas as spaces relevant to unearthing new understandings
of the world which both move us beyond a terrestrial sphere, but also allow that terrestrial sphere to
be examined in novel ways. Studying oceans and seas are essential to understanding our ‘landed’
lives. Water worlds cannot be conceived as ‘out there’ or ‘irrelevant’ because maritime mobilities
permeate our daily existence invisibly, but significantly. That the sea touches our everyday lives alerts
us to the material and tangible reality of water worlds. Often emptied and reduced to metaphor (Mack
2011: 25), it is vital to remember that humans do not just imagine the water world but physically
experience it, and concomitantly, nonhumans are not outside of the seas and oceans; they are
enfolded within it in an embodied and enlivened way. Moreover, the seas and oceans are not merely
full of people, animals and material things; they are, at the most fundamental level, constituted of
matter. If we seek to bring to the fore the various ways the seas and oceans are ‘filled’, we can
attempt to write about the world in a different way, from perspectives which do not privilege the
land, or land-based thinking. Gaining novel and important insights from the water world enables us to
create a new language, a ‘Thalassology’, for conceptualizing watery-human interactions and which
may be employed at, but also beyond the oceans and seas.
Critical Cartography allows the people to be free from control by the elites.
Crampton, Associate Professor of Geography, University of Kentucky, 10
[Jeremy W, Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS, page 40-41, PAC]
In the last few years cartography has been slipping from the control of the powerful¶ elites that have
exercised dominance over it for several hundred years. You have¶ probably already have noticed this
with the emergence of fantastically popular¶ mapping applications such as Google Earth. The elites – the
map experts, the great¶ map houses of the West, national and local governments, the major mapping
and¶ GIS companies, and to a lesser extent academics – have been confronted by two¶ important
developments that threaten to undermine their dominance. First, as Google¶ Earth has shown, the
actual business of mapmaking, of collecting spatial data and¶ mapping it out, is passing out of the
hands of the experts. The ability to make a map,¶ even a stunning interactive 3D map, is now available
to anyone with a home computer¶ and a broadband internet connection. Cartography’s latest
“technological¶ transition” (Monmonier 1985; Perkins 2003) is not only a technological question¶ but a
mixture of “open source” collaborative tools, mobile mapping applications,¶ and the geospatial web.¶
While this trend has been apparent to industry insiders for some time, a second¶ challenge has also
been issued. This is a social theoretic critique that is challenging the way we have thought about
mapping in the post-war era. During the last¶ 50 years or so cartography and GIS have very much
aspired to push maps as factual¶ scientific documents. Critical cartography and GIS however
conceives of mapping¶ as embedded in specific relations of power. That is, mapping is involved in
what we¶ choose to represent, how we choose to represent objects such as people and things,¶ and
what decisions are made with those representations. In other words, mapping¶ is in and of itself a
political process . And it is a political process in which increasing¶ numbers of people are
participating. If the map is a specific set of power/knowledge¶ claims, then not only the state and the
elites but the rest of us too could make¶ competing and equally powerful claims (Wood 1992).¶ This
one–two punch – a pervasive set of imaginative mapping practices and¶ a critique highlighting the
politics of mapping – has “undisciplined” cartography.¶ That is, these two trends challenge the
established cartographic disciplinary methods¶ and practices . It has certainly not occurred without
opposition or resistance – which¶ all new ideas encounter. For example, there is quite a strong trend in
the USA and¶ other countries right now to make people “qualify” as GIS experts through a licensing¶ or
certification process. Indeed an organization known as Management Association¶ of Private
Photogrammetric Surveyors (MAPPS) which represents licensed surveyors¶ recently sued the US
government in order to force it to hire only licensed users of¶ geospatial information. This would have
had large repercussions on federal contractors¶ and further encouraged the development of “bodies
of knowledge” that¶ people must qualify in before they can use maps or GIS (such as this one: DiBiase¶
et al. 2006). While MAPPS lost their lawsuit they issued a statement saying “the¶ game is not over”
(MAPPS 2007).¶ Critical mapping operates from the ground up in a diffuse manner without¶ top-down
control and doesn’t need the approval of experts in order to flourish. It¶ is a movement that is
ongoing whether or not the academic discipline of cartography¶ is involved (D. Wood 2003). It is in
this sense that cartography is being freed from¶ the confines of the academy and opened up to the
people.
Kitchin, National University of Ireland, Department of Geography and Dodge,
University of Manchester, Department of Geography, 7
[Rob, Martin, “Rethinking maps,” Progress in Human Geography, Volume: 31 Number: 3, page
5-7, http://eprints.nuim.ie/2755/1/RK_Rethinkingmaps.pdf, PAC]
The argument we forward is not being¶ made to demonstrate clever word play or to¶ partake in aimless
philosophizing.1 In contrast,¶ we are outlining what we believe is a significant conceptual shift in how
to think about¶ maps and cartography (and, by implication,¶ what are commonly understood as
other¶ representational outputs and endeavours); that¶ is a shift from ontology (how things are) to¶
ontogenesis (how things become) – from¶ (secure) representation to (unfolding) practice.¶ This is not
minor argument with little theoretical or practical implications. Rather it involves¶ adopting a
radically different view of maps and¶ cartography. In particular, we feel that the¶ ontological move
we detail has value for five¶ reasons. First, we think it is a productive¶ way to think about the world,
including cartography. It acknowledges how life unfolds in multifarious, contingent and relational
ways.¶ Second, we believe that it allows us a fresh¶ perspective on the epistemological bases of¶
cartography – how mapping and cartographic¶ research is undertaken. Third, it ‘denaturalizes¶ and
deprofessionalizes cartography’ (Pickles,¶ 2004: 17) by recasting cartography as a broad¶ set of spatial
practices, including gestural and¶ performative mappings such as Aboriginal¶ songlines, along with sketch
maps, countermaps, and participatory mapping, moving it¶ beyond a narrowly defined conception of
mapmaking. (This is not to denigrate the work of¶ professional cartographers, but to recognize¶ that they
work with a narrowly defined set of¶ practices that are simply a subset of all potential mappings.) As
such, it provides a way to¶ think critically about the practices of cartography and not simply the end
product (the¶ socalled map). Fourth, it provides a means to¶ examine the effects of mapping without
reducing such analysis to theories of power, instead¶ positioning maps as practices that have diverse¶
effects within multiple and shifting contexts.¶ Fifth, it provides a theoretical space in which¶ ‘those
who research mapping as a practical¶ form of applied knowledge, and those that seek¶ to critique the
map and mapping process’ can¶ meet, something that Perkins (2003: 341) feels¶ is unlikely to happen
as things stand. Perkins¶ (2003: 342) makes this claim because he feels¶ ‘addressing how maps work . . .
involves asking different questions to those that relate to¶ power of the medium’ – one set of questions¶
being technical, the other ideological. We do¶ not think that this is the case – both are questions
concerning practice.
Inherency Extensions
Ocean represented as void between terrestrial civilization
Steinberg, Florida State University Political Geography Professor, 2001
[Philip E., The Social Construction of the Ocean, 114-117, Google books JO]
The idealization of the deep sea as a great void between developable, terrestrial places of civilization
was aided and reflected by representations in maps, art, and literature of the industrial capitalist era.
In cartography, the sea slipped into the background. The sea, once represented on maps by colorful
fish, terrifying monsters, dramatic swells, and valiant ships engaged in battle, now was drawn as a
blue, form- less expanse (Whitfield 1996). Taking this representation to its extreme absurdity, Lewis
Carroll penned the following verses to accompany the "Ocean-Chart" (Figure 10) in his 1876 poem The
Hunting of the Snark:
He had bought a large map representing the sea, without the least vestige of land: And the crew were
much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand. "What's the good of
Mercator's North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?" So the Bellman would cry:
and the crew would reply 'They are merely conventional signs! Other maps are such shapes, with their
islands and capes! But we've got our brave Captain to thank" (So the crew would protest) "that he's
bought us the best - A perfect and absolute blank!"
Rationalists of the era saw the ocean as a space resistant to social progress, modernization, and
development, and that therefore must be conquered or annihilated (or, short of annihilation, reserved
for outcast sailors and non-Western harpoonists). This attitude is aptly demonstrated in James Barry's
Progress of Hitman Culture (1777-1783), a mural that adorns the great hall of London's Royal Society of
Arts and Manufactures. Throughout the mural's six panels, Barry utilizes classical techniques (one critic
calls the mural "ultra-Michelangelesque") to create a "Sistine Chapel of the Enlightenment...
[celebrating] the missionary cult of genius, the glorification of the human faculties, the ameliorist
confidence, the encyclopedic approach to both history and knowledge, the patriotic pride alongside the
assertion of the brother- hood of nations" (Burke 1976:250). The first panel, "Orpheus Reclaiming
Mankind from a Savage State," is a pointed attack on the romantic glorification of the noble savage.
Contrasting this notion, the mural, according to its artist, seeks to demonstrate that "the obtaining of
happiness as well individual or public, depends upon cultivating the human faculties" (cited in Burke
1976: 248-249). The fourth panel, "Navigation, or the Triumph of the Thames" (Figure 11, later titled
"Commerce, or the Triumph of the Thames"), is notable in that there is almost no water in the
foreground. This seems at first an odd way to represent navigation, unless one defines navigation as
the process whereby science is used not to tame or interpret but to annihilate ocean-space; in that
case the sight of gods, goddesses, statesmen, scientists, and philosophers literally crowding out the
vast expanses of the ocean is an appropriate celebration of the Age of Reason.
Although writing in 1989, William Golding captures the spirit of the times in Fire Down Below, the third
volume of his sea trilogy set in the early nineteenth century. After completing harrowing journeys from
England to Australia, two British aristocrats carry on the following conversation while courting each
other:
"I did not know there was so much [sea], Mr Talbot, that is the fact of the matter. One sees maps and
globes but it is different." "It is indeed different!" "Most of it you know, sir, is quite unnecessary."
Advantage Extensions
Resource Exploitation Focus SQ
SQ focus on resources limits our understandings of the oceans
Steinberg, Florida State University Political Geography Professor, 2001
[Philip E., The Social Construction of the Ocean, page 11-12, Google books, PAC]
The perspective most often applied in academic studies of marine issues is that of the ocean as a
space of resources. The ocean is perceived as akin to other resource-rich spaces, and its management
is characterized by similar dilemmas: How can the maximum sustainable yield be calculated and how
should portions of that yield be allocated to competing users? How can traditional tenure systems and
production practices be integrated with emerging resource needs, political power differentials, and
technological advances? How can one adjudicate between the needs of users of one ocean-space
resource and those who wish to use the same area for a different, incompatible resource use? How
can one implement comprehensive, binding management of a space expressly defined as outside state
territory when the key actors in building institutions of global govemance are territorially bounded
states?3
Students of resource management regimes note that in recent decades there have been dramatic
increases in the rates of extraction of both nonliving and living resources from marine environments.
While petroleum is the best known and, to date, most important non-living resource extracted from the
ocean floor, significant quantities of sand and gravel also are taken from marine space, and since the
1960s there has been strong interest in other marine minerals, including coal, polymetallic sulphides,
metalliferous sediments, phosphorite nodules, and, most notably, polymetallic manganese nodules
(Earney 1990). Since World War ll, the quantity of fish harvested from marine areas has risen at an
average growth rate of 3.6 percent per annum, increasing from 17.3 million metric tons (t) in 1948 to
61.7 million t in 1970 to 91.9 million t in 1995(FAO. various years). Most recently; the ocean has
attracted attention as an alternative source for renewable energy (Tsamenyi and Herriman 1998),
while deep sea habitats have amused the interest of biologists seeking previously unexploited genetic
material (Norse 1993).
Diminishing stocks of ocean resources (especially certain fish species) have led many scholars to
advocate a stronger regime for managing marine resource extraction. Some have suggested that a
stronger system of ocean governance be built around enhanced international regulatory organizations
(Bautista Payoyo 1994; Borgese 1986, 1998; Prager 1993). Others argue that this "tragedy of the
commons" situation requires a regime based on enclosure of ocean resources, so that each producer
will become a "stakeholder" with an incentive to restrict production to the ocean's maximum
sustainable yield (Denman 1984; Eckert 1979). Others suggest that models for sustainable ocean
governance maybe found in the "traditional" tenure systems of non-Westem societies (Cordell 1989;
McCay and Acheson 1987; jackson 1995; Ostrom 1990; Van Dyke et nl. 1993), while still others promote
a civil society-based partnership wherein fishers, processors. consumers, retailers, and
nongovernmental organizations work together to implement a sustainable extraction system
(Constance and Bonanno 2000; Steinberg 1999a).
Whichever policy proscription one adopts, the resource centered perspective offers a limited account
of the history of human interactions with the sea. Through the early twentieth century:
The only [extractive] resource exploitation was fishing, and with some infrequent exceptions of inshore
fisheries there were no serious problems of stock depletion until the technical modernization of fishing
vessels in the twentieth century The oceans |i.e., non-coastal areas] were used mainly as avenues of
commerce and for waging war and in the latter case military endeavors involved for the most part
colonization or naval encounters. Large invasions across ocean spaces were difficult and infrequent.
Therefore the major use of the oceans was essentially for the transportation of goods. (Zacher and
McConnell 1990: 78)
Oceans as Blank Resource Reserve
In an industrial capitalist period, the ocean is described as a blank backdrop,
wilderness, and filler—this allows elitist control and capitalist gain
Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography University of Cardiff, & Peters,
Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, UK., 2014
[Dr. Jon, Dr. Kimberley, February 2014, Ashgate, “Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the
Ocean,” http://www.ashgate.com/pdf/SamplePages/Water-Worlds-Human-Geographies-ofthe-Ocean-Intro.pdf, accessed 6-27-14, J.J.]
Our world is a water world. The oceans and seas are entwined, often invisibly but nonetheless
importantly, with our everyday lives. Trade, tourism, migration, terrorism, and resource exploitation all
happen in, at, and across the oceans. The globalized world of the twenty-first century is thus
thoroughly dependent upon water worlds. Despite this, geography, as ‘earth writing’ (Barnes and
Duncan 1992: 1), has largely taken its etymological roots seriously (Steinberg 1999a, Peters 2010). The
discipline has been a de facto terrestrial study; the sea not accorded the status of a ‘place’ worthy of
scholarly study (Hill and Abbott 2009: 276). In the words of Lewis Carroll’s crew in The Hunting of the
Snark (see Foreword), until very recently, geography has reduced the sea to ‘a perfect and absolute
blank’. Such status has been most marked within human geography, where focus on sociocultural and
political life rarely strays beyond the shore (Steinberg 1999a: 367). As Mack identifies, water worlds
have generally been relegated to, either the backdrop to the stage on which the real action is seen to
take place – that is, the land – or they are portrayed simply as the means of connection between
activities taking place at coasts and in their interiors. (2011: 19) As a consequence, the predominant
view of the sea has come to be characterized as, a quintessential wilderness, a void without
community other than that temporarily established on boats crewed by those with the shared
experience of being tossed about on its surface. (Mack 2011: 17) Such a conceptualization is
commonly attributed to ‘modern’ framings in the industrial capitalist era that have endured until the
twenty-first century (Steinberg 2001: 113). Oceans and seas have been dismissed as spatial fillers to be
traversed for the capital gain of those on land (Steinberg 2001) or conquered for means of long
distance imperial control (Law 1986, Ogborn 2002). Moreover, because so few moderns live their lives
at sea – it is not a place of ‘permanent, sedentary habitation’ (Steinberg 1999a: 369) – water worlds
often remain at the edge of everyday consciousness. As Langewiesche states, since we live on land,
and are usually beyond the sight of the sea, it is easy to forget that our world is an ocean world. (2004:
3)
Solves Gulf of Mexico Scenarios
Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography University of Cardiff, & Peters,
Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, UK, 2014
[Dr. Jon, Dr. Kimberley, February 2014, Ashgate, “Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the
Ocean,” http://www.ashgate.com/pdf/SamplePages/Water-Worlds-Human-Geographies-ofthe-Ocean-Intro.pdf, accessed 6-30-14, J.J.]
While each of these Gulf/Caribbean images is certainly maritime, none of them suggests an underlying
historical, or ongoing, space of maritime unity - a Mediterranean space of crossings. Mexico, which
might logically be perceived as lying on the 'other' side of the region (the equivalent of North Africa
and the Levant, in the Mediterranean context), is instead seen as an extension of the arid western
United States, not a space that is joined to the United States through maritime connectivity. This
geographic erasure in U.S. thought, in which the southern maritime frontier is subsumed by the
western land frontier, is reproduced in the Hollywood Western, where Mexico is almost universally
depicted as an extension of the southwestern U.S. desert, not the land that lies across from the Gulf
coast of the southeastern United States. The resulting conception of the Gulf region as a series of local
destinations, as opposed to being an integrated maritime space unified by a body of water, is so
pervasive that when Mississippi state legislator Steve Holland proposed renaming the Gulf of Mexico
the Gulf of America in an effort to spoof his anti-immigration colleagues the joke was lost on the
national media (Wilkinson 2012)."
Thinking of the ocean space as a homogenous, whole region perpetuates colonial
relations to resources
Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography University of Cardiff, & Peters,
Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, UK, 2014
[Dr. Jon, Dr. Kimberley, February 2014, Ashgate, “Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the
Ocean,” http://www.ashgate.com/pdf/SamplePages/Water-Worlds-Human-Geographies-ofthe-Ocean-Intro.pdf, accessed 6-30-14, J.J.]
Giaccaria and Minca (2011) advance this critique by identifying ocean basin-based regions as
exemplarily postcolonial spaces that reproduce and naturalize ideals of unity in difference. On the one
hand, the ocean in the middle of a maritime region links spaces and societies that are purported to be
'naturally' different. The different societies exist on opposite sides of a seemingly natural divide, a
purportedly empty and separating ocean. On the other hand, because the ocean connects, even if it
does not homogenize, the societies in an ocean region appear to exist in a permanent and natural
universe of exchange and interaction that reproduces difference. Existing within an idealized arena of
connectivity amidst difference, the various societies within an ocean region are linked together in an
arena of mobility in which all entities - those with relatively more power and those with relatively less
- are transformed even as they resist the 'other'. While all ocean regions are, in this sense,
prefiguratively postcolonial, arguably the paradigmatic case is the Mediterranean (Chambers 2008). In
part, this is because of the Mediterranean's physical geography (relatively small and enclosed), in art it is
because of its location at the intersection of Europe an one of its longest standing 'others' (the Arab
'orient'), and in part it is because of the ion history in the humanities of treating the Mediterranean as a
singularly unified, but also resolutely divided, region (Giaccaria and Minca 2011). For all these reasons,
[amidst] a paradoxical interplay between different (and potentially conflictual) representations of this
sea that alternate narratives of homogeneity and continuity with those of heterogeneity and
discontinuity, [the rhetoric of mediterraneanism sustains] the belief in the existence of a geographical
object called the Mediterranean, where different forms of proximity (morphological. climatic. cultural.
religious. etc.) justify a specific rhetorical apparatus through the production of a simplified field of
inquiry, otherwise irreducible to a single image. (Giaccaria and Minca 2011: 348, emphasis in original)
The Mediterranean thus comes to be seen as something that, although permanently divided, is also
permanent in its wholeness: 'The mediterraneisme de la fracture [is understood as] something
substantially immutable - a vision that resembles, in many ways, the cultural "containers" imagined and
celebrated in Orientalist colonial rhetoric and Romantic literature' (Giaccaria and Minca 2011: 353).
Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography University of Cardiff, & Peters,
Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, 2014
[Dr. Jon, Dr. Kimberley, February 2014, Ashgate, “Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the
Ocean,” http://www.ashgate.com/pdf/SamplePages/Water-Worlds-Human-Geographies-ofthe-Ocean-Intro.pdf, accessed 6-30-14, J.J.]
Like any antithetical categorization, the ocean region can either challenge or reproduce the
fundamental assumptions of the dominant construction to which it is posed as an alternative. On the
one hand, when one designates an ocean as the element that unites a region, fluidity and connections
replace embeddedness in static points and bounded territories as the fundamental nexus of society
and space. 'Roots' are replaced by 'routes', and this suggests a radical ontology of deterritorialization
and reterritorialization (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987). On the other hand, by reaffirming the concept
of the region as a unit of analysis - a unit that is stable in space and time and, therefore, potentially
explanatory - the ocean region perspective can inadvertently reproduce the static and essentialist
spatial ontology that it attempts to subvert.'
Solves Overfishing/Whaling
Understanding ocean cartography opens the door for the understanding of oceanic
cultures relationship to fishing, whaling, etc.
Steinberg, Florida State University Political Geography Professor, 2009
[Philip E., “Oceans,” International Encyclopedia of Human Geography,
http://philsteinberg.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/iehg.pdf, accessed 6/27/14 JO]
While contemporary studies of the political geography of the sea can draw upon a long history of
political geographers studying maritime conflict, the study of marine issues is quite new in cultural
geography. Of course, there always have been marine cultural geographies; seafaring and fishing
communities invariably display distinct cultural formations that reflect and impact the surrounding
marine environment. Historically, however, few geographers have devoted their attention to the
cultures of fishing communities and even fewer have studied the cultures of societies engaged in uses
of the deep sea (e.g, whalers, naval personnel, merchant mariners, oceanographic and fisheries
researchers, or long-distance fishers). As has occurred throughout cultural geography since the 1980s,
much of the impetus for new cultural geographic studies of the sea has come from outside the
discipline, especially from anthropology, history, literature, and cultural studies. This turn to the sea
— and to understanding the sea as a space of culture — perhaps emerged first in the discipline of
history. Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
demonstrated that the ocean, far from being an empty space between cultures, was in fact a space of
interaction in which cultures (and natures) were formed and transformed . This perspective, which
directly challenged prevailing ideas in cultural ecology (as well as in history and anthropology) about
cultures being rooted in place, was soon taken up by other historians who started new ocean-basinbased organizations of history (most notably Atlantic history). In the 1990s, this work on the history of
ocean regions began to be joined with work emerging from cultural studies (and, increasingly, cultural
geography) on diasporas, hybrid identities, and transnationalism. Broadly, scholars associated with this school
of thought stress the ways in which cultures are continually reproduced through movement and connection
rather than through stasis in place. A key motivational book for integrating the ocean within this line of
thinking was Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic Although Gilroy only indirectly considers the ocean as a
material space of society, the book, which has been highly influential in cultural studies, suggests the
power of oceanic metaphors, and, by association, oceanic spaces, in interpreting cultural formations.
Extinction
That exacerbates structural violence and makes extinction inevitable
Byrne, Head of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy and Toley, Directs the
Urban Studies and Wheaton in Chicago programs 6
(John – Head of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy – It’s a leading institution for interdisciplinary graduate education, research,
and advocacy in energy and environmental policy – John is also a Distinguished Professor of Energy & Climate Policy at the University of
Delaware – 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Toley – Directs the Urban Studies
and Wheaton in Chicago programs - Selected to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Emerging Leaders Program for 2011-2013 - expertise
includes issues related to urban and environmental politics, global cities, and public policy, Transforming Power, Energy, Environment, and
Society in Conflict, “Energy as a Social Project: Recovering a Discourse,” p. 1-32 http://ceepolicy.org/wpcontent/uploads/2013/08/2006_es_energy_as_a_social_project2.pdf Accessed 7/1/14) NM
From climate change to acid rain, contaminated landscapes, mercury pollution, and biodiversity loss,2
the origins of many of our least tractable environmental problems can be traced to the operations of
the modern energy system. A scan of nightfall across the planet reveals a social dilemma that also
accompanies this system’s operations: invented over a century ago, electric light remains an experience
only for the socially privileged. Two billion human beings—almost one-third of the planet’s population—
experience evening light by candle, oil lamp, or open fire, reminding us that energy modernization has
left intact—and sometimes exacerbated—social inequalities that its architects promised would be
banished (Smil, 2003: 370 - 373). And there is the disturbing link between modern energy and war.3
Whether as a mineral whose control is fought over by the powerful (for a recent history of conflict over
oil, see Klare, 2002b, 2004, 2006), or as the enablement of an atomic war of extinction, modern energy
makes modern life possible and threatens its future. With environmental crisis, social inequality, and
military conflict among the significant problems of contemporary energy-society relations, the
importance of a social analysis of the modern energy system appears easy to establish. One might,
therefore, expect a lively and fulsome debate of the sector’s performance, including critical inquiries
into the politics, sociology, and political economy of modern energy. Yet, contemporary discourse on
the subject is disappointing: instead of a social analysis of energy regimes, the field seems to be a
captive of euphoric technological visions and associated studies of “energy futures” that imagine the
pleasing consequences of new energy sources and devices.4 One stream of euphoria has sprung from
advocates of conventional energy, perhaps best represented by the unflappable optimists of nuclear
power 1 2 Transforming Power who, early on, promised to invent a “magical fire” (Weinberg, 1972)
capable of meeting any level of energy demand inexhaustibly in a manner “too cheap to meter” (Lewis
Strauss, cited in the New York Times 1954, 1955). In reply to those who fear catastrophic accidents from
the “magical fire” or the proliferation of nuclear weapons, a new promise is made to realize “inherently
safe reactors” (Weinberg, 1985) that risk neither serious accident nor intentionally harmful use of highenergy physics. Less grandiose, but no less optimistic, forecasts can be heard from fossil fuel
enthusiasts who, likewise, project more energy, at lower cost, and with little ecological harm (see,
e.g., Yergin and Stoppard, 2003). Skeptics of conventional energy, eschewing involvement with
dangerously scaled technologies and their ecological consequences, find solace in “sustainable energy
alternatives” that constitute a second euphoric stream. Preferring to redirect attention to smaller, and
supposedly more democratic, options, “green” energy advocates conceive devices and systems that
prefigure a revival of human scale development, local self-determination, and a commitment to
ecological balance. Among supporters are those who believe that greening the energy system embodies
universal social ideals and, as a result, can overcome current conflicts between energy “haves” and
“havenots.” 5 In a recent contribution to this perspective, Vaitheeswaran suggests (2003: 327, 291),
“today’s nascent energy revolution will truly deliver power to the people” as “micropower meets village
power.” Hermann Scheer echoes the idea of an alternative energy-led social transformation: the shift to
a “solar global economy... can satisfy the material needs of all mankind and grant us the freedom to
guarantee truly universal and equal human rights and to safeguard the world’s cultural diversity”
(Scheer, 2002: 34).6 The euphoria of contemporary energy studies is noteworthy for its historical
consistency with a nearly unbroken social narrative of wonderment extending from the advent of steam
power through the spread of electricity (Nye, 1999). The modern energy regime that now powers
nuclear weaponry and risks disruption of the planet’s climate is a product of promises pursued
without sustained public examination of the political, social, economic, and ecological record of the
regime’s operations. However, the discursive landscape has occasionally included thoughtful
exploration of the broader contours of energy-environment-society relations. As early as 1934, Lewis
Mumford (see also his two-volume Myth of the Machine , 1966; 1970) critiqued the industrial energy
system for being a key source of social and ecological alienation (1934: 196): The changes that were
manifested in every department of Technics rested for the most part on one central fact: the increase of
energy. Size, speed, quantity, the multiplication of machines, were all reflections of the new means of
utilizing fuel and the enlargement of the available stock of fuel itself. Power was dissociated from its
natural human and geographic limitations: from the caprices of the weather, from the irregularities that
definitely restrict the output of men and animals. By 1961, Mumford despaired that modernity had
retrogressed into a life harming dead end (1961: 263, 248): ...an orgy of uncontrolled production and
equally uncontrolled reproduction: machine fodder and cannon fodder: surplus values and surplus
populations... The dirty crowded houses, the dank airless courts and alleys, the bleak pavements, the
sulphurous atmosphere, the over-routinized and dehumanized factory, the drill schools, the secondhand experiences, the starvation of the senses, the remoteness from nature and animal activity—here
are the enemies. The living organism demands a life-sustaining environment. Modernity’s formula for
two centuries had been to increase energy in order to produce overwhelming economic growth. While
diagnosing the inevitable failures of this logic, Mumford nevertheless warned that modernity’s
supporters would seek to derail present-tense7 evaluations of the era’s social and ecological
performance with forecasts of a bountiful future in which, finally, the perennial social conflicts over
resources would end. Contrary to traditional notions of democratic governance, Mumford observed
that the modern ideal actually issues from a pseudomorph that he named the “democraticauthoritarian bargain” (1964: 6) in which the modern energy regime and capitalist political economy join
in a promise to produce “every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus [one] may
desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority” on the condition that
society demands only what the regime is capable and willing to offer. An authoritarian energy order
thereby constructs an aspirational democracy while facilitating the abstraction of production and
consumption from non-economic social values.
Solvency Extensions
Deconstruction
Accepting maps as cultural texts is critical to deconstruct cartography and redefine its
social relationships
-objective evaluations always fail
Harley, Director of the Office of Map History in the American Geographical Society
Collection, 89
[JB, Summer 1989, “Deconstructing the Map,” CARTOGRAPHICA VOL 26 No 2 , page 7-9,
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/passages/4761530.0003.008/--deconstructing-themap?rgn=main;view=fulltext, PAC]
To move inward from the question of cartographic rules — the social context within which map
knowledge is fashioned — we have to turn to the cartographic text itself. The word 'text' is
deliberately chosen. It is now generally accepted that the model of text can have a much wider
application than to literary texts alone. To non-book texts such as musical compositions and
architectural structures we can confidently add the graphic texts we call maps.42 It has been said that
"what constitutes a text is not the presence of linguistic elements but the act of construction" so that
maps, as "constructions employing a conventional sign system,"43 become texts. With Barthes we
could say they "presuppose a signifying consciousness" that it is our business to uncover.44¶ 'Text' is
certainly a better metaphor for maps than the mirror of nature. Maps are a cultural text. By
accepting their textuality we are able to embrace a number of different interpretative possibilities .¶
Instead of just the transparency of clarity we can discover the pregnancy of the¶ opaque. To fact we
can add myth, and instead of innocence we may expect¶ duplicity. Rather than working with a formal
science of communication, or even a¶ sequence of loosely related technical processes, our concern is
redirected to a¶ history and anthropology of the image, and we learn to recognize the narrative¶
qualities of cartographic representation45¶ as well as its claim to provide a synchronous picture of the
world. All this, moreover, is likely to lead to a rejection of the¶ neutrality of maps, as we come to
define their intentions rather than the literal face¶ of representation, and as we begin to accept the
social consequences of cartographic practices. I am not suggesting that the direction of textual enquiry
offers a¶ simple set of techniques for reading either contemporary or historical maps. In¶ some cases we
will have to conclude that there are many aspects of their meaning¶ that are undecidable.46¶
Deconstruction, as discourse analysis in general, demands a closer and deeper reading of the
cartographic text than has been the general practice in either¶ cartography or the history of
cartography. It may be regarded as a search for¶ alternative meanings. " To deconstruct," it is
argued,¶ is to reinscribe and resituate meanings , events and objects within broader movements
and¶ structures; it is, so to speak, to reverse the imposing tapestry in order to expose in all its¶
unglamorously dishevelled tangle the threads constituting the well-heeled image it presents to the
world.47¶ The published map also has a 'well-heeled image' and our reading has to go¶ beyond the
assessment of geometric accuracy, beyond the fixing of location, and¶ beyond the recognition of
topographical patterns and geographies. Such interpretation begins from the premise that the map
text may contain "unperceived¶ contradictions or duplicitous tensions"48¶ that undermine the
surface layer of¶ standard objectivity. Maps are slippery customers. In the words of W.J.T. Mitchell,
writing of languages and images in general, we may need to regard them more¶ as "enigmas, problems
to be explained, prison-houses which lock the understanding away from the world." We should regard
them "as the sort of sign that presents¶ a deceptive appearance of naturalness and transparence
concealing an opaque,¶ distorting, arbitrary mechanism of representation."49¶ Throughout the history
of¶ modern cartography in the West, for example, there have been numerous instances of where maps
have been falsified, of where they have been censored or kept¶ secret, or of where they have
surreptitiously contradicted the rules of their¶ proclaimed scientific status.50¶ As in the case of these
practices, map deconstruction would focus on aspects¶ of maps that many interpreters have glossed
over. Writing of "Derrida's most¶ typical deconstructive moves," Christopher Norris notes that¶
deconstruction is the vigilant seeking-out of those 'aporias,' blindspots or moments of¶ selfcontradiction where a text involuntarily betrays the tension between rhetoric and logic,¶ between
what it manifestly means to say and what it is nonetheless constrained to mean. To 'deconstruct' a
piece of writing is therefore to operate a kind of strategic reversal, seizing on¶ precisely those
unregarded details (casual metaphors, footnotes, incidental turns of argument) which are always, and
necessarily, passed over by interpreters of a more orthodox¶ persuasion. For it is here, in the margins of
the text - the 'margins,' that is, as defined by a¶ powerful normative consensus — that deconstruction
discovers those same unsettling forces¶ at work.51
AT: Won’t Change Maps/Actions
Status quo geography ignores the ocean—static disciplines entrenched in society
means new studies must start from a marine perspective
Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cardiff, and
Peters, Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, 2014
[Jon, Kimberley, Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean; pg 10-11; PAC]
To paraphrase Cresswell (2000: 263), we have argued to date that human geographers have yet to
adequately ‘talk about the water’. Despite this, in various ways the marine and maritime world lap
into our everyday lives through the use of language. Sayings such as ‘all hands on deck’, ‘you can’t
swing a cat in here’ or ‘all at sea’, have moved seamlessly from ship-based contexts to land-based life,
and thus, turns of phrase are appropriated and tie together the terrestrial and water world. Such sayings
remind us that language remains a key way through which humans make sense of our geographies. As
Wittgenstein reminds us, ‘the world we live in is the words we use’ (cited in Raban 1999: 151), and
although ‘how places are made is at the core of human geography, [we have perhaps] neglected1991:
684). Sensitizing ourselves to language, and the philosophies that underpin it, is therefore a further
means by which we can take the ‘large [blank] map representing the sea’ and reinvent it as something
we can ‘all understand’ (see Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, Foreword).
As our world is not only terrestrial but also marine in focus, it is possible to move beyond a traditional
terrestrial vocabulary that is dominantly used to describe, conceptualize, and understand it. According
to Cresswell (2006), the dominant way in which the terrestrial world is studied is through adopting the
language of a ‘sedentary metaphysics’ (after Malkki 1992). This language seeks to ‘divide the world up
into clearly bounded territorial units’ (Cresswell 2004: 109), whilst the process of place-making
involves the ‘carving out of ‘permanences”’ (Harvey 1996: 294, emphasis added). It is from this
sedentary metaphysics that our ‘common sense’ categorizations of the world – as fixed, static and
durable – originate (Bourdieu 1977, 1991). Although this narrative may be appropriate for many places,
it also produces a limited geographical imagination in a number of ways. Due to the radical difference
in physicality between the terrestrial and the oceanic (Steinberg 1999a: 327), these perspectives serve
to not only marginalize the marine world from scholarly study, but also preclude theoretical
innovations that may help to conceptualize this world more appropriately. We have seen how
geography has always been a ‘land’ discipline, but in this way is also became a ‘locked’ discipline,
fixated on the sedentary, static and terrestrially rooted rather than processes of flow, hybridity and
mobile routes.
Cartography of Debate 1AC- Draft
<Counter Cartography – this 1ac would be individualized to the debaters including
personal experience and narrative>
Current conceptualizations of the Earth’s oceans is rooted in a history of Eurocentrism
colonialism
Lewis, Stanford University, International History, Senior Lecturer, 99
[Martin W., April 1999, “Dividing the Ocean Sea”, Geographical Review, Vol 89, Num 2, pg 189-190, PAC]
Three major variations in the conceptualization of sea space can be seen over the centuries. First is the
manner in which the oceanic realm as a whole has been divided into its major constituent units, now
called "oceans." Second is the changing way in which the hierarchy of oceanic divisions and
subdivisions has been arrayed: Seas, for example, are now considered constituent units of the larger
oceans, but this has not always been the case. Third is the matter of nomenclature, the changing
names assigned to the (more or less) same bodies of water. Although naming is seemingly the least
complex issue at hand, it can have significant political and ideological ramifications; the demise of the
"Ethiopian Ocean" in the nineteenth century, for example, perhaps reflects the denigration of Africa
that occurred with the rise of racist pseudoscience (Bernal 1987).
The conventional present-day schema of global geography, encompassing continental and oceanic
constructs alike, is rooted in a specifically European worldview. During the colonial era, Western ideas
about the division of the globe were forced on, and often eagerly borrowed by, other societies the
world over, thereby largely extinguishing competing geographies. To examine the history of imagining
the ocean, one must therefore begin with ancient Greek geography, even though Greek ideas on this
score may ultimately have been rooted in Babylonian, Egyptian, and Phoenician concepts that are
now largely lost. Tracing out this story involves examining the cartographic evidence; certainly other
modes of division are imaginable and possible, but it is the cartographic imagination that most directly
informs our division of the Ocean Sea.
Debate makes us always forced to be “lost at sea” and we engage with arguments and
observations that are problematic— the aff is a lighthouse to which our arguments are
filtered through
Tally, American and World Literature Professor at Texas State University, 2011
[Robert T., January 2011, New American Notes Online, “On Literary Cartography: Narrative as a
Spatially Symbolic Act,” http://www.nanocrit.com/issues/issue-1-navigation/literarycartography-narrative-spatially-symbolic-act/, accessed 6-27-14, J.J.]
The experience of being in the world is one of constant navigation, of locating oneself in relation to
others, of orientation in space and in time, of charting a course, of placement and displacement, and
of movements though an array of geographical and historical phenomena. The human condition is
one of being “at sea”—both launched into the world and somewhat lost in it—and, like the navigator,
we employ maps, logs, our own observations and imagination to make sense of our place. As Frank
Kermode notes in The Sense of an Ending, “Men, like poets, rush ‘into the middest,’ in medias res,
when they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive
concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems” (7). Kermode is speaking
of temporal organization, but this experience of being “in the middest” is also acutely spatial, and it
calls for cartographic solutions that are likewise “fictive concords” with here and there, near and far,
home and away, and so on. Humans come to terms with this reality by projecting imaginary lines—
latitude and longitude are obvious examples—inventing provisional landmarks or making narratives.
An approach to narrative as a spatially symbolic act enables us to navigate literature and the world in
interesting new ways, by asking different questions, exploring different territories, and discovering
different effects. As writers map their worlds, so readers or critics may engage with these narrative
maps in order to orient ourselves and make sense of things in a changing world.
The aff engage the reader through a crafted scope, unites different aspects that are an
essential form of critical cartography
Tally, American and World Literature Professor at Texas State University, 2011
[Robert T., January 2011, New American Notes Online, “On Literary Cartography: Narrative as a
Spatially Symbolic Act,” http://www.nanocrit.com/issues/issue-1-navigation/literarycartography-narrative-spatially-symbolic-act/, accessed 6-27-14, J.J.]
This cartographic project of the novel is much like Jameson’s conception of cognitive mapping as a
strategy for situating oneself within a complex and seemingly unrepresentable social totality. Jameson
famously derives the concept from Kevin Lynch’s analysis of urban disorientation in Image of the City
and from Louis Althusser’s revisionary theory of ideology as an imaginary solution to real contradictions.
It is worth noting, however, that Jameson first used the term (albeit a somewhat different way) in
reference to narrative in The Political Unconscious, where he posits realism as “a narrative discourse
which unites the experience of everyday life with a cognitive, mapping, or well nigh ‘scientific’
perspective” (90). Narrative itself is a form of mapping, organizing the data of life into recognizable
patterns with it understood that the result is a fiction, a mere representation of space and place,
whose function is to help the viewer or mapmaker, like the reader or writer, make sense of the world.
In Maps of the Imagination, Peter Turchi asserts that all writing is in one way or another cartographic,
but that storytelling is an essential form of mapping, of orienting oneself and one’s readers in space.
The storyteller, like the mapmaker, determines the boundaries of the space to be represented, selects
the elements to be included, establishes the scope and scale, and so on. In producing the narrative,
the writer also produces a map of the space, connecting the reader to a totality formed by the
narrative itself. Narrative is thus a spatially symbolic act in establishing a literary cartography for the
reader.
Performative Mapping
Kitchen, Geography Professor at National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Perkins
Senior Lecturer of Geography at University of Manchester and Dodge Senior Lecturer
of Human Geography at University of Manchester, ‘11
(Rob, Chris and Martin, June 2nd 2001, Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory, p. 17,
Accessed 6/30/14, ESB)
Mapping can then be conceptualized as a suite of cultural practices involving action and affects. This
kind of approach reflects a philosophical shift towards performance and mobility and away from
essence and material stability. This rethinking of cartography is supported by historical and
contemporary work. Researchers concerned with historical contexts increasingly stress the interplay
between place, times, actions and ideas. Mapping in different cultures reflects multiple traditions
including: an internal or cognitive set of behaviours involving thinking about space; a material culture
in which mapping is recorded as an artefact or object; and a performance tradition where space may
be enacted through gesture, ritual, song, speech dance or poetry (Woodward and Lewis 1998). In any
cultural context there will be a different blend of these elements. Interpreting mapping then means
considering the context in which mapping takes place; the way it is invoked as part of diverse
practices to do work in the world. Instead of focusing on artefacts, aesthetics, human agency, or the
politics of mapping, research focuses on how maps are constituted in and through diverse, discursive
and material processes. Arguments presently emerging in the literature extend both the notion
of maps as processes and the ontological thought underpinning cartography by problematizing the
ontological security enjoyed by maps. The idea that a map represents spatial truth might have been
challenged and rethought in a number of different ways, but a map is nonetheless understood as
a coherent, stable product – a map; a map has an undeniable essence that can be interrogated and
from which one can derive understanding. Moreover, the maps and mapping practices maintain and
reinforce dualities with respect to their conceptualization – production–consumption, author–reader,
design– use, representation–practice, map–space. This position has been rejected by those adopting
performative and ontogenetic understandings of mapping. Maps rather are understood as always in a
state of becoming; as always mapping; as simultaneously being produced and consumed,
authored and read, designed and used, serving as a representation and practice; as
mutually constituting map/space in a dyadic relationship
The counter mapping strategies of the 1AC access the Thirdspace—through which we
can access Identity knowledge and understand our place in the world
Taylor, Vanderbilt University Philosophy Graduate, 2013
[Katie Headrick, August 2013, Counter-mapping the Neighborhood: A Social Design Experiment for
Spatial Justice, Graduate School of Vanderbilt University dissertation submitted to and approved by
Philosophy Department in Learning, Teaching and Diversity, pg. 5-6, accessed 6-30-14,
http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-06142013-141535/unrestricted/HeadrickTaylor.pdf,
KMM]
From my position as someone who is neither a “local” of Woodbridge nor a powerful entity, but also
from several years of participant observation and study, I have come to think of counter-mapping as a
thirdspace practice. By thirdspace, I mean a kind of interface “produced by processes that exceed the
forms of knowledge that divide the world into binary oppositions” (Routledge, 2009; p. 753).
Thirdspace is where unofficial meets official, informal meets formal, represented meets lived, and
concrete meets abstract to create and/or imagine something emergent and new (Lefebvre, 1991; Soja,
1996). I want to propose three specific ways in which counter-mapping is a thirdspace practice. These
distinct qualities of counter-mapping relate to how people understand, make, and take place. By
understanding place, I mean to describe how people know what they know about a particular
geography. By making place, I mean to describe how people talk about and imbue geography with
personally relevant meaning. And by taking place, I mean to talk about how people exert ownership
of and agency within a geography of which others may have designs.
The following analytic categories of counter-mapping emerged from watching adult residents participate
in a participatory planning process with urban planners (Phase I) and became important for developing
research questions and designing activities for youth in an experimental teaching case (Phase II). I then
looked for these categories in how youth were talking about and representing their neighborhoods
throughout the designed activities (Phase II) and in interaction with urban planners and local
stakeholders (Phase III) to determine if the design met its over-arching objective – to teach and engage
youth in counter-mapping. These categories then became more refined during retrospective analyses,
looking back across all three phases. The three analytic categories of counter-mapping that this
dissertation describes and examines across the three phases of research are as follows:
Counter-mapping creates opportunity for residents’ “on the move” epistemology based on mobility
(Cresswell, 2006) to meet a “grid epistemology” (Dixon & Jones, 1998); locals (informally) know places
by moving through them rather than from (formally) seeing an area from above (e.g., de Certeau, 1984;
Creswell, 2006; Jacobs, 1961).
Counter-mapping creates opportunity for story-telling from sensuous, historical, and lived experience
to simultaneously understand and disrupt a disembodied, abstract narrative represented by a map
(Eckstein, 2003); locals bring concrete experiences in place to abstract conceptions of space to build
“sense-scapes” (Grasseni, 2009) or lived experience and desire.
Counter-mapping creates opportunity for demonstrating spatial literacies; residents leverage “official”
tools (i.e., geospatial information and technologies) and discursive practices (e.g., understanding urban
phenomena through spatial concepts like scale, distribution, accessibility) to tell and re-represent
personally relevant arrangements for the future (Fox, 1998; Peluso, 1995).
People may be inclined to take-up counter-mapping as a sociotechnical performance genre because of
spatial inequities that they experience on the ground, in their daily lives (e.g., living in a food desert, no
bicycle lanes), in an effort to take place in the ongoing “official” discursive processes of their everevolving communities. These three analytic categories of counter-mapping may not exhaustively
describe this performance genre. However, these categories describe how counter-mapping is a
thirdspace practice where informal and formal ways of understanding, making, and taking place come
together and inform the other. These categories were the most visible and reoccurring in my analysis of
interactions during Phase I of the study. These categories were also the most helpful in making
conjectures about designing activities for youth counter-mapping in Phase II and Phase III, and then
making sense of what occurred. These analytic categories are fluid, in interaction, and inform the other,
but for clarity of design, analysis, and writing, I will attempt to separate them in the sections and
chapters that follow.
Cartography of Debate Extensions
Narrative Cartography
Maps are the starting reference point that give sense to a lot of things in the world
and our place in it
Tally, American and World Literature Professor at Texas State University, 2011
[Robert T., January 2011, New American Notes Online, “On Literary Cartography: Narrative as a
Spatially Symbolic Act,” http://www.nanocrit.com/issues/issue-1-navigation/literarycartography-narrative-spatially-symbolic-act/, accessed 6-27-14, J.J.]
Navigation is thus a figure for one’s existential condition and for literature. From a phenomenological
perspective, the subject must attempt to understand the world by performing a kind of cartographic
activity. Fredric Jameson has called this sort of cartographic activity “cognitive mapping,” a relational
framework that enables “a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that
vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole”
(Postmodernism 51–54). Mapping establishes a meaningful framework for the subject, with points of
reference for thinking about oneself and one’s place in the broader social space. Likewise, narratives
are frequently used to make sense of, or give form to, this world in significant ways. As such, literary
works serve a cartographic function by creating a figurative or allegorical representation of a social
space, broadly understood. This I refer to as literary cartography. In his Theory of the Novel, Georg
Lukács contrasts the closed or integrated civilization of the ancient epic and the fragmented world of
the novel, and his rhetoric implies the sort of cartographic anxiety that calls for narrative maps. The
epic hails from that “happy age” when “the starry sky is the map of all possible paths […] The world is
wide and yet it is like a home” (29). The modern condition, whose representative form is the novel, is
marked by a split between interior and exterior or between the subject and the world, which is now “a
world abandoned by God” and characterized by a “transcendental homelessness” (Lukács 88, 41). This
existential anxiety translates into a bewilderment in space, as one can no longer feel “at home” in the
word. As Heidegger puts it in Being and Time, “In anxiety one feels ‘uncanny’ [unheimlich]. Here the
peculiar indefiniteness of that which Dasein finds itself alongside in anxiety, comes proximally to
expression: the ‘nothing and nowhere’. But here ‘uncanniness’ also means ‘not-being-at-home’ [das
Nicht-zuhause-sein]” (233). The age of the novel is marked by an uncanny homelessness that requires
a figurative way to connect oneself to one’s world. And that is what the novel becomes, a literary
cartography providing figurative or allegorical images of the world and one’s place in it.
Anzaldua/Borderlands
Floating in an uncharted sea, only by searching for the subjective pluralism through
exploration can we find ourselves
Anzaldúa, Scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory, 1987
[Gloria E., Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, p. 79, J.J.]
These numerous possibilities leave la mestiza floundering in uncharted seas . In perceiving conflicting
information and points of view, she is subjected to a swamping of her psychological borders. She has
discovered that she can't hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries. The borders and walls that are
supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these
habits and patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity means death. Only by remaining flexible is she able
to stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically. La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual
formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move
toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from
set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes.
The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She
learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to
juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out,
the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain
contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else.
Borders are developed through objective mapping mentality
Anzaldúa, Scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory, 1987
[Gloria E., Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, p. 3, J.J.]
The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and
bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a
third country—a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to
distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a
vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a
constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here:
the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed,
the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the "normal."
Gringos in the U.S. Southwest consider the inhabitants of the borderlands transgressors, aliens-whether
they possess documents or not, whether they're Chicanos, Indians or Blacks. Do not enter, trespassers
will be taped, maimed, strangled, gassed, shot. The only “legitimate” inhabitants are those in power, the
whites and those who align themselves with whites. Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands
like a virus. Ambivalence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger.
We are “The Crossed”, the mixed, the mestiza—constantly crossing over and crosspollinizing identity, making an “alien” to society where you don’t quite fit in
Anzaldúa, Scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory, 1987
[Gloria E., Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, p. 77, J.J.]
Pg. 77- the borderlands
Jose Vascocelos, Mexican philosopher, envisaged una raza mestiza, una mezcla de razas afines, una raza
de color—la primera raza sintesis del globo. He called it a cosmic race, la raza cosmica, a fifth race
embracing the four major races of the world. Opposite to the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the policy
of racial purity that white America practices, his theory is one of inclusivity. At the confluence of two or
more generic streams, with chromosomes constantly "crossing over." this mixture of races, rather
than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a
rich gene pool. From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization, an "alien"
consciousness is presently in the making—a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer. It is a
consciousness of the borderlands.
Una lucha de fronteras / A Struggle of Borders
Because I am mestiza,
continually walk out of one culture and into another,
because I am in all cultures at the same time,
alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro,
me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio.
Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan
simultáneamente.
The impact is mental damnation—the struggle of borders— to find where you belong
along this tear calls into question, “Where do I belong?”
Anzaldúa, Scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory, 1987
[Gloria E., Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, p. 78, J.J.]
The ambivalence from the clash of voices results in mental and emotional states of perplexity.
Internal strife results in insecurity and indecisiveness. The mestiza's dual or multiple personality is
plagued by psychic restlessness. In a constant state of mental nepantilism, an Aztec word meaning torn
between ways, la mestiza is a product of the transfer of the cultural and spiritual values of one group
to another. Being tricultural, monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual, speaking a patois, and in a state
of perpetual transition, the mestiza faces the dilemma of the mixed breed: which collectivity does the
daughter of a darkskinned mother listen to?
El choque de un alma atrapado entre el mundo del espirita y el mundo de la tecnica a veces la deja
entullada. Cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and
their value systems, la mestiza undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war. Like
all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or
living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of
two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural
Collision.
Identity politics solve impacts (war, rape, & violence)
Questioning our identity leads to a better future, breaking down hierarchies depends
on a new consciousness—leads to answer fundamental questions.
Anzaldúa, Scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory, 1987
[Gloria E., Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, p. 80, J.J.]
En unas pocas centurias, the future will belong to the mestiza. Because the future depends on the
breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. By creating a new
mythos—that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we
behave—la mestiza creates a new consciousness.
The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a
prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The
answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in
healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our
thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is
the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of
violence, of war.
The “Mestiza’s”—or the mixed—are the revolutionary movement. We are the ones
who take the first step into the unknown
Anzaldúa, Scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory, 1987
[Gloria E., Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, p. 81, J.J.]
We are the people who leap in the dark, we are the people on the knees of the gods. In our very flesh,
(r)evolution works out the clash of cultures. It makes us crazy constantly, but if the center holds, we've
made some kind of evolutionary step forward. Nuestra alma el trabajo, the opus, the great alchemical
work; spiritual mestizaje, a “morphogenesis," an inevitable unfolding. We have become the quickening
serpent movement.
Indigenous like corn, like corn, the mestiza is a product of crossbreeding, designed for preservation
under a variety of conditions. Like an ear of corn—a female seed-bearing organ—the mestiza is
tenacious, tightly wrapped in the husks of her culture. Like kernels she clings to the cob; with thick
stalks and strong brace roots, she holds tight to the earth—she will survive the crossroads.
Solvency: Mapping otherness
Mapping out power relations is a necessary prerequisite to transforming otherness to
a site of change
Braidotti, contemporary philosopher and feminist theoretician, 5
[Rosi, “A Critical Cartography of Feminist Post-Postmodernism”, Australian Feminist Studies ,
Volume:20 Number 47 page 3, http://www.rosibraidotti.com/index.php/publications/digitalpublications/88-publications/digital-publications/138-a-critical-cartography-of-feminist-postpostmodernism, PAC]
Fortunately, otherness remains also as the site of production of countersubjectivities. Feminist, postcolonial, black, youth, gay, lesbian and transgender counter-cultures are positive examples of these
emergent subjectivities which are ‘other’ only in relation to an assumed and implicit ‘Same’. How to
disengage difference or otherness from the dialectics of Sameness is therefore the challenge .
Intersecting lines of ‘otherness’ map out the location of what used to be the ‘constitutive others’ of
the unitary subject of classical [humynism]. They mark the sexualised bodies of [womyn]; the racialised
bodies of ethnic or native others and the naturalised bodies of animals and earth others. They are the
inter-connected facets of structural otherness defined on a hierarchical scale of pejorative differences.
The historical era of globalisation is the meeting ground on which sameness and otherness or centre
and periphery confront each other and redefine their inter-relation. The changing roles of the former
‘others’ of modernity, namely [womyn], natives and natural or earth others, has turned them into
powerful sites of social and discursive transformation. Let us remember, with Foucault,11 that power is
a multi-layered concept, which covers both negative or confining methods (potestas) as well as
empowering or affirmative technologies (potentia). This means that the paths of transformation
engendered by the ‘difference engine’ of advanced capitalism are neither straight nor predictable. They
rather compose a zigzagging line of internally contradictory options. Thus, [humyn] bodies caught in
the spinning machine of multiple differences at the end of post modernity become simultaneously
disposable commodities to be vampirised and also decisive agents for political and ethical
transformation. How to tell the difference between the two modes of ‘becoming other’ is the task of
cultural and political theory and practice.
Solvency - Critical mapping is doing
Examination of the assumptions behind mapmaking is necessary to challenge
cartographic authority
Crampton Professor of Geography at Georgia State and Krygier, Professor of
Geography at Ohio Wesleyan University, 2006
[Jeremy W. and John, “An Introduction to Critical Cartography”, Acme Journal http://www.acmejournal.org/vol4/JWCJK.pdf, Accessed 6/25/2014, JO]
A critique is not a project of finding fault, but an examination of the assumptions of a field of
knowledge. Its purpose is to understand and suggest alternatives to the categories of knowledge that
we use. These categories (i.e., assumptions and familiar notions) shape knowledge even as they
enable it. For example, it is often assumed that good map design must achieve “figure-ground”
separation, even though recent research on cultural differences in the perception of figure ground
reveals that non-Western viewers do not have the same reaction to figure-ground as Western viewers
(Chua et al. 2005). Critique does not seek to escape from categories but rather to show how they came
to be, and what other possibilities there are.
This sense of critique was developed by Kant, especially in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 2nd Edn.
1787). For Kant a critique is an investigation which “involves laying out and describing precisely the
claims being made, and then evaluating such claims in terms of their original meanings” (Christensen
1982: 39). Kant’s essay on the question of the Enlightenment (Kant 2001/1784) describes critical
philosophy as one in which people constantly and restlessly strive to know and to challenge authority.
The modern emphasis on critique owes a substantial amount to the Frankfurt School’s development of
critical theory. The Frankfurt School, known formally as the Institute for Social Research, was founded in
Germany in 1923 and moved to New York in 1933 when Hitler came to power. The writers most closely
associated with the school included Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert
Marcuse, and later Jurgen Habermas. Many of these writers sought to release the emancipatory
potential of a society repressed by technology, positivism and ideology. For example, Adorno argued
that capitalism, instead of withering away as Marx had predicted, had in fact become more deeply
established by co-opting the cultural realm. The mass media, by pumping out low quality films, books
and music (and today, TV or internet) substituted for people’s real needs. Instead of seeking freedom
and creativity, people were satisfied with mere emotional catharsis, and were reduced to making
judgments of value on monetary worth. Frankfurt School writers sought to dispel such harmful and
illusory ideologies by providing an emancipatory philosophy which could challenge existing power
structures.
Reflecting on Kant’s critical philosophy Michel Foucault observed that critique is not a question of
accumulating a body of knowledge, but is rather “an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which
the critique of what we are is at the one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are
imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” (Foucault 1997: 132).
This emphasis on the historical conditions that make knowledge possible led Foucault to his
explorations of how knowledge—including knowledge that aspired to scientific rationality such as
disciplinary knowledge—was established and enabled through historically specific power relations.
Such a historical emphasis is also a part of the cartographic critique.
However, by power Foucault did not mean the same thing as the “false consciousness” of ideology in
the Frankfurt sense. For Foucault power is not a negative force that must be dispelled, nor does he
conceive of subjects as being constrained from reaching their true potential by a repressive state power
(Ingram 1994). Foucault’s conception of power was more subtle, one that emphasized the politics of
knowledge. Power did not emanate from the top of a class hierarchy, but rather was diffused
horizontally in a highly differentiated and fragmented fashion. Furthermore if power had repressive
effects it also produced subjects who act freely. The possibility of “going beyond” the limits, of
resisting, is a real one. This construction of rationality does not occur in a void however, but has been
“historically and geographically defined” (Foucault 1991: 117). Foucault’s sensitivity to geographic and
spatial aspects of rationality makes him of particular interest because he shows that many problems of
politics require spatial knowledge (Crampton and Elden 2006).
In sum then, the answer to the question “what is critique?” is that it is a politics of knowledge. First, it
examines the grounds of our decision-making knowledges; second it examines the relationship
between power and knowledge from a historical perspective; and third it resists, challenges and
sometimes overthrows our categories of thought. Critique does not have to be a deliberate political
project. If the way that we make decisions (based on knowledge) is changed, then a political
intervention has been made. Critique can therefore be both explicit and implicit. Furthermore, the
purpose of critique as a politics of knowledge, is not to say that our knowledge is not true, but that
the truth of knowledge is established under conditions that have a lot to do with power. In the next
section we elaborate on these points in the context of the cartographic critique more specifically.
Solvency – Third Space
Specifically, thirdspace reconceptualizes what it means to develop—goes beyond the
binary approach standard interpretations of the topic takes
Allen, UCLA Graduate School of Education Graduate, 1997
[Rick, 3-28-97, “What Space Makes of Us: Thirdspace, Identity Politics, and Multiculturalism.,” Paper
presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, page 16-20,
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED409409.pdf, accessed 6-30-14, KMM]
One of the dilemmas facing Thirdspace methodological development is connecting deconstructions of
the Firstspace-Secondspace duality to a radical political project of solidarity with marginalized
communities. This is especially difficult when some types of postmodernisms and poststructuralisms
have been critiqued as being politically damaging to the marginalized. For example, the more
apocalyptic postmodernisms have been attacked because neo- conservatives have used them to suggest
a state of positional relativism where any epistemological position has the same social weight as any
other (Best & Kellner, 1991; Soja, 1993). But, a view from privilege, already overdeveloped, should not
be given as much dialectical weight as a view from the margins when the privileged was created at the
expense of the marginal (Hammer & McLaren, 1991). How can a similar spatial relativism, where one
spatiality is no more problematic than another, be avoided or countered?
I would like to begin my argument by considering the possibilities of the term "development" as a spatial
metaphor. It is an interesting word because it has meanings that imply the production of both real-andimagined space. Development in the traditional sense of "real," or Firstspace, can mean "an occurrence,
event, or situation" or that spatial "happening" that is perceivable and has socially validated discursive
value. Development can also refer to the "real" of Firstspace in that it means "the economic and
material creation or growth of jobs, housing, education, etc..." Development also references a
Secondspace imagined spatiality in that it can mean "the cognitive or intellectual growth or structuring
of one's mind through learning." These varying definitions become interrelated and interdependent
when they are thought of as an example of the Firstspace-Secondspace duality. Development as
Firstspace is the recognition of changes that arise in Firstspace that are based on the perceived natural
and material spaces that are assumed to be unproblematic. Although Firstspace developments act as
material sites or stages for social problems, what is not questioned is why they are perceived at all, let
alone why the events themselves are read in various ways. Development as Secondspace is the changing
of the world through a universality of properly rationalized conceived space without recognition of the
maintenance of perceived space and the domination of lived space. These definitions alone hide behind
each other and mask the problems of power in social space.
However, the definition that has the most invigorating potential is the metaphor drawn from
photography that describes development as "a process for making images clear or seeable when they
were not clear or seeable before." This definition harkens back to Lefebvre's strategic use of the term
"illusion." To be able to "see" (a metaphor for perceiving reality) conceptual space must be changed. For
a magician to learn an illusion, she must learn it from another magician to perpetuate the seen, yet,
unseen mystery. As a Marxist, Lefebvre was not as concerned with repeating the illusion as he was with
creating conceptual ways to enable the audience (i.e.-the marginalized) to see through the trickery.
Lefebvre's project was then to critique Secondspace because it was the key to rethinking the double
illusion. The power of conceptual space is that it can change perceptions, and, thus, everyday spatial
practices. Those who change conceptually often describe experiences of "seeing" (i.e.-noticing,
recognizing, and validating from any sense stimuli) things that they did not notice before. As Soja argues,
the question is not whether spatialities are either real or imagined because they are always both. For
example, development is not either an occurrence or cognitive growth, it is both, and more.
The more important question is whose version of the real-and-imagined of development, or any spatial
metaphor, is conceptually dominant and how did it get to be that way? To answer this question, I will
borrow a political economy term from the debate on Thirdworld or urban economic development policy
called "underdevelopment." Underdevelopment represents a critique of the developed-undeveloped
binary in capitalistic, liberal policy. "Developed" and "undeveloped" are Firstspace descriptors that have
been used to quantify and communicate the degree of capitalistic benefit relative to economic
conditions. Some argue that material conditions are stratified according to class and that resources, as
spatial reality, need to be redistributed towards the undeveloped regions. Others claimed that people in
these undeveloped regions were poor because they lacked the knowledge to change their spatial
conditions. The concept of underdevelopment is an attempt to break this Firstspace- Secondspace
binary. Underdevelopment theory argues that capitalism actively produces undeveloped spaces in a
process of underdevelopment. This theory is premised on the notion that capitalism is a "zero-sum
game" where getting ahead necessarily means that someone else is left behind. Regions of development
are actually areas of "overdevelopment" because they grow from an over-accumulation of wealth.
Underdeveloped regions are those places that are politically and economically marginalized through
relations with dominant capitalist places (Wallerstein, 1979).
The political economy version of underdevelopment made famous by Wallerstein is still rather
Firstspatial, even though it definitely is aimed at the idealization of development policy in Secondspace.
It is a critique of how to read Firstspace material development. However, what is not always expressed
in the political economy version of underdevelopment are the sources for this conceptual shift in some
Western scholars that enabled a perceptual change of material space. In other words, what were the
origins of the Secondspatial change that was necessary for the Firstspace-Secondspace deconstruction
and reconstitution as the Thirdspatial "underdevelopment"?
The critiques of development were coming from the voices of those who were colonized and
marginalized by the power imbalances of imperial capitalism, such as the narratives developed in
postcolonial theory. The deconstruction of modernistic development metaphors came from lived
spatialities of those dominated by the double illusion. Secondspace creativity and Firstspace change
came from Thirdspace and life as lived on the margins. What was not seen at the conceptual center of
knowledge and power in development theory became "seen" as a critical spatial theory moved in from a
place of domination.4 Spatial underdevelopment is then conceptual as well as material, imagined as
well as real. Spatial underdevelopment involves a masking or silencing of voices from geohistoricaily
underdeveloped regions, not just an economic and material hardship. The conceptualizations of space
coming from subaltern lived spaces must, therefore, be brought to the center of spatial discourse if
Firstspace-Secondspace dualities are to be problematized with any rigor.
Thirdspace radically breaks down binary thinking
Allen, UCLA Graduate School of Education Graduate, 1997
[Rick, 3-28-97, “What Space Makes of Us: Thirdspace, Identity Politics, and Multiculturalism.,” Paper
presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, page 15-16,
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED409409.pdf, accessed 6-30-14, KMM]
Soja's call for the ontological importance of space in critical social theory and critical feminisms is
located in his description of Thirdspace epistemologies. Thirdspace is the "deconstruction and heuristic
reconstitution of the Firstspace-Secondspace duality." Thirdspace is a means to radically open Firstspace
and Secondspace knowledges for the purpose of creating new social possibilities. In Thirdspace, all
epistemologies must be re-written relative to the ontological assertion of space, along with new
intersectionalities with spatiality, historicity, and sociality. Although I do not have the space to include
lengthy descriptions of Thirdspace examples, I will mention that Soja (1996) argues that bell hooks'
Yearning (1990), Gyatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988), Edward Said's Orientalism (1979),
and Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) provide the best examples of what could be called
Thirdspace.
Current dualistic thinking marginalizes identities—thirdspace is key to reinsert those back into our
spatial thinking
Allen, UCLA Graduate School of Education Graduate, 1997
[Rick, 3-28-97, “What Space Makes of Us: Thirdspace, Identity Politics, and Multiculturalism.,” Paper
presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, page 20-21,
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED409409.pdf, accessed 6-30-14, KMM]
Turning to issues of identity brings the discussion back to my original question, "What does space make
of us?" Identity production is also related to the domination of lived space by conceived space. The
connection between identity and lived space makes sense if we think of identity as not just a name, but
a narrative of life as lived by those on the margins. Those who have the power to do so create dominant
versions of conceived space that matches their own lived and perceived space, and actively produce the
identity of the "Other" in the narratives that come from daily interaction with the Other. Of course, their
power is both imagined, in that it is refereed by idealized rationality, and real, in that there are material
connections and consequences. Identities are produced from the interaction between lived spaces that
are different from hegemonic conceived and perceived space. Difference in the double illusion is
"Othered" as subaltern identities. Spatial underdevelopment corresponds to the active production of
identities in territories of hegemonic domination such as barrios, ghettos, reservations, colonies, or
domestic households. Marginalized identities go beyond difference for the sake of difference; they are
representational of dominated spatialities that those who promote hegemonic modernistic spatialities
cannot readily perceive, let alone value. Discussing the production of identity then brings out issues of
spatial domination that may have been underdeveloped metaphorically or materially.
The most promising of Thirdspace methodologies brings together the critiques I have presented so far
into something called spatial praxis (Soja & Hooper, 1993). Spatial praxis gives methodological life to
what I have previously theorized as spatial underdevelopment. Spatial praxis is the combining of the
politics of identity (or location) and geohistorical underdevelopment to deconstruct and reinvigorate the
dialectic between spatial metaphor and spatial materiality. In spatial praxis, spatial metaphors
represent the linguistic aspects of Secondspace and the knowledge, space, power trialectic. The spatial
materiality of spatial praxis represents Firstspace. Together, these two parts comprise the FirstspaceSecondspace duality to be deconstructed (but not destroyed) just as I have argued previously. What is
really different in spatial praxis is the positioning of Identity and geohistorical underdevelopment as an
initial, contingent, and strategic operationalization of Thirdspace. Since identity and underdevelopment
are so closely related to Secondspace domination, they are given a Thirdspace position in spatial praxis
so that the real-and-imagined must address spatial underdevelopment.
One could argue that this example of Thirdspace in spatial praxis is just using another version of a realand-imagined binary, and they would be right. However, the political question is whose version of the
real-and-imagined becomes dominant and how do we deconstruct that hegemony. This Thirdspace also
places importance on the marginalizing effects of capitalistic underdevelopment and the related
production of marginal, and, therefore, dominant identities. The spatial praxis of Thirdspace is a way to
politically reinsert the spatialities produced by domination back into the center of dominant discourses.
Spatial praxis takes as a given the poststructural and critically pragmatic notion that every conceived
space will structure marginalization. Spatial praxis is one realm of theory that addresses these concerns.
But, Thirdspace should be radically open. As spatial praxis develops more in social science discourses, a
critique of the identity-geohistorical underdevelopment binary may be developed as well.
Thirdspace breaks down hegemonic discourses of dualism the otherizes certain populations
Allen, UCLA Graduate School of Education Graduate, 1997
[Rick, 3-28-97, “What Space Makes of Us: Thirdspace, Identity Politics, and Multiculturalism.,” Paper
presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, page 22-27,
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED409409.pdf, accessed 6-30-14, KMM]
In a critical multiculturalism, the concept of hegemony is crucial to disordering oppressive rationalities
and knowledges of control. The identification of oppressive rationalities partially hinges upon a
recognition or perception of socio-cultural differences and their political significance. Through spatial
underdevelopment theory, difference can be re-imagined as being actively produced and reproduced
through the domination of lived space by conceptual space. Difference can no longer be seen as
naturally given distinctions separate from the production of space because as conceptual space changes,
so does lived space, which is the site of identity emergence and maintenance. Hegemony is maintained
through the processes of spatial underdevelopment in their material and imagined forms. Identity
production in spatial underdevelopment represents the articulation of social and spatial domination in
an ever-shifting, multiple-bordered milieu of hegemonic territories or "Othering" sites.
Counter-hegemonic projects needs to be re-imagined given the productive dimension of space in
shaping identity. Counter-hegemonic critiques must consider Thirdspace, seeking to sympathetically
deconstruct Firstspace-Secondspace binaries, such as the double illusion of modernism. Conceived
space, as the site of the mental ordering of spatiality, must be particularly scrutinized by Thirdspace
methodologies such as spatial praxis. Lived space descriptions and symbolic representations should be
given a privileged place at the center of spatial thought. Identity production and geohistorical
underdevelopment should guide conceptual attention to the margins, which are the locations of
"creativity" and social transformation.
Current counter-hegemony identity politics usually have not embraced the more Thirdspatial
postcolonial and radical feminist critiques of modernistic spatial imaginations. Unfortunately, the politics
of difference (or identity politics) has been conceptually, and therefore, perceptually constrained by the
dualism of liberal humanism and modernist identity politics (Soja & Hooper, 1993). Liberal humanism
has sought to oppose conservative, class maintaining hegemony by arguing for the belief in a universal
"we." Equality and democracy are liberal humanist technologies of control that seek to minimize the
perceived problems caused by differences in people. Difference in this sense is seen as something to be
accommodated, if not overcome. Modernist identity politics imagines binary oppressive relationships
such as masculine/feminine, capital/labor, white/black, or colonizer/colonized. It imagines a unified
subaltern group that struggles to resist and/or defeat their particular oppressor. The radical subjectivity
utilized in modernist identity politics often universalizes its own cause to the exclusion of other
marginalized groups. This homogenizing of subaltern subjectivity may be part of the conceived
cohesiveness that is believed to be necessary to overcome the oppressor.
The problem with these modernistic counter-hegemonies is that the liberal humanist/modernist identity
politics binary constructs "fragmentation" as an unwanted social development. Liberal humanists are
Secondspatial in that they believe in the adherence to universal principles as the way to combat the
problems caused by difference. If a large number of people agree that a social principle is valid, then, as
Durkheim states, it is the responsibility of individuals to give up their selfish desires and abide by
"common sense." Difference in this view is subversive if it counters dominant opinion. Arguments like
postmodernism or poststructuralism are called "fragmenting" because they are seen as disruptive to the
project of producing a unified "we" with a shared common sense. Fragmentation is a spatial metaphor
that implies that there existed a previous "we." This mythical "we" linguistically constructs
fragmentation as a political device to place blame for the material consequences related to identity
production on those discourses the critique universalizing, idealist rationalities.
Although modernist identity politics is called fragmenting, too, by liberal humanists, it still has its own
version of fragmentation that it directs at those who are perceived to share the identity of a particular
bipolar subaltern group but do not place all of their energies into the singular "revolutionary" cause. The
homogenization process involved in creating the counter-hegemonic subjectivity causes many who have
had lived experiences that are different from the dominant conceptualizations to be politically resistant.
Those who do support the cause of the singular oppressed against the singular oppressor label those
who are not supportive of the cause, but are identified as one of the oppressed, as being "fragmenting"
or as having "false consciousness." For example, the Marxist who is "not Marxist enough."
The dilemma of both modernistic counter-hegemonies is that they do not account for how their
idealized, rationalized, and totalized visions of what space should be blinds them to thinking about how
space, particularly their own conceived space, actively produces the very fragmenting that they find
subversive.5 Difference in both cases is feared and invokes spatial metaphors with negatively viewed
meanings such as fragmentation. Conceived space once again dominates lived space, and the expressed
subjugation in the form of multiple or fragmented identities is attacked.
The choices for a counter-hegemonic identity politics do not have to be constrained within this
modernistic binary. Since there are multiple dominating conceived spaces, their will always be multiple
lived spaces representing multiple identities in any individual, or for that matter, group. Also, spatial
underdevelopment and identity production are an ongoing process. So the new production of
marginalized identities needs to be figured into the conceptualization of radical identity politics. One
political view that accomplished this task is called "postmodern identity politics." As the Thirdspace of
counter-hegemonic identity politics, postmodern identity politics is "a polyvocal postmodernism that
maintains a commitment to radical social change while continuing to draw (selectively, but
sympathetically) from the most powerful critical foundations of modernist identity politics." f p. 187,
Soja, 1993 #1341 The idea is to reach out empathetically to other marginalized groups who share a
similar social and spatial oppression of geohistorical underdevelopment.
Postmodern identity politics are often critiqued as being too fragmented to be politically worthwhile. A
similar critique asks how one should know when to be modernist or postmodernist.6 Once again, the
problem is one of spatial assumptions. The term "politics" is usually associated with the term "public."
Unfortunately, the spatial imagination of most has confined public to mean the space of the nation-state
and its various spatial extensions. To act politically is to act in this particular public. However, this public
is the hegemonic spatial production of modernism. Publics can be any collection of people where views
are aired, ideas are discussed, or commitments are made. These alternative publics, or "counterpublics," can be places where those dominated by the rationalized conceived space of the hegemonic
public can create community and foster creativity and resistance (Fraser, 1994). They are the places
where postmodernist identities can be expressed and explored, and maybe even validated.
Simultaneously, the empathy for all spatially marginalized groups can be practiced in the dominant
public sphere of the nation-state, such as voting against anti-Affirmative Action legislation such as
California's Proposition 209.
Postmodern identity politics is takes the identities that space produces and then actively develops
counter-spaces, sometimes as counter-publics, to draw from those identities in a radical, creative, and
open way. Critical pedagogists imagine the classroom as a potential counter-public site. Some say that
this type of postmodernism revels in fragmentation. It is insulting to suggest that any caring person sees
fragmentation as solely positive. What postmodern identity politics, as well as spatial praxis, offers is a
way to hold modernism morally and politically accountable for the very marginalization it produces.
Focusing on the margins or "fragments" is a way to validate lived space amongst those who share similar
spatialities and critically transform conceived and perceived space by deconstructing the monolithic
notion of a singular public and constructing counter-publics. All of this while still keeping open the
possibilities of participating in more modernistic politics.
I will conclude and summarize by addressing the question, "What would a critical multicultural
curriculum that is also spatially critical look like?" First, spatiality would be a central focus of most
readings, analyses, and discussions. In particular, the goal would be to identify dominant spatial
conceptualizations and practices, such as the double illusion, and bring marginal lived spatialities to a
privileged place. The production of marginalized identities via the social intersectionality of the real-andimagined spaces of racism, capitalism, and sexism should be a primary device for deconstructing
hegemonic spatialities. People should learn to identify Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace
epistemologies as helpful, heuristic categories to think critically about space, but not as dogmatic
conceived space. Thirdspace literatures such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, or radical feminism
would be commonly read. The concept of spatial underdevelopment in both its material and conceptual
expressions should be created as an important spatial trope. Spatial praxis should also be developed as
one possible Thirdspace methodology or "literacy" for interrogating a text whether spoken, written, or
other. And finally, and possibly most importantly, critical spatial theory is primarily about rethinking the
political imagination. Postmodern identity politics, or any other Thirdspatial politics, should be offered
as a new possibility for social living. If curriculum truly is an "introduction into a way of life" as Giroux
argues, then space can and must play a major role in the very nature of being critical of how hegemony
is produced and reproduced.
2AC
T/FW
AT: Substantially Increase = Quantifiable Increase
Treating the ocean as a quantifiable resource is our criticism of the SQ
Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Cardiff University and Peters,
Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, 2014
[Jon & Kimberly, Water Worlds Human Geographies of the Ocean, p. 8, J.J.]
'Seventy percent of our planet consists of oceans'. So began the proposal, drafted by Jon Anderson and
Kimberley Peters, which ultimately resulted in this book. That figure is repeated continually in the ocean
studies and marine environmentalism literature. Indeed, it is difficult to find a publication on
endangered marine nature, the significance of global shipping, the role of fisheries in the food chain, the
importance of the ocean for climate regulation, or the necessity of preserving maritime livelihoods, that
does not contain this statistic or its more precise 71% variant.1
The statistic is a compelling figure. It achieves metaphysical significance when paired with the fact that
the human body is also about 70% water. Indeed, it is so powerful that it may be having an unintended
effect of, rather than instilling concern for our 'blue planet', leading to a sense of security: If so much
of our planet is water, then why do we need to steward it as a fragile resource? Perhaps in response
to this complacency, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) has recently complicated the
statistical narrative with an image that demonstrates that while the planet's surface may be 70%
ocean, the ocean, despite its depths, constitutes only .12% of the planet's volume (Figure F.l).
The USGS' reworking of the 70% figure illustrates how statistics often have multiple meanings. I would
go one step further, however, and suggest that the prevalence of both the 70% statistic and the .12%
image demonstrates how such figures can mask as much as they reveal. When one reduces the ocean
- a dynamic system that is perpetually being remade and whose edges are continually being redefined
- to a quantity (whether a seemingly large quantity like 70% or a seemingly small one like .12%), it
becomes static and undifferentiated. The ocean can then be categorized as a space of nature to be
fetishized, a space of alterity to be romanticized, or even a space beyond society to be forgotten. In
each of these formulations, the ocean is classified as an object, a space of difference with a
distinguishing ontological unity, the 'other' in a land-ocean binary.
Framework
Maps are a manifestation of social relationships behind a guise of neutral science. We
can redefine cartography—rewrite the map—to change the social structure
Harley, Director of the Office of Map History in the American Geographical Society
Collection, 89
[JB, Summer 1989, “Deconstructing the Map,” CARTOGRAPHICA VOL 26 No 2 , page 6-7,
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/passages/4761530.0003.008/--deconstructing-themap?rgn=main;view=fulltext, PAC]
A second example is how the 'rules of the social order' appear to insert themselves into the smaller
codes and spaces of cartographic transcription. The history of European cartography since the
seventeenth century provides many examples of this tendency. Pick a printed or manuscript map from
the drawer almost at random and what stands out is the unfailing way its text is as much a
commentary on the social structure of a particular nation or place as it is on its topography. The mapmaker is often as busy recording the contours of feudalism, the shape of a religious hierarchy, or the
steps in the tiers of social class,39 as the topography of the physical and human landscape. Why maps
can be so convincing in this respect is that the rules of society and the rules of measurement are
mutually reinforcing in the same image. Writing of the map of Paris, surveyed in 1652 by Jacques
Gomboust, the King's engineer, Louis Marin points to "this sly strategy of simulation-dissimulation": The
knowledge and science of representation, to demonstrate the truth that its subject declares plainly,
flow nonetheless in a social and political hierarchy. The proofs of its 'theoretical' truth had to be
given, they are the recognisable signs; but the economy of these signs in their disposition on the
cartographic plane no longer obeys the rules of the order of geometry and reason but, rather, the
norms and values of the order of social and religious tradition. Only the churches and important
mansions benefit from natural signs and from the visible rapport they maintain with what they
represent. Townhouses and private homes, precisely because they are private and not public, will have
the right only to the general and common representation of an arbitrary and institutional sign, the
poorest, the most elementary (but maybe, by virtue of this, principal) of geometric elements; the point
identically reproduced in bulk.40 Once again, much like 'the rule of ethnocentrism,' this
hierarchicalization of space is not a conscious act of cartographic representation . Rather it is taken
for granted in a society that the place of the king is more important than the place of a lesser baron,
that a castle is more important than a peasant's house, that the town of an archbishop is more
important than that of a minor prelate, or that the estate of a landed gentleman is more worthy of
emphasis than that of a plain farmer. Cartography deploys its vocabulary accordingly so that it
embodies a systematic social inequality . The distinctions of class and power are engineered, reified
and legitimated in the map by means of cartographic signs. The rule seems to be 'the more powerful,
the more prominent.' To those who have strength in the world shall be added strength in the map.
Using all the tricks of the cartographic trade — size of symbol, thickness of line, height of lettering,
hatching and shading, the addition of color — we can trace this reinforcing tendency in innumerable
European maps. We can begin to see how maps, like art, become a mechanism "for defining social
relationships, sustaining social rules, and strengthening social values."41 In the case of both these
examples of rules, the point I am making is that the rules operate both within and beyond the orderly
structures of classification and measurement. They go beyond the stated purposes of cartography.
Much of the power of the map, as a representation of social geography, is that it operates behind a
mask of a seemingly neutral science. It hides and denies its social dimensions at the same time as it
legitimates. Yet whichever way we look at it the rules of society will surface. They have ensured that
maps are at least as much an image of the social order as they are a measurement of the phenomenal
world of objects.
Framework: Debate is mapping
Debate is inherently a cartographical practice, but like with any maps, there’s more
than an objective truth in our arguments. Rather we must recognize that arguments
are manifested through the relationships people have with them
Kitchin, National University of Ireland, Department of Geography, Dodge, University of
Manchester, Department of Geography, 7
[Rob, Martin, “Rethinking maps,” Progress in Human Geography, Volume: 31 Number: 3, page
7-9, http://eprints.nuim.ie/2755/1/RK_Rethinkingmaps.pdf, PAC]
Starting from a position of having specialized tools (scientific instruments or software)¶ and resources
(boundary and attribute data,¶ previously mapped information), and a degree¶ of knowledge,
experience and skills, John¶ works to create a map. The map thus emerges¶ through a set of iterative
and citational practices – of employing certain techniques¶ that build on and cite previous plottings or
previous work (other spatial representations) or¶ cartographic ur-forms (standardized forms of¶
representation). This process is choreographed to a certain degree, shaped by the scientific culture of
conventions, standards,¶ rules, techniques, philosophy (its ontic knowedge), and so on, but is not
determined and¶ essential. Rather, instead of there being a teleological inevitability in how the map is
conlook, the map is contingent and relational in¶ its production through the decisions made by¶
John with respect to what attributes are¶ mapped, their classification, the scale, the¶ orientation, the
colour scheme, labelling,¶ intended message, and so on, and the fact that¶ the construction is enacted
through affective,¶ reflexive, habitual practices that remain outside cognitive reflection. Important
here is the¶ idea of play – of ‘playing’ with the possibilities¶ of how the map will become, how it will
be¶ remade by its future makers – and of arbitrariness, of unconscious and affective design.¶ John thus
experiments with different colour¶ schemes, different forms of classification, and¶ differing scales to map
the same data. Making¶ maps then is inherently creative – it can be¶ nothing else; and maps emerge
in process For example, using mapping software the¶ first stage might be to plot administrative¶
boundaries. In doing so, decisions have to be¶ made in terms of the administrative units to¶ use
(postcodes, enumeration areas, electoral¶ divisions, counties, and so on), and the scale¶ of the display.
Next, these units need to be¶ populated with data. To be able to do this the¶ data need to allocated to a
zone and sorted¶ into categories that differentiate rates of population change. There are technical
solutions¶ to classification that can be performed using¶ specialized algorithms. However, John still¶
needs to determine which algorithm is most¶ suitable given the structure of the data (eg, to¶ use the
default setting, choosing fixed intervals, mean standard deviation, percentiles,¶ natural breaks and so
on). These technical¶ solutions are not fixed and essential in their¶ practice but are also subject to play
and precognitive judgement through the evaluation¶ of different algorithms in order to determine¶
which work ‘best’. Alternatively, the classification can be devised through a manual, iterative playing
with the data in terms of class¶ boundaries, number of classes, and so on¶ (which in fact was the case
with Figure 1).¶ Both cases, technical and manual, consist of¶ practice (of running the algorithm or
playing¶ with the data), and these practices vary over¶ time, by context, and across people. In terms¶ of
the visual display, a colour scheme needs to¶ be devised. Similarly, there are technical soluRobinson et
al., 1995);3 in other cases the¶ colour ramp is chosen by the cartographer.¶ Finally, there are
considerations concerning¶ where the legend appears, whether labels¶ appear on the map and where,
and so on.¶ While some of these practices seem prosaic,¶ the procession of decisions and actions¶
‘grows’ the map. Each might seem banal or¶ trivial, but their sum – the culmination of a set¶ of
practices – creates a spatial representation¶ that John understands as a map (and believes¶ that others
will accept as a workable map¶ based upon their knowledge and experience¶ as to what constitutes a
map).¶ When a spatial representation understood¶ as a map is printed for inclusion in a policy¶
document (see Figure 1), for example, we¶ would argue that its creation is not complete ¶ – it is not
ontologically secure as a map.¶ Although it has the appearance of an¶ immutable mobile – its knowledge
and message fixed and portable because it can be read¶ by anyone understanding how maps work – it¶
remains mutable, remade every time it is¶ employed. Like a street geometrically defined¶ by urban
planning, and created by urban planners, is transformed into place by walkers (de¶ Certeau, 1984), a
spatial representation created by cartographers (the coloured ink on¶ the paper) is transformed into a
map by individuals. As each walker experiences the¶ street differently, each person engaging with ¶ 8
Progress in Human Geography 31(3) a spatial representation beckons a different¶ map into being.
Each brings it into their own¶ milieu, framed by their knowledge, skills and¶ spatial experience , in
this case of Ireland and¶ Irish social history. For someone familiar with¶ the geography of Ireland, their
ability to¶ remake the map in a way that allows them to¶ articulate an analysis of the data is likely to be¶
far superior to someone unfamiliar with the¶ pattern of settlement (to know what the¶ towns are, what
county or local authority¶ area they reside in, what their social and economic history is, their physical
geography is,¶ and so on). For someone who does not¶ understand the concept of thematic mapping¶
or classification schemes, again the map will¶ be bought into being differently to people¶ who do,
who will ask different questions of¶ the data and how it is displayed. While all¶ people who
understand the concept of a map¶ beckon a map into being, there is variability in¶ the ability of people
to mobilize the representation and to solve particular problems.¶ Moreover, the beckoning of the map
generates a new, imaginative geography (an¶ ordered, rationale, calculated geography) for¶ each person,
that of the spatial distribution of¶ population change between the 1996 and¶ 2002 census.
Framework: Aff prior question to education
Framework’s claims of knowledge are flawed—objective truths don’t exist and only
through deconstruction can we reach good knowledge production
Crampton, Associate Professor of Geography, University of Kentucky, 10
[Jeremy W, Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS, page 39-40, PAC]
A related idea is that critical mapping (cartography and GIS) examines the¶ relationship of knowledge
with power. What are the underpinning assumptions that¶ help to govern knowledge? That is, what
rationalities are in play? The reason many¶ critical mappers and critical geographers think this is
important is because these¶ rationalities shape and form the subject of the map, that is, how the map
helps oppress,¶ subjugate, or subjectify individuals and populations (Wood and Krygier 2009).¶ To look
at the relationship of power and knowledge therefore is not to claim that¶ “knowledge is power” or
that might makes right. What it does say is that what we¶ know is affected by relationships of power:
some ways of knowing are deemed to¶ be better than other ways of knowing, and therefore it is
“easier” for us to know¶ things in certain modes rather than others. Which ways? Well, it depends on
what¶ historical time period you’re looking at. Today, the scientific mode of knowledge is¶
predominant. For a critical mapper, the objective is not to over-turn this way of¶ knowing (as some
scientists often believe) but to ask how it has come to be so powerful (perhaps as a historical
investigation) and to ask what the implications¶ are of this knowledge and whether or not alternative
ways of knowing are possible.¶ Because the latter question is sometimes framed as a critique of the
limitations of¶ scientific knowledge, or of its negative effects, some writers who identify with the¶
scientific mode of knowledge have assumed that this kind of critique will usher in¶ relativism. By this
they claim that all ideas will become relatively acceptable;¶ opening the flood-gates to non-scientific
knowledge such as creationism, intelligent¶ design, or worse, to the politicization of knowledge (e.g.,
to the denial of global¶ climate change, or opposition to experimental stem cell research, etc.).¶ These
disputes are long-standing and will not be resolved here. One point to¶ bear in mind however is the
understanding of critical researchers that knowledge¶ can never come in an unpoliticized form,
because as mentioned above they see knowledge¶ as situated within relationships of power. ¶ It is
significant that the word “discipline” has more than one meaning. In addition¶ to referring to a body of
knowledge such as geography, it also means the practice¶ of learning (a related word is “pupil”) and from
that idea keeping order and control¶ – in other words, power. Such order and control is what critical
mapping attempts¶ to deconstruct – in what way is it ordered? For whose benefit? Is it possible to
conceive¶ of mappings that are outside the control of the prevailing discipline?
Science Good/Objective
AT: Maps are Objective
Must break the false perception of maps as objective science
Harley, Director of the Office of Map History in the American Geographical Society
Collection, 89
[JB, Summer 1989, “Deconstructing the Map,” CARTOGRAPHICA VOL 26 No 2 , page 1-2,
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/passages/4761530.0003.008/--deconstructing-themap?rgn=main;view=fulltext, PAC]
My basic argument in this essay is that we should encourage an epistemological shift in the way we
interpret the nature of cartography. For historians of cartography, I believe a major roadblock to
understanding is that we still accept uncritically the broad consensus, with relatively few dissenting
voices, of what cartographers tell us maps are supposed to be. In particular, we often tend to work
from the premise that mappers engage in an unquestionably 'scientific' or 'objective' form of
knowledge creation. Of course, cartographers believe they have to say this to remain credible but
historians do not have that obligation. It is better for us to begin from the premise that cartography is
seldom what cartographers say it is.
As they embrace computer-assisted methods and Geographical Information Systems, the scientistic
rhetoric of map makers is becoming more strident. The 'culture of technics' is everywhere rampant.
We are told that the journal now named The American Cartographer will become Cartography and
Geographical Information Systems. Or, in a strangely ambivalent gesture toward the nature of maps,
the British Cartographic Society proposes that there should be two definitions of cartography, "one
for professional cartographers and the other for the public at large." A definition "for use in
communication with the general public" would be "Cartography is the art, science and technology of
making maps": that for 'practicing cartographers' would be "Cartography is the science and technology
of analyzing and interpreting geographic relationships, and communicating the results by means of
maps."3¶ Many may find it surprising that 'art' no longer exists in 'professional' cartography. In the
present context, however, these signs of ontological schizophrenia can also be read as reflecting an
urgent need to rethink the nature of maps from different perspectives. The question arises as to
whether the notion of a progressive science is a myth partly created by cartographers in the course of
their own professional development. I suggest that it has been accepted too uncritically by a wider
public and by other scholars who work with maps.4 For those concerned with the history of maps it is
especially timely that we challenge the cartographer's assumptions. Indeed, if the history of
cartography is to grow as an interdisciplinary subject among the humanities and social sciences, new
ideas are essential.
Status quo epistemology of what the map represents is problematic – the aff is key to
break down these social hierarchies and instead help us read in-between the lines of
ocean exploration
Harley, Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee,
Cartographer, and Map Historian at the Universities of Birmingham, 89
[John Brian, Spring 1989, MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, “Deconstructing the
Map,” Reprinted from Cartographica, v. 26, n. 2 (Spring 1989), 1-20., accessed 6-25-14, J.J.]
The notion of deconstruction [6] is also a password for the postmodern enterprise. Deconstructionist
strategies can now be found not only in philosophy but also in localized disciplines, especially in
literature, and in other subjects such as architecture, planning and, more recently, geography. [7] I shall
specifically use a deconstructionist tactic to break the assumed link between reality and
representation which has dominated cartographic thinking, has led it in the pathway of 'normal
science' since the Enlightenment, and has also provided a ready-made and 'taken for granted'
epistemology for the history of cartography. The objective is to suggest that an alternative
epistemology, rooted in social theory rather than in scientific positivism, is more appropriate to the
history of cartography. It will be shown that even 'scientific' maps are a product not only of "the rules of
the order of geometry and reason but also of the "norms and values of the order of social ... tradition."
[8] Our task is to search for the social forces that have structured cartography and to locate the
presence of power—and its effects—in all map knowledge. The ideas in this particular essay owe most
to writings by Foucault and Derrida. My approach is deliberately eclectic because in some respects the
theoretical positions of these two authors are incompatible. Foucault anchors texts in socio-political
realities and constructs systems for organizing knowledge of the kind that Derrida loves to dismantle. [9]
But even so, by combining different ideas on a new terrain, it may be possible to devise a scheme of
social theory with which we can begin to interrogate the hidden agendas of cartography. Such a scheme
offers no 'solution' to an historical interpretation of the cartographic record, nor a precise method or set
of techniques, but as a broad strategy it may help to locate some of the fundamental forces that have
driven map-making in both European and non-European societies. From Foucault's writings, the key
revelation has been the omnipresence of power in all knowledge, even though that power is invisible or
implied, including the particular knowledge encoded in maps and atlases. Derrida's notion of the
rhetoricity of all texts has been no less a challenge. [10] It demands a search for metaphor and rhetoric
in maps where previously scholars had found only measurement and topography. Its central question is
reminiscent of Korzybski's much older dictum "The map is not the territory" [11] but deconstruction
goes further to bring the issue of how the map represents place into much sharper focus.
Deconstruction urges us to read between the lines of the map—"in the margins of the text"—and
through its tropes to discover the silences and contradictions that challenge the apparent honesty of
the image. We begin to learn that cartographic facts are only facts within a specific cultural perspective.
We start to understand how maps, like art, far from being "a transparent opening to the world," are but
"a particular human way of looking at the world." [12] In pursuing this strategy I shall develop three
threads of argument. First, I shall examine the discourse of cartography in the light of some of Foucault's
ideas about the play of rules within discursive formations. Second, drawing on one of Derrida's central
positions I will examine the textuality of maps and, in particular, their rhetorical dimension. Third,
returning to Foucault, I will consider how maps work in society as a form of power-knowledge.
Need ontological exploration and epistemological critique of claims to objectivity
Harley, American Geographical Society, Office of Map History, Director, 90
[JB, Summer 1989, “Cartography, ethics and social theory,” CARTOGRAPHICA VOL 27 No 2 , page 8-9,
PAC]
As far as the history of maps is concerned (my standpoint), the ontological exploration is also an
epistemological critique. It leads to questions: what is the nature, and what are the grounds, the
limits, and the criteria by which we write and we judge the writing of cartographic history? Elsewhere
David Woodward and I have argued that we need to become more self conscious about the historical
tradition of which we are part.36¶ It may now be stressed, though, that in achieving these ends, links
with postmodern scholarship do not entail a retreat from critical standards nor a substitution of
superficiality for depth. Indeed, an engagement with postmodernist thinking can only equip us to
unmask the very duplicity of text that Fraser Taylor refers to in the work of Jorge Luis Borges.37¶ The
point I am making is that the act of deconstruction is a way of avoiding the myths that sometimes drive
cartographic history. Thus a leading American cartographer, belonging to the 'Never Doubt it's Science'
school of thinking, writes in a Preface to an officially sponsored ICA publication, Cartographical
Innovations, that "cartography now has an indispensable addition to its long and glorious history."38¶
We can glimpse here the unconscious process of myth-making, through which the invention of a
progressive positivist past is used to justify a progressive positivist present.39
In the responses to my paper a number of suggestions were made as to how we might write a
different sort of history of cartography. Michael Blakemore writes that "there may indeed be a case for
more biography ... Too much of the history of cartography is sanitized by the removal of personality and
motive."40 Certainly it is not my intention to banish cartographers or their institutional contexts from
the process of mapping,41¶ and I agree with him that we need to know far more about the 'extrascientific' factors that have contributed to the development of cartography and recently GIS as a
discipline. In the words of one philosopher of science such factors include "the political infighting, the
namecalling, the parody and ridicule, the arrogance, elitism, and raw use of power."42 But at the same
time, there are dangers in merely compiling 'interesting biographies' or oral reminiscences from grand
old cartographers that could result more in canonization than criticism.43¶ Any self-respecting history
must systematically embrace the structures or contexts within which individuals acted to produce
their maps. This 'contextualization of representation' is a thread that runs through a wide spectrum of
historical scholarship. For instance, iconology seeks to place the image or text into the matrix of thought
of the society that created it;44 realism, as understood by historians of science, assumes that there are
unseen forces that both influence, and are influenced by, the actions of individuals;45 structuration
theory is concerned with reciprocal interaction of agents and structures in society;46¶ and hermeneutics
pursues the meaning of texts within a wider context of conventions and assumption.47¶ To cite these is
not an attempt to obfuscate the argument with yet more arcane theories but to reinforce the point that
there is already a territory of common ground extending across disciplines. All sorts of scholars with
seemingly different philosophical perspectives are converging on the view that knowledge is a social
product, a matter of dialogue between different versions of the world, including different...
ideologies, and modes of representations. The notion that there is 'a' scientific method so flexible and
capacious that it can contain all these differences and adjudicate among them is a handy ideology for
the scientist... committed to the authority of science, but it seems mistaken in theory and practice.48
My worry is that while other disciplines are broadening their perspectives, developments in
cartography have tended to narrow them, at least until very recently.49¶ International practice in this
respect is varied but cartography is often defined to exclude the processes of data collection in
mapmaking, such as land and hydrographic surveying, aerial photography, and, most recently, remote
sensing.50¶ In a widely used textbook in the United States cartography is defined as "any activity in
which the presentation and use of maps is a matter of basic concern"51¶ but other texts suggest a yet
narrower focus with design and production of thematic maps gaining ground in the academic curriculum
at the expense of other types of maps including the products of national survey organizations.52
Cartography has lost its hold on the lived-in world. Matthew Edney is thus right to observe that
surveying — or indeed other agents of information gathering — cannot be excluded either from
cartographic history or from the study of contemporary mapping.53¶ Looking back over developments
since the 1960s, it is clear that it is this divorce between the social relevance of map content and the
technology of map-making that underlies the present crisis of representation in cartography and the
history of cartography. The shift of focus in cartography, almost exclusively to the technical side, may
in part have been a practical necessity — a matter of survival — but it also reflected a conscious
political strategy. Cartography was to acquire the status of a sub-science. Yet, it is arguable that the
search for institutional power lost, rather than gained, status for cartography in the scientific
community. How many other 'sciences' are merely manipulators and generalizers of other people's
data? The severing of links with the world one purports to represent is no less than abdication,
intellectual as well as ethical . The adoption of new technologies can perhaps reverse the trend by
restoring some links between the 'real' world and the image but it has to be recognized that the hard
decisions about social content have already been made long before the substance of the map arrives in
the cartographer's office. Whether the end product is a draft map or a digital tape, the power game
over just what is to be privileged in the world is already largely over for the cartographer.
AT: GIS Good
Not questioning the map and exploration leads to an acceptance that the map is a
fact, not a process—leads to a legitimacy of unacceptable parts of the squo
Winlow, Cultural and Historical Geographer at Bath Spa University, 2006
[Heather, March 1, 2006, “Mapping Moral Geographies: W. Z. Ripley’s Races of Europe and the
United States,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, EBSCOhost Academic
Search Complete, accessed 6-25-14, J.J.]
Harley’s work on the deconstruction of the map (now well known among geographers) provides some
means of understanding how the power of the map was harnessed to legitimize and reinforce racial
taxonomies. Maps are often regarded as neutral and scientific and are seen as ‘‘mirrors of nature’’
accurately reflecting the world (Harley 1992, 234). The fact that maps became an acceptable part of
academic discourse meant that their legitimacy went unquestioned for many years. It is now widely
acknowledged among human geographers that maps are ‘‘cultural texts’’ reflecting the wider social,
cultural, and political milieu of society. Harley, Wood (1993), Pickles (1992, 1995, 2004), and Crampton
(2001) have urged that cartographers need to reevaluate mapping within this context. Pickles (1995,
2004) and Crampton (2001, 2003) have further emphasized the need for ongoing research agendas in
critical cartography in relation to continuing technological developments. The development of
scientific cartography since the postwar period, through for example geographic information systems
(GIS), has meant that the social and cultural production of maps continues to be ‘‘written out’’ (Pickles
2004, 280).2
AT: Politicized Mapping Bad
Non unique - Mapping and politics are inseparable
Crampton, Associate Professor of Geography, University of Kentucky, 10
[Jeremy W, Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS, page 9, PAC]
One might register a few problems with both of these viewpoints however. It is noticeable that the
second viewpoint, that of technology being non-essential or “neutral,” often crops up when a new
technology appears and people are thinking about it for the first time. It’s as if people want to try and
get things straight in their mind¶ and that this can be done by considering each application “before” or
outside of¶ untoward influence. Bringing in politics only serves to muddy the waters.¶ The problem with
these ideas is that they miss the point. Even casting a cursory glance at the history of cartography
should lead us to suspect that mapping and maps have a whole series of engagements in politics,
propaganda, crime and public¶ health, imperialist boundary-making, community activism, the nationstate, cyberspace,¶ and the internet. That is, mapping has a politics. It is hard to imagine mapping that
does not in some way or other involve politics, mapping is itself a political act. As a politics of
mapping, critical cartography and GIS question what kinds of people and objects are formed through
mapping. As the Canadian philosopher¶ Ian Hacking puts it, how are people made up (Hacking 2002)?
This is a question¶ about how categories of knowledge are derived and applied, a question as old as¶ Kant
and as contemporary as racism.¶ Maps produce knowledge in specific ways and with specific categories
that then have effects (i.e., they deploy power). Categories are useful, but at the same time they
encourage some ways of being and not others. Often, some ways of being are accepted¶ as somehow
typical and are called “normal,” while others are called “abnormal.”¶ Then there is a tendency to try and
correct, eliminate, or manage the abnormal.
AT: Objective Mapping Good
‘Objective’ Maps lock in technocracy - Accepting maps as absolute truths gives them
their authority to shape the world. Maps appear to have objective power because we
allow them to—discourse key
Zubrow, University of North Carolina Institute for the Environment Research
Associate, 2003
[Alexis, June, “Mapping Tension: Remote Sensing and the Production of a Statewide Land Cover Map,”
Human Ecology, Vol. 31, No. 2, page 281-307, JO]
The WISCLAND1 map as representation seems all encompassing, almost seductive in the singular and
complete story it tells about the state. At every point, we know the one and only identity of the land:
ambiguity has been erased. Since this story is so powerful, how can alternative views be seen? The view
of the map as a snapshot or even as a means of transmitting knowledge from "reality" to the reader via
the cartographer has been criticized by many in the geographic and cartographic community (Crampton,
2001; Harley, 1989a, 1989b; Turnbull, 1993; Wood, 1992). However, maps are no longer seen as
neutral arbiters of the truth. They are seen as representations that systematically establish their own
authority. Authority is established through the extensive network of individuals , institutions, and
technologies that are brought to bear to construct the land cover map. Everything from experts
(professors, technicians, graduate students), to satellite instrumentation, to government bureaucracies
(NASA, Wisconsm State Cartographer's Office, DNR, etc), to processing technologies are part of the
chain of events that produces the map. These multiple scientific and governmental organizations
imbue the map with authority.
Instead of being a singular presentation (from the cartographer to the reader), maps exist through
discourse (Crampton, 2001; Harley, 1989a). Different readers bring varying interpretations and
expectations to the use of the map. We can imagine three hypothetical readers: a remote sensing
scientist, a land manager, and an ecologist. The remote sensing scientist might see a patch of red pine
on the map as a defined duster in spectral space, primarily indicated by its uniform reflectance in the
near infrared bands. A land manager may see this same patch as a monoculture forest that can be
either harvested or managed through a series of common techniques. The ecologist may see the red
pines as the canopy overshadowing a diverse ecosystem characterized by undergrowth and soil
conditions. All three are presented with the same data, but through their own interaction with the data,
they ostensibly create three different maps: a map of reflectance, of management, and of
heterogeneous ecosystems.
Critiques
2AC – Perm
Our critique pushes the boundaries of epistemological comfort zones allowing for
interaction from inside and outside—we can within and outside the system
Crampton, University of Kentucky, Geography, Associate Professor, 10
[Jeremy W, Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS, page 178-179, PAC]
The second step is to put this critique into practice. Therefore this book is written, as best as I can, in a
critical spirit. But from whence is it launched? Here I have to acknowledge my own positionality as
someone who “does” critical cartography and GIS. But this “here” is hard to locate; I exist between
two worlds in a kind of exile (Said 2000), not only because of my British background but because I have
lived in America for over 20 years. As Said experienced, there is still a sense of alienation from one’s
adopted country that cannot be shaken off. But this is doubled, or mirrored, by the fact that I also sit
somewhat uneasily between the two worlds of critical social theory and mapping/GIS. There is a very
real danger and actuality of being dismissed by both sides, my theoretic qualifications are never
sufficient for critical geographers, but are too sufficient for GIS users. This is not to claim an obscure
“outsider” status; obviously I occupy a specific and privileged intellectual position . But neither is it
truly an insider status; for many academics, writers, poets, and artists their degree of freedom is highly
constrained and surveilled, and not just in other countries but also in the United States. What I
experience is something like a voice from the edges, a question of belonging. Edward Said in his
lifetime was at various times accused of being both too close to the Palestinian cause and of not being
“authentically” Palestinian. As is perhaps the case for many people, I retain both a proximity to and a
distance from the subject under discussion. And I think it is the same for a practice of critique.
So in this book I have tried to act as a kind of translator, believing that this would be most appealing to
readers who find themselves, not quite comfortably, in one or more camps. This kind of “shuttle
diplomacy” might act as a way of bringing thought to bear on itself, and of learning to think differently.
Every translation is after all an invitation for a re-translation. Like many students I encounter, you might
find that you occupy several positions at once in Figure 1.1. Perhaps you are attracted to the possibility
of acquiring a recognized GIS Certificate, but also the possibilities of bottom-up user-produced maps.
The clash of motives here may usefully spark that questioning at the heart of critical practice.
If we recall the three principles of critical geography outlined earlier, that is, it is oppositional, it is
activist /practical, and it is embedded in critical theory, then a number of chapters attempt to put
these principles into practice. For this book I chose three topics which seem to me to be important, and
in which GIS andcartography play significant and problematic roles. These are governing with maps
(Chapter 6), geosurveillance (Chapter 9), and the construction of race (Chapter 11). Other chapters,
speaking to other issues, are possible and even necessary. That is the flaw in this book or any book that
is also the opening for further seeking.
If we agree with David Harvey that “cartography is a major structural pillar of all forms of geographical
knowledge” (discussed below) then one of the first things we will want to know is the nature of the
forms of knowledge produced for these three domains. A critical approach will also want to
problematize these areas, to work through their implications, contradictions, assumptions,
historicities, and deployments. Thirdly, I have tried to situate both the source and the target of critical
cartography and GIS. Any account which tells the story from a purely disciplinary perspective will, it
seems to me, omit some of the most interesting and radical practices of that critique. The fact is that
mapping today is escaping the discipline. The rise of “people-powered mapping” and the geoweb at
the same time that we have seen the rise of the political “netroots” and people-powered politics is not
coincidental. They stem from the same cause and desire to create alternative forms of expression
beyond those encompassed by the traditional power-holders (whether the geographical knowledge
elites or Big Media). Critical cartography and GIS then, does an end-run around the accreted power
structures such as academic experts,textbooks, and official “bodies of knowledge.” In Chapter 12 for
example, I tried to trace some of these non-disciplinary and non-academic critiques in the context of
map art and the poetics of space.
In order to achieve its goals must critique place itself on the “outside?” If much critique is reflexive
and internal the degree to which one can oppose from within is not an uncontroversial one. For some,
opposition can only take place from the outside, from a purer position, detached and uncorrupted.
Work within the system will only lead to becoming a part of the system, becoming co-opted. For others
this very claim for detachment, of escape from the object of analysis, is only another sign of the
impossibility of escape from the power relations of mapping and GIS. Again this is a question of
positionality, and you may find yourself both within and outside the system at different times. I know I
do.
Our aff lines up with your kritik—investigating truth claims enables the alternative to
exist and frames the debate
Crampton, Associate Professor of Geography, University of Kentucky, 10
[Jeremy W, Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS, page 15, PAC]
This questioning attitude is not unrelated to the question of power, because¶ it asks “what is an
authority?” and “who shall have authority?” The church? The¶ military? The government? These
questions are political ones, and indicate that¶ critique, as well as asking about the unexamined
assumptions behind our practices,¶ can also therefore open up other ways of doing things. It asks “well,
we seem to be¶ doing it this way, but do we have to? Isn’t there an alternative?”¶ To return to
Foucault:¶ I will say that critique is the movement through which the subject gives itself the right¶ to
question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses¶ of truth.
Critique will be the art of voluntary inservitude, or reflective indocility.¶ The essential function of critique
would be that of desubjectification in the game of¶ what one could call, in a word, the politics of truth.
(Foucault 1997b: 32 translation¶ modified by Eribon 2004)¶ In other words critique is a political practice
of questioning and resisting (“voluntary¶ inservitude”!) what we know in order to open up other ways of
knowing.¶ I dwell on these points here because of another misunderstanding about critical¶
cartography and GIS which has sometimes characterized them as purely rejectionist. ¶ For example,
critique is sometimes described as if it rejected all forms of knowledge¶ or truth. The point though is not
to reject, but to carefully consider the truth¶ claims of maps and GIS (and there are a lot of such
claims, as we shall see, beginning¶ with the idea that the map is a natural reflection of the landscape). In
other¶ words, knowledge does not just exist “out there” but is created and then is privileged¶ by
being divided between truth and falsity. How truth comes to dominate is¶ due to some fairly specific
rules. Many of these rules have geographic centers, or¶ occur at particular points in time. Critique can
uncover these rules and the times¶ and spaces in which they occur.
AT: USFG Bad
We must understand the complex meaning of the map and the process that creates
them as well as the activity woven in between them
Casino, Professor of Geography and Development at College of Social and Behavioral
Sciences, & Hanna, Department of Geography Chair and Professor at University of
Mary Washington, 2006
[Vincent J. Del & Stephen P., 2006, “Beyond The ‘Binaries’: A Methodological Intervention for
Interrogating Maps as Representational Practices,” ACME, 4 (1), http://www.acmejournal.org/vol4/VDCSPH.pdf?origin=publication_detail, accessed 6-25-14, J.J.]
Maps are thus not simply representations of particular contexts, places, and times. They are mobile
subjects, infused with meaning through contested, complex, intertextual, and interrelated sets of
socio-spatial practices. As Deleuze and Guarttari suggest, “the map has multiple entryways” (ibid., 12)
and a myriad number of possibilities because it operates at the margin and center simultaneously.
Maps are also not, as some may argue (e.g., Harley, 1989), fixed at the moment of production, a result
of the hegemonic authority embedded by the mapmaker in/on the representation. Thus, while maps
may be infused with power, and thus ripe for deconstruction, it is not enough to demythologize the
map (c.f., Sparke, 1995). Instead, maps ought to be theorized as processes, “detachable, reversible,
susceptible to constant modification.” It is therefore appropriate to say that maps, as representations,
“work” (Wood, 1992). As we contend, representations, such as maps, work because “they help make
connections to other representations and to other experienced spaces” (Hanna et al., 2004, 464)
suggesting that maps do, indeed, provide multiple entryways into how they are produced and
consumed as well as how they are used, interpreted, and constituted.
AT: Map K Links (Managerialism, etc Ks)
The creation of maps shapes reality as much as it reflects what it represents
Crampton Professor of Geography at Georgia State and Krygier, Professor of
Geography at Ohio Wesleyan University, 2006
[Jeremy W. and John, “An Introduction to Critical Cartography”, Acme Journal http://www.acmejournal.org/vol4/JWCJK.pdf, Accessed 6/25/2014, JO]
The theoretical critique of cartography addresses post-war academic cartography's search for ever
belter and more veridical representations of a pre- existing reality. But instead of participating in this
search, critical cartography assumes that maps make reality as much as they represent it. Perhaps
John Pickles expresses this best when he says: instead of focusing on how we can map the subject...[we
could] focus on the ways in which mapping and the cartographic gaze have coded subjects and
produced identities (Pickles 2004: 12).
Pickles rethinks mapping as the production of space, geography, place and territory as well as the
political identities people have who inhabit and make up these spaces (Pickles 1991, 1995). Maps are
active; they actively construct knowledge, they exercise power and they can be a powerful means of
promoting social change.
Map non-linearity allows multiple readings
Stallmann Freelance Cartographer and GIS analyst, ‘12
(Timothy, 2012, Alternative Cartographies: Building Collective Power, p. 73-74, Accessed 6/30/14, ESB)
Casas-Cortes and Cobarrubias emphasize the non-linearity of map-reading, pointing out that maps
have no definite beginning or end, and that therefore multiple map viewers can follow different paths
through the same map (and because they don’t have to turn pages to do so, it is easy for many readers
to read one map at the same time). As a whole, written texts have a tendency to be more linear than
maps do. Certainly, particularly at higher levels of organization (whole chapters, sections), written works
can have a non-linear structure, although few do. Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, cited at
the beginning of this section, is one example of a written work which is intended to be read non-linearly.
Except for experimental works of fiction or poetry, however, text tends to be read linearly within
sentences or paragraphs, even if sections or chapters can be re-arranged. Moreover, except in a few
isolated cases, removing or changing several words in a sentence or several sentences in a paragraph
changes the meaning drastically or even renders that sect ion of writing nonsense. In contrast, it is fairly
easy to design maps which contain a lot of information but in which the meaningfulness of different
sections of the page are not dependent on each other. Thus maps can allow for a multiplicity of
different readings, opening up a space of possibility wherein each person who interacts with the map
finds something which resonates with their own story.
AT: Environmental Managerialism Link
The ocean is a unique space of alternate ordering that enables the understanding of
broader structures
Steinberg, Florida State University Political Geography Professor, 2009
[Philip E., “Oceans,” International Encyclopedia of Human Geography,
http://philsteinberg.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/iehg.pdf, accessed 6/27/14 JO]
Amidst these conflicts (and in the wake of past attempts to solve them through the spatial fix of single-use
zonation), the ocean is a space that leads one to question the efficacy of rationalist planning
paradigms. It likely is no coincidence that two of the works of geophilosophy most frequently cited by
human geographers make reference to the ocean as a space of alternative sociospatial formations. In
One Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1988) write, " The sea is a smooth space par
excellence," (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988) while Michel Foucault (1986), in Of Other Spaces, writes, " The ship is
the heterotopia par excellence" (Foucault, 1986: 22—27). In both cases, the allusions to the ocean as a
space of alternate ordering are metaphorical, but, like all metaphors, they gain some of their power
because they resonate with what is known about the material conditions of the entity being
referenced. Thus, for human geographers, the ocean, long ignored or, at best, viewed as an arena
within which social actors encounter one another or nature, now is seen as a space of society, and, as
a space of society, the ocean has come into its own in human geography as a space that one can 'think
with' as one attempts to understand broader structures, processes, and potentialities - on- and offshore.
AT: Env Managerialism/Tech Progress Ks
Status quo cartography is a manifestation of modern epistemology. Subjective
relationships are thrown out in the name of accuracy and scientific progress. This
leads to an ethic of exclusion and logic of dichotomies that ignores the full truth
Harley, American Geographical Society, Office of Map History, Director, 89
[JB, Spring 1989, “Deconstructing the Map,” CARTOGRAPHICA VOL 26 No 2,
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/passages/4761530.0003.008/--deconstructing-themap?rgn=main;view=fulltext page 3-5, PAC]
The first set of cartographic rules can thus be defined in terms of a scientific epistemology. From at
least the seventeenth century onward, European mapmakers and map users have increasingly
promoted a standard scientific model of knowledge and cognition. The object of mapping is to
produce a 'correct' relational model of the terrain. Its assumptions are that the objects in the world to
be mapped are real and objective, and that they enjoy an existence independent of the cartographer;
that their reality can be expressed in mathematical terms; that systematic observation and
measurement offer the only route to cartographic truth; and that this truth can be independently
verified.17. The procedures of both surveying and map construction came to share strategies similar to
those in science in general: cartography also documents a history of more precise instrumentation and
measurement; increasingly complex classifications of its knowledge and a proliferation of signs for its
representation; and, especially from the nineteenth century onward, the growth of institutions and a
'professional' literature designed to monitor the application and propagation of the rules. l8¶
Moreover, although cartographers have continued to pay lip service to the 'art and science' of
mapmaking,19¶ art, as we have seen, is being edged off the map. It has often been accorded a cosmetic
rather than a central role in cartographic communication.20¶ Even philosophers of visual communication
— such as Arnheim, Eco, Gombrich, and Goodman21¶ — have tended to categorize maps as a type of
congruent diagram — as analogs, models, or 'equivalents' creating a similitude of reality — and, in
essence, different from art or painting. A 'scientific' cartography (so it was believed) would be
untainted by social factors. Even today many cartographers are puzzled by the suggestion that
political and sociological theory could throw light on their practices. They will probably shudder at the
mention of deconstruction.
The acceptance of the map as 'a mirror of nature' (to employ Richard Rorty's phrase22) also results in a
number of other characteristics of cartographic discourse even where these are not made explicit.
Most striking is the belief in progress: that, by the application of science ever more precise
representations of reality can be produced. The methods of cartography have delivered a "true,
probable, progressive, or highly confirmed knowledge."23¶ This mimetic bondage has led to a tendency
not only to look down on the maps of the past (with a dismissive scientific chauvinism) but also to
regard the maps of other non-Western or early cultures (where the rules of mapmaking were
different) as inferior to European maps.24¶ Similarly, the primary effect of the scientific rules was to
create a 'standard' — a successful version of 'normal science'25¶ — that enabled cartographers to build
a wall around their citadel of the 'true' map. Its central bastions were measurement and
standardization and beyond there was a 'not cartography' land where lurked an army of inaccurate,
heretical, subjective, valuative, and ideologically distorted images. Cartographers developed a 'sense of
the other' in relation to nonconforming maps. Even maps such as those produced by journalists, where
different rules and modes of expressiveness might be appropriate, are evaluated by many
cartographers according to standards of 'objectivity,' 'accuracy,' and 'truthfulness.' In this respect, the
underlying attitude of many cartographers is revealed in a recent book of essays on Cartographie dans
les médias.26 One of its reviewers has noted how many authors attempt to exorcise from the realm of
cartography any graphic representation that is not a simple planimetric image, and to then classify all
other maps as 'decorative graphics masquerading as maps' where the 'bending of cartographic rules' has
taken place ... most journalistic maps are flawed because they are inaccurate, misleading or biased.27 Or
in Britain, we are told, there was set up a 'Media Map Watch' in 1984. "Several hundred interested
members [of cartographic and geographic societies] submitted several thousand maps and diagrams for
analysis that revealed [according to the rules] numerous common deficiencies, errors, and inaccuracies
along with misleading standards."28¶ In this example of cartographic vigilantism the 'ethic of accuracy' is
being defended with some ideological fervor. The language of exclusion is that of a string of 'natural'
opposites: 'true and false'; 'objective and subjective'; 'literal and symbolic' and so on. The best maps
are those with an "authoritative image of self-evident factuality."29
AT: heidegger
Crampton, Department of Anthropology and Geography Georgia State University, 2
[Jeremy W, Winter 2002, “Thinking Philosophically in Cartography: Toward A Critical Politics of
Mapping”, Cartographic Perspectives, Number 41, page 7-8, PAC]
For example the question “how old is the Vinland map” is an ontical question, whereas “what is the
mode of being of maps” is an ontological question. The first question may be addressed and resolved
by science, but not the second (Polk, 1999, 34). Elden adds that “Heidegger’s own exercise of
fundamental ontology deals with the conditions of possibility not just of the ontic sciences, but also of
the ontologies that precede and found them. This is the question of being” (Elden, 2001, 9).
Heidegger’s distinction suggests that ontical enquiry often characterizes disciplinary work because it
can be addressed scientifically. In the discipline of cartography for example, we enquire how to
satisfactorily generalize and symbolize landscape features, or which projection best reduces
distortion. But this ontic language of science and objectivity itself takes place within a conceptual
framework (ontologically). We can call this the fisherman’s problem, using an insightful metaphor from
Gunnar Olsson: “The fisherman’s catch furnishes more information about the meshes of his net than
about the swarming reality that dwells beneath the surface” (Olsson, 2002, 255). The fisherman
certainly catches real fish that were in the ocean (that is, ontical enquiry certainly can say truthful
things about the real world). But if he tried to say something about the reality of the denizens of the
ocean, his explanation would be related to the size of his fishing net. He wouldn’t have much to say
about whales or sharks, nor about sea anemones. The net therefore plays a double function of both
revealing things about the sea and hiding or concealing them. For Heidegger this double function of
unconcealing–concealing is an abiding aspect of our understanding of being. If Heidegger is right then
studying maps and mapping would seem to include as much about what maps can’t or don’t do as
what they can do. This is why Harley spoke of the silences of the map (Harley, 1988b).
If we now go back to the difference between Robinson and Harley we can see that where the former
described the fish in the net, the philosophies of Foucault and Heidegger are concerned with the net
itself. Harley also asked about the net . What does the net catch? Do we like what it catches? Have
other places or times had other kinds of nets which caught different things? What do we suspect the
net to be unable to catch? How can we change the net to catch other things? According to Heidegger
our present “ontological net” is critically flawed because it sets up being in a very scientific way. We
like to measure things and treat them as objective presences on the landscape that can be re–
presented. Again, this critique of science should remind us more of Harley than Robinson. The ontic–
ontological distinction is a familiar one in the history of philosophy, dating back to Descartes and Kant.
When Heidegger took it up, he distinguished between living life as such (making choices against a
background of possibilities) for which he coins the term “existential” understanding, and the questioning
of what constitutes existence and the structure of these possibilities, which he calls the “existential”
understanding (Heidegger, 1962, §3–4). This existential understanding is one directed toward the
meaning of being. Heidegger begins his book by stating that we are very far from answering the
question of what an existential understanding might be; so far, in fact, that the very question itself is
forgotten (Heidegger, 1962, §1).
These bewildering terms might make us wonder why it’s worth worrying about the “being of maps.”
Why not study concrete maps that actually exist? Heidegger’s response is essentially to refer us once
again to the fisherman’s problem. Sure, we could study the contents of the net. This is what we do
when we study maps and mapping, especially from a scientific viewpoint. It is ontical enquiry about
things. But the only way to know anything meaningful about the nature of the ocean is to understand
our conceptual framework from within which we understand that ocean––to look at the net itself.
This ontological looking means thinking about being as such, including the being of maps. The fact
that it sounds strange to say this (“the being of maps”) is just one indication that we hardly ever think
this way, that is, philosophically. Perhaps if we do so, we can open up a new and productive dialog
about mapping
AT: Env K – Scapegoating/Personal Responsibility
Refusing to question the subjectivity of maps and other ‘truths’ cedes our power to
hegemonic authorities
Wood, Cartographer and Fels North Carolina State University GIS Program Graduate 8
[Denis; John; “The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World,” Cartographica
Volume 43, Issue 3, page 191-192, accessed via ebscohost, PAC]
The continual assent given to the propositions made by maps endows them with the authority that is
uniquely that of reference objects. These include catalogues,¶ calendars, concordances,
encyclopaedias, directories,¶ phone books, dictionaries (Merriam-Webster’s, the OED [look it up!]),
thesauruses (Roget’s!), glossaries (at the end¶ of every textbook), textbooks (Organic Chemistry – no¶
subtitle), the National Geographic, the Times (New York,¶ London, Los Angeles), TV Guide, style guides
(The Chicago¶ Manual of Style [fifteenth edition!], Turabian, Strunk and¶ White), cookbooks, field guides,
travel books (‘‘What¶ does the Mobil Guide say?’’), footnotes, citations, legal citations, priests, eye
witnesses, constitutions, parliamentary procedures. All of these constitute objectifying resources that
permit a claimant to insist that, ‘‘It is not I, not I who says this, but –’’ before dropping, like a tombstone,
the name of some revered reference object (Langenscheidt’s, Grove’s, the Britannica, Larousse, Merck).¶
Maps too are objectifying resources: the maps of¶ Hammond, Bartholomew, Rand-McNally, Esselte,
the¶ National Geographic Society, AAA, Mobil, Michelin, the¶ United States Geological Survey, other
national mapping¶ services, state highway maps, the Thomas Guides, Falk’s,¶ bus maps, maps of metro
lines. Maps objectify by winnowing out our personal agency, replacing it with that of a reference
object so constructed by so many people over so long a time that it might as well have been
constructed by no one at all (‘‘It is not I who says this,¶ but...the entire human race’’). Citation enhances
a source’s authority but also the authority of the one who cites it. The reflected light is blinding.
Opposition is extinguished.¶ ‘‘You don’t believe the map? Check it out!’’¶ This authority, apparently
descriptive, is inherently prescriptive. The phone book is not a guide to numbers¶ from which one may
feel free to pick and choose (though¶ plenty evidently do): it tells you what to dial, it prescribes the
number. A street directory gives you the address.¶ There is no ‘‘Hmmm’’ here as there is over the
choices a¶ thesaurus offers or among the shades of meaning¶ provided by decent dictionaries, where
even so there is¶ little hemming or hawing over spelling. The dictionary is¶ absolutely prescriptive about
spelling, a social fact we¶ acknowledge – that we dramatize – in the annual rite of¶ the National Spelling
Bee. Among the mutual validations¶ – spellers validating the authority of the dictionary,¶ dictionary
validating the speller’s spelling – the prescriptive, the authoritative, is hard to miss.
AT: Environmental Securitization
Our current representation of the ocean is manifested in modern security logic
Steinberg, Florida State University Political Geography Professor, 2001
[Philip E., The Social Construction of the Ocean, page 11-12, Google books, PAC]
Much like the "transport-surface" construction of ocean-space, the construction of the ocean as a
"force-field” is dependent upon an idealization of the sea as an unmanaged and unmanageable
surface, an idealization that resonates with the spatial assumptions that permeate realist theories of
international politics. According to realists, individual societies, as embodied by spatially defined
nation-states, are the repositories of order, while international relations are characterized by anarchic
competition (Grieco l990;Morgenth.1u and Thompson 1985). As unclaimed and unclaimable
"international" space, the world-ocean lends itself to being constructed as the space of anarchic
competition par excellence, when: ontologically pre-existent and essentially equivalent nation-states do
battle in unbridled competition for global spoils. In realist geopolitics (a subset of realist international
relations theory), control of specific locations on the earth's surface is considered crucial in the
competition for global power (Cohen 1973; Mackinder 1904; Parker 1985). Within this group of
geopolitical realists, certain theorists have put a premium on control of portions or the entirety of the
world-ocean (Mahan 1890; Raleigh 1829; Spykman 1944).
Leaving aside for the moment any further critique of the realist conception of either the state or
international relations (both of which are taken up again later in this chapter), it is argued here that the
military history perspective is deficient for much the same reason as the commercial history
perspective: Both perspectives are premised upon a denial of the ocean's long history as a space that
continuously has been regulated and managed. Even those who study the history of sea power from
an explicitly social angle-such as Modelski and Thompson (1988), who trace the rise and fall of maritime
powers as indicators of world-systemic long cycles and the shifting fortunes of individual countries fail to investigate the ocean itself as a space within which the social contest is played out . Rather
than being a neutral surface across and within which states have vied for power and moved troops,
the sea, like the nation-states themselves, has been socially constructed throughout history. Although
in the modem era the sea has been constructed outside the territory of individual states, it has been
constructed as a space amenable to a degree of governance within the state system. Indeed, as
Thomson (1994) has shown, this construction of the sea has played an important role in the
construction of modem norms of international relations. As was the case with Harlow's definition of
the sea as unregulatable transport space, the very act of defining the sea as a space of anarchic military
competition both reflects and creates specific social constructions of both ocean-space and land-space.
The mapping of oceans has historically portrayed them only as sites for geopolitical
conflict. We must realize that the ocean is not only a space where politics is enacted,
but also one where politics is constructed
Steinberg, Florida State University Political Geography Professor, 2009
[Philip E., “Oceans,” International Encyclopedia of Human Geography,
http://philsteinberg.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/iehg.pdf, accessed 6/27/14 JO]
Historically, when human geographers have studied the ocean, they most often have looked to the
sea as a space of politics and, in particular, as an arena for geopolitical conflict . The ocean has been
viewed as a space in which the forces of land-based states meet as each attempts to control crucial
areas of the sea (e.g., choke points on shipping lanes or particularly productive fishing grounds) or to
use the ocean as a platform from which power can he projected onto land. Increasingly, however,
political geographers (especially those who associate themselves with the critical geopolitics
movement) are criticizing this model of the world as one in which states with unambiguously bounded
insides interact with each other on a preexisting (and presocial) spatial platform. Instead, the discursive
bounding of states and the construction of the world as a universe of mutually exclusive territorial
states is seen as an act of politics that itself is worthy of study . It follows from this critique that there
is no a priori distinction between a state's 'inside' (its territory) and its 'outside' (space that is outside
state territory). Thus, the ocean, historically viewed by political geographers as a space wherein
political actors battle each other, is now recognized as a space in which politics (and political
territories) are created .
AT: Object Oriented Ontology - Perm
The perm solves—The plan recognizes the way that objects such as maps are able to
influence and shape human societies
Bryant, Collin College Philosophy Professor, 2012
[Levi, September, “The Gravity of Things: An Introduction To Onto-Cartography,”
http://larvalsubjects.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/bryantontocartographies.pdf, accessed: 7/1/14, JO]
While the term “onto-cartography” is perhaps new, bits and pieces of onto-cartographical theory and
investigation have been around for quite some time. When Latour writes “Where are the Missing
Masses” and argues that we must refer to nonhumans such as hinges on doors and speed bumps to
account for many of the regularities we find in society, he is proposing what we would call an ontocartographical analysis of the world.5 There Latour shows us how the nonhumans of the world in the
form of various technologies encourage us to behave in certain ways or follow certain paths that we
would not ordinarily follow in their absence. He shows, in short, how these nonhumans exercise a
certain gravity over us, leading us to follow certain paths of movement and becoming.
The perm is best—Onto-Cartography is meant to be used in conjunction with other
critical studies
Bryant, Collin College Philosophy Professor, 2014
[Levi, “Onto-cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media”, page 8, JO]
While the aims of onto-cartography are political and ethical in nature, I do not advocate for any
particular ethical or political paradigm in what follows. In other words, the work that follows can be
described as a work of meta-politics and meta-ethics. It does not stipulate what political issues we
should be concerned with , what we ought to do, or what ethics we ought to advocate, but rather
attempts to outline the ontological framework within which political and ethical questions should be
thought. Recently Adam Miller has proposed the concept of "porting" to describe this sort of
theorizing (Miller 2013: 4-5). In computer programming, porting consists in reworking a program so it is
able to function in a foreign software environment. It is my hope that a variety of political
preoccupations - Marxist critiques of capitalism, anarchist critiques of authority and power, feminist
critiques of patriarchy, deconstructive critiques of essences, critiques of ideology, queer theory
critiques of heteronormativity, ecological critiques of environmental practices, post-humanist critiques
of human exceptionalism, post-colonial critiques of racism, and so on, can be fruitfully ported into the
framework of onto-cartography , assisting in the development of new avenues of inquiry and political
practice, revealing blind-spots in other theoretical frameworks, and helping to render certain concepts
and claims more precise and rigorous. The aim of onto-cartography is not to close of styles of
inquiry , but to expand our possibilities for intervening in the world to produce change so as to better
understand how power functions and devise strategies so as to overcome various forms of
oppression.
AT: Object Oriented Ontology – No Link
No link—Our way of rethinking cartography recognizes social relations as embedded
in a particular space
Bryant, Collin College Philosophy Professor, 2014
[Levi, “Onto-cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media”, page 7, JO]
While onto-cartography overlaps with many issues and themes dealt with in geographical
cartography, it differs from the latter in that geography, in one of its branches, maps geographical
space, whereas onto-cartography maps relations or interactions between machines or entities and
how they structure the movements and becomings of one another. With that said, onto-cartography
does contend that geography is the queen of the social sciences as it is that branch of social theory
that least dematerializes the world and social relations, avoiding the transformation of social
ecologies into discursivity. If this is so, then it is because geography recognizes the manner in which
social relations are always embedded in a particular space or place, that communication takes time to
travel through space and requires media to travel, and that geographical features of the material
world play an important role in the form that social relations take. Social and political philosophy
needs to become more geographical.
AT: Cap K – Perm
Capitalist regimes have tried to identify the difference, but in their attempt have
ignored difference—the only way to solve is the aff where we have a space to actually
think from
Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Cardiff University, & Peters,
Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, 2014
[Jon & Kimberly, Water Worlds Human Geographies of the Ocean, p. 9-10, J.J.]
For the past two decades, critical theorists (including myself) have been problematizing the changing
substance of that ontological unity, locating its shifting significations, uses, and regulatory regimes in
the dialectics of capitalism, the interstices of political thought, or the specificity of cultural norms, and
tracing its dynamism across time and space. But even as we have pursued this agenda, we have
persisted in conceiving of the ocean as an object, a substance, a surface of difference, the other 70%.
To borrow terms from Derrida (1982), in our efforts to identify difference, the system by which
meanings are defined, we have ignore difference, the system by which meanings are deferred.
The alternative, if one is to write about the ocean as a non- objectified arena, is to approach it as a
space that is not so much known as experienced; less a space that we live on (or, more often, gaze at)
than one that we live in; less a two-dimensional surface than a four-dimensional sphere; a space that
we think from (Anderson 2012).
AT: Cap K
Turn - The counter mapping of the 1AC inserts new ideas into the system that disrupts the capitalist
flow of traditional cartography
St. Martin, Rutgers Geography Professor, 2009
[Kevin, 2009, “Toward a Cartography of the Commons: Constituting the Political and Economic
Possibilities of Place,” Professional Geographer, 61, (4): pg. 1-4, Accessed: 6-30-14,
http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/Kevin-StMartin/Cartography_of_Commons.pdf, KMM]
Place-based politics and struggles around resources that counter neoliberal dispossessions of what had
been common require an ontological ground upon which such politics and struggles might be enacted. A
host of contemporary movements, from indigenous rights to resources to anti-enclosure movements,
rely upon a vision of community territory or local commons through which alternative forms of
environmental knowledge, productive utilization of resources, and local identities can be imagined (e.g.
Escobar 2001; Mackenzie 2006; Sletto 2002). These spaces of difference counter hegemonic
understandings of nature as an inventory of discrete resources open to individual appropriation, and
they are increasingly represented using mapping and related technologies that fall under the rubric of
“counter-mapping” (Peluso 1995).
Counter-maps work against the displacement, valuation, abstraction, individuation, privatization, and
alienability of resources that are foundational to a capitalist appropriation and exploitation of nature
(Castree 2003), and, insofar as they recast space as the domain of resource dependent communities,
they work against the representation of resource users as competing individuals bent on utility
maximization. Counter-mapping, then, is not only an effective method for reclaiming material
resources for those who have been dispossessed but it works to counter particular forms of economic
subjectivity and space (St. Martin 2005a); it inserts a non-capitalist presence into locations where only
a capitalist potential had been identified via scientific and institutionalized mappings of nature and
resources (cf. Law 2004).
In this sense, counter-maps represent a parallel and spatial analogue to the alternative language of
economy developed by Gibson-Graham and others (Gibson-Graham 1996). Where counter-maps
suggest the possibility of non-capitalist spaces, openings in the economic landscape, Gibson-Graham
posits a “diverse economy” where non-capitalist class processes, alternative economic subjectivities,
and “community economies” might be identified and/or enacted (Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006). Both are
counter-discourses that create openings for non-capitalism, one utilizes a spatial imaginary and one is
focused more on economic subjectivity. Furthermore, insofar as capitalism is associated with a globally
expansive and totalizing system, both locate difference from capitalism in ways that are constitutive of
community economies and their respective commons (see also Gudeman and Rivera 2002) and
contribute to an “ethics of the local” (Gibson-Graham 2003; see also Mackenzie 2006).
This paper seeks to build upon the possibility of counter-mapping initiatives to act not only as a
reclaiming of resources and identities by local, primarily indigenous, peoples but also as constitutive of
an imaginary of place and identity released from capitalist subjection and productive of a
community/commons becoming. While mapping and the quantitative assessment of resources have
long been associated with the rise of capitalism, here such methods are rethought and redeployed as a
means to counter capitalism by remapping space/resources as common(s). Competing with the
cartography of capitalism, undermining its power to fix resources as open to capitalist appropriation and
space as enclosed, will require a cartography of the commons that can effectively recast space as a site
of multiple economic possibilities and resources as the basis of community livelihoods.
This broadening of counter-mapping to be a method for “imagining and enacting non-capitalism”
(Community Economies Collective 2001) is, however, hampered by its alignment with essential
communities located on the periphery of capitalism. Reliant upon ethnographic approaches, sketch
mapping, map biographies, and village-level meetings, counter-mapping initiatives reinforce
representations of resource dependent communities as traditional, local, discrete, and often
homogenous entities (Hodgson and Schroeder 2002); they cast community-based claims to resources in
chiefly historic terms (Chapin 2005); and they suggest an applicability in sites that are somehow either
beyond or before capitalism (St. Martin 2005a). Such methods make the generalization of difference
from capitalism to other scales or locations (particularly those represented as capitalist by dominant
discourses of economy) difficult at best. In this sense, counter-mapping is limited: it does not so much
disrupt the cartographic discourse of capitalism as it maps islands of difference to be defended from a
powerful, coherent, and, ultimately, global capitalism.
The second task of this paper, then, is to explore the use of counter-mapping as a means to counter
capitalism not just on its frontier but at its center, to re-present and re-map the economic landscape of
even, and especially, the global North as diverse and open to alternative economic futures. While this
might be achieved in a variety of ways (c.f. Cameron and Gibson 2005a), this paper illustrates how we
can not only reclaim space and resources for communities (and community economies; see Graham et
al. 2002) but how we can reclaim the very tools and methods of hegemonic institutions that have
traditionally mapped space as a template for capitalism and resources as available for
individual/corporate appropriation. For example, state sponsored databases and inventories of
resources that fix space and resources as elements of a capitalist economy might be reworked using
critical quantitative and GIS methodologies to reveal non-capitalist potentials across sites and scales
(e.g. Arvidson 1995). Such methods will allow a cartography of the commons to not only map spaces as
non-capitalist but to do so beyond the village or the historic commons. In general, a cartography of the
commons, applicable in the first world and disruptive of capitalism, will require a shift in strategy from
explicating and defending existing commons to mapping a space into which a commons future might be
projected.
The process of art mapping is able to challenge the authority of the capitalist structure
Wood, North Carolina State Former Design Professor, and Krygier, Ohio Wesleyan
University Geography Professor, 2009
[Denis and John, Elsevier Ltd., “Critical Cartography,”
http://www.mixedrealitycity.org/readings/critical_cartography.pdf, accessed 6/30/14, JO]
Ethnocartography, eco-mapping, PPGIS, anticipatory rural appraisal, green mapping, Parish mapping, all
these and others have fed the stream of maps, growing in volume ever since the late 1950s, that have
been made by artists. From the hands of surrealists, situations, pop artists, conceptual artists, Earth
artists, eco-artists, installation artists, and others have come a flood of maps challenging not simply
Western capitalist society, but the authority of Western capitalist cartography to map the world . Art
maps contest not only the authority of professional mapmaking institutions — government, business,
and science — to reliably map the world, but they also reject the world such institutions bring into
being. Art maps are always pointing toward worlds other than those mapped by professional
mapmakers. In doing so, art maps draw attention to the world-making power of professional
mapmaking. What is at stake, art maps insist, is the nature of the world we want to live in. In pointing
toward the existence of other worlds, real or imagined, map artists are claiming the power of the map
to achieve ends other than the social reproduction of the status quo . Map artists do not reject maps.
They reject the authority claimed by professional cartography uniquely to portray reality as it is. In
place of such professional values as accuracy and precision, art maps assert values of imagination,
social justice, dreams, and myths; and in the maps they make hurl these values as critiques of the
maps made by professionals and the world professional maps have brought into being. Artists insist
that their maps chart social and cultural worlds every bit as 'real' as those mapped by professional
cartographers. Some, Guy Debord among them, have explicitly called for a 'renovated cartography' as a
form of" intervention. The project of art mapping is nothing less than the remaking of the world .
Race Critiques
The aff helps us understand the idea of “race” and the particular way that maps
engage in this discussion
Winlow, Cultural and Historical Geographer at Bath Spa University, 2006
[Heather, March 1, 2006, “Mapping Moral Geographies: W. Z. Ripley’s Races of Europe and the
United States,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, EBSCOhost Academic
Search Complete, accessed 6-25-14, J.J.]
Critical geographers, among others, have in recent years come to understand the idea of ‘‘race’’ as
socially constituted over time. Kobayashi (2003) has traced the historical links between racialization
and spatialization with particular focus on key developments in geography as a discipline. She argues
that the idea of race as we now understand it can be traced to developments in scientific thinking during
the Enlightenment. In particular she notes that Immanuel Kant’s stress on the links between skin color
and distance from the equator fed into new ways of thinking about race. His assumption of links
between darker skin color and inferior intellectual qualities reflected a moral hierarchy of both
peoples and places and played into the interests of colonialism. As a respected academic and holder of
a Chair in Geography in Europe, Kant’s lectures on geography strongly influenced the next generation of
researchers (Livingstone 1992a; Kobayashi 2003). Other elements of Enlightenment thought also
stressed the links between environment and human development. For example, Montesquieu’s The
Spirit of the Laws (1748) emphasizes that ‘‘the cultural characteristics that shape and condition
humanity were molded by environmental factors, like climate and soil’’ (see Livingstone 1992a, 122).
Travelogues of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also incorporated ‘‘the conventional judgment .
. . that warmer climates encouraged moral sloth, while colder ones stimulated intellectual vigor’’ (Driver
1988, 278). It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that the idea of discrete race types,
linked to geographical region, became more strictly delineated. Biddis (1979) has noted that before
1800 the term race had been used as a rough expression to convey ethnic lineage, but that over the first
half of the nineteenth century the word assumed an additional sense that initially appeared more
scientific. During the early part of the twentieth century geographers continued to be informed by the
scientific racism of the late nineteenth century, but issues surrounding race were largely ignored
following World War II. Kobayashi (2003) has noted that despite the defeat of Nazism and the rejection
of racism following the war, there was a systematic ‘‘denial’’ of the issues of race within geographical
circles, with dehumanized spatial science playing the dominant role in human geography. In the 1960s
and 1970s, there was some focus on race and space, with race issues largely viewed in terms of spatial
inequalities. Following the critical turn in the discipline in the 1980s and early 1990s, which involved
deliberate attempts to integrate both Marxist and humanistic geographies (Kobayashi 2003), there has
been widespread recognition of race as a ‘‘social construct’’ (Jackson 1987, 1989, 1994, 1998).
Acceptance of this theory has resulted in a diverse range of studies on race and space, including a focus
on whiteness (Bonnett 1993, 1996a, 1996b), on the creation of hegemonic landscapes (Anderson 1987,
1988, 1991), and on various forms of historical racial representation.
CounterPlans
AT: PIC State/Usfg
Only including state action allows us to challenge the neutrality of SQ maps
McTavish, San Francisco State University Geography Master of Arts, 2010
[Anne Kathryn, January, San Francisco State University, “The Role of Critical Cartography in
Environmental Justice: Land-Use Conflict at Shasta Dam, California”,
http://geog.sfsu.edu/geog/sites/sites7.sfsu.edu.geog/files/thesis/McTavishThesis.pdf, accessed 6-29-14,
JO]
Critical Cartography provides a framework through which the scientific neutrality of maps may be
examined. The Public Land Survey System (PLSS) detailed the measurement methods to be followed by
surveyors and the processes to be followed in disposing of land from the public domain. However, John
Short, in Representing the Republic: Mapping the United States, 1600-1900, documented the political
power of these maps. He described various ways the changing technology and industry of geographic
representation played an important role in the development of a national identity for the American
Republic. Throughout the book Short continually turned to the New York state area to examine the
impact of national changes on local areas. In one example he described the impact of the PLSS on the
Oneida Tribe. They were reduced from “owning” six million acres in central New York in 1784 to
controlling thirty-two acres in 1990 (Short 2001: p. 77). Another example of the political power of
maps is provided by Malcolm Lewis, in Cartographic Encounters. In a case study of the upper Great
Lakes region, Lewis demonstrated how Indian maps, once considered spatially naive, were essential
inputs to Euro-American maps (Lewis 1998).
Critical Cartography promotes cartographic integrity and responsibility, and advocates social change.
In the article, “Beyond the ‘Binaries’: A Methodological Intervention for Interrogating Maps as
Representational Practices,” authors Vincent Del Casino and Stephen Hanna argued that the researcher
must strive to examine the many historical and spatial references that are part and parcel of any map
(Del Casino et al. 2006: p. 37). The classic study that showed how geographical analysis can empower
social movements was Toxic Wastes and Race, published in 1987 (Crampton et al. 2005: p. 15; United
Church of Christ 1987). This study changed focus from examining the details of local hazardous waste
sitings to examining patterns of sitings. At the national level it became evident that a disproportionate
number of the hazardous waste sites were located in minority neighborhoods. By changing scale from
local to national, and examining the relationship of ‘‘toxic release inventory’’ sitings to race, the study
show that race, not poverty, was the correlating factor, and thereby catalyzed the environmental
justice movement ((Bullard 2001: p. 151; Cole et al. 2001: p. 20). However, the connection between
race and space is often hard to see, especially if space is thought of as empty and racially neutral (Pulido
2000: p. 13; Sullivan 2006: p. 1). The geography of environmental racism may be exposed by adding the
element (scale) of time, which makes it possible to see that contemporary conditions, that were created
historically, are now preserved institutionally (Almaguer 1994: p. 14; Pulido 2000: p. 15).
Even Google maps carries with it subliminal values and social relations
Ström, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Global Studies Ph.D student, 2013
[Timothy Eric, November, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, “The Culturalization of Nature and the
Naturalization of Culture in Google Maps,” http://global-cities.info/wpcontent/uploads/2013/11/Culturalisation-of-Nature.pdf, Accessed: 6/30/14, JO]
The still frame depicted in Figure 1 was captured from Google Maps ‘satellite mode’ at the outmost
level of zoom. As a world map, this image is not unique, being similar to many other established,
influential world maps, and, at the global level, many of Google’s innovations do not come into play.
What’s more, this image is taken from a desktop computer interfacing with Google Maps, which may be
seen as ‘old fashioned’ now that the internet is increasingly ‘going mobile’. What is unique about this
world map is its’ audience of one billion. This sheer power of their market penetration, to use this
phallic expression, means that how Google Maps represents the Earth, how they ‘culturalize nature’, is
highly significant because this shapes the image of the world that is presented to an unprecedented
number of people.
At first glance, the highly abstracted shapes of the continents are instantly recognizable to anyone
enculturated in the global age. In his influential book Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson
noted that national maps played a significant role in shaping peoples’ ability to imagine nation-states
and thus their identity within this framework (2006, pp. 170– 8). Building on this, I suggest that world
maps have become icons of globalization and that they now play a significant role in shaping peoples’
imaginations of the world as a single place and thus their identity in this global frame (Steger 2008).
The continents depicted by Google Maps are fractured by borders which represent a political
geometry of history, empire, states, conquest and power. These neat, self-contained nation-states are
the building blocks of this world, which can be read as embodying a tension between the global and the
national. One thing immediately jumps out from this image: north is up. This may sound trivial, yet
there is nothing ‘natural’ about it. This is a value judgement thrust upon the spherical Earth. Before
the advent of modern mapping, European maps were often oriented with East as up, as the famous
13th century Hereford Mappa Mundi testifies (Hereford Mappa Mundi). Jerusalem is in the centre of
this map, with the archipelago we now call the British Isles being situated in the bottom left corner, and
the island now known as Sri Lanka is in the top right corner. The logic behind this orientation was that
Jerusalem is to the east, the Garden of Eden is in the east, the sun rises in the east and thus Heaven
must be that direction too. Thus, the male figure of God is depicted as sitting on the top of the world,
so this map captures how the entire medieval Christian world order was organized around, and under,
this divine orientation.
Later, with the Enlightenment, empiricism and empire, the orientation of European maps changed
and—in a move of sublime humility—they put themselves in the top and in the centre of the world. The
emblazoned 1886 map of the British Empire as drawn by English artist Walter Crane is an emblematic
example of this. In this map, the goddess Britannia literally sits atop the world while being lavishly
fanned by her oriental imperial subjects. The map is embellished with the spoils of empire, including a
half-naked aboriginal woman waving a boomerang in one hand and patting a kangaroo with the other.
Times change, now Google Maps defaults to a new ‘centre of the world’; the United States of America
(Ström 2011).
It is worth contrasting the Google Maps image with the famous Blue Marble photograph, taken from
the window of Apollo 17 in 1972 about 45,000 kilometres above the Earth’s surface (Apollo 17). This
image of the world looks vividly different from how our planet is presented in most maps, particularly
when seen in its original south-as-up orientation. One reason for this can be summed up in a word:
clouds. In Google’s world, there are no clouds, rather the entire atmosphere has been purged. In noting
this silence, I draw attention to Google’s choice not to represent the atmosphere in favour of, say
nation-state boundaries, for this belies the corporation’s intentions and values, as well as locating it
within a broader cartographic tradition. In the same move, as Google removes the atmosphere, it also
removes the entire hydrosphere. In place of the oceans, the sea floor is represented with ridges and
trenches all coloured blue. And yet, the ocean is blue because it reflects the sky, but in Google’s world it
purges the sky, purges the ocean, and then paints the seafloor. The reasons for these choices relate to a
visual aesthetics of meaning-making, and thus they are profoundly imagined and cultural.
In making the above point I am not imploring Google to attempt to map the unmappable, or even to
encourage the corporation in their architectonic mission ‘to organize the world’s information.’ By noting
the exclusion of clouds from Google Maps, I am not suggesting that this is a gross oversight, or that
the map even should include the atmosphere. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to imagine an
uncomfortably close future where in which Google has fleets of surveillance drones hovering above
cities allowing real time information, meteorological and otherwise, to be streamed onto their map.
Scenarios such as this will become increasingly possible as Google furthers its their embrace of the
expanding surveillance-intelligence- robotics-military complex (Bauman and Lyon 2013). My point is
rather to stress the inescapable subjectivity of maps and to tease out the values and social relations
that underpin these representations.
Returning to the hydrosphere, it is significant to note that while the Pacific Ocean is larger than all of
Earth's land areas combined; yet in Google Maps the world-ocean is reduced to a mere 8 per cent of
the total surface due to its use of the Mercator projection, invented in 1569 (Strom 2011). This
colonial projection also dramatically reduces the relative size of the equatorial countries of the Global
South. Other examples of choices Google has made regarding the visual aesthetics of their map are
evident in the removal of the Earth's great cycles. The planet is represented as being illuminated by
perpetual summer; there are no seasonal variations in this evergreen world. And, finally, there is no
night: the sun never sets on Google's empire.
AT: Indigenous PIC - Perm
Perm do both
Pearce Geography Professor at the University of Kansas and Louis Affiliate Researcher
Institute of Policy and Social Research University of Kansas, ‘08
(Margret Wickens and Renee Pualani, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 32:3 “Mapping
Indigenous Depth of Place” P. 109, Accessed 7/2/2014, ESB)
These projects overwhelmingly apply Western cartographic language by using GT to represent
Indigenous cultural knowledge. Methodological approaches to Indigenous mapping have varied
depending on the particular political and cultural context in which they arise, from the traditional landuse studies of Canada and Alaska to the participatory mapping programs of
Asia and Africa and the implementation of large-scale tribal GIS programs in the United States. 5 Issues
of ontological and epistemological differences in cartography and map symbolization between
Indigenous communities and those who design, market, and provide instruction in GT (including GIS
software) generally have not been addressed. As a result, Indigenous cultural knowledge is often
distorted, suppressed, and assimilated into the conven-tional Western map. This practice of locating
cultural knowledge without expressing the spatial meanings and interrelationships of that knowledge
preserves “only a superficial cultural diversity through its products, ceremo-nies, and performances
whose meaning will be diluted through secular decontexted performances.” 6 In addition, mapping
Indigenous cultural knowledge in general leaves such knowledge vulnerable. In their 2005 study,
which created an ethno-graphic record of Navajo wayfinding and narratives of place, Kelley and Francis
reflected on this question: “Doesn’t putting this kind of information in the ‘ethnographic record’
endanger the society’s traditions, its very self-perpet-uation? From the maps that American Indians
drew for the earliest European colonizers to today’s Geographic Information System maps of current
indig-enous hunting-gathering areas, the ‘putting on the record’ always seems to accompany
indigenous loss of resources and the oral tradition itself.” 7 Despite substantial literature that
expresses concern about such distor-tions and dilutions, little has been offered in the way of solutions.
The presentation of cultural knowledge through traditional Indigenous cartogra-phies as a means of
communication to non-Indigenous communities is not an option. When Indigenous cartographies are
removed from the context of their knowledge space and placed in colonial conditions, Indigenous
maps do not convey the same level of power and authority naturally conveyed by the Western maps.
The need for Indigenous communities to adapt Western mapping techniques for the representation
of local knowledge remains essential to both the preservation of Indigenous cultural diversity and
the realization of Indigenous self-determination in the face of global change. Given that necessity,
what can be done to improve the uses of cartography in the future?
Perm do Both: “Indigenous mapping” PIC
Johnson Professor of geography at the University of Kansas, Louis affiliate Researcher Institute of
Policy and Social Research University of Kansas and Promanono department of Geography at
University Hawai‘i at Mānoa, ‘6
(Jay, T, Renee Pualani, Albertus Hadi, Facing the Future: Encouraging Critical Cartographic Literacies, In
Indigenous Communities, 2006, P. 85, Accessed 7/1/14, ESB)
Returning to the heading of this section, having described ‘multiple literacies’ now let us turn our
attention to describing what we mean by ‘multiple cartographies’. Just as the recognition of multiple
literacies allows for intrinsic diversity, historic and cultural variability, so the recognition of multiple
cartographies allows for the recognition of diverse forms of spatial representation among various
cultural groups. Harley observes that “recent studies in anthropology, art history, and ethnohistory
identify a corpus of indigenous maps that represent valid ‘alternative’ cartographies, different from
European maps, yet important in the history of spatial representation” (1992b: 522). This
conceptualization of multiple or alternative cartographic traditions has been supported in varying
degrees by the works of other geographers as well (Chapin et al., 2001; Harley and Woodward, 1987;
Lewis, 1998; Louis, 2004; Pearce, 1998;Rundstrom, 1987; Sparke, 1998; Woodward and Lewis, 1998). As
a part of multi-volume History of Cartography project, Woodward and Lewis (1998) even provide a
classification of Indigenous spatial representation. While recognizing Indigenous cartographic
traditions, Turnbull (1998) warns that the use of terms such as ethnocartography and Indigenous
mapping runs the risk of “subsuming all other traditions under Western notions of maps and
cartography (p. 17).” We agree that there is a certain risk involved in using this terminology but
emphasize that using the term ‘cartography’ to describe Indigenous spatiotemporal representations
and performances is fundamental in creating a ‘shared space’ through which different cartographic
traditions can be compared and translated. The creation of a ‘shared space’ through which Indigenous
and Western cartographic traditions can be performed and compared requires as Turnbull has
asserted, the recognition that distinct knowledge systems are locally produced and not ‘universal’, as
Western science has claimed (1997).
AT: Indigenous CP - No Solvency Net Benefit
We need a different Epistemology to approach “indigenous” maps
Pearce Geography Professor at the University of Kansas and Louis Affiliate Researcher
Institute of Policy and Social Research University of Kansas, ‘08
(Margret Wickens and Renee Pualani, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 32:3 “Mapping
Indigenous Depth of Place” P. 113, Accessed 7/2/2014, ESB)
Western knowledge and science shapes the structure of Western cartographic language, from the
smallest part of the symbol to the overall look of the map and the ways in which the map is used.
From the initial categorization of a eographical entity as a point, line, area, or volume, an ontological
structure and epistemological assumption has been established in the map. Graphic variables, the marks
that form the vocabulary of cartographic language, also establish an ontological structure. For example,
for paper maps, these variables are spacing, size, perspective height, orientation, shape, arrangement,
hue, saturation, and value. For animated maps, there are the variables of duration, rate of change,
order, display date, frequency, and synchronization. All these variables encode the level of
measurement at which a geographical phenom-enon has been categorized through their “syntactic
rules.” This language is flexible, and cartographers have reexamined and redesigned the form, range,
and depth of these variables to accommodate technological change and the consideration of other
concepts such as scale and uncertainty. Other elements of cartography such as typography, projection,
perspec - tive, the foundations of information design, and the format of graphic media, all contribute
to the map’s ontological structures. Perspective, for example, refers to the point of view from which a
cartographic scene is portrayed. Typically perspective is interpreted as the map’s spatial point of view,
whether the geography is expressed from a plan, profile, or oblique angle. However, perspective may
also be interpreted as the map’s temporal point of view, whether the geography is expressed in spring,
summer, winter, or fall. Expressing this point of view in the map is one technique for removing the
illusion of a place as both disembodied (orthogonally rectified plan perspec - tive) and seasonless space.
Epistemology and ontology are also manifested in the layout and design and the media and materials of
cartographic language. The use of specific techniques such as figure/ground, micro/macro, and small
multiples all communicate specific ontological structures in the map, as do the limitations or variety of
media and materials incorporated into the map and the mapping process. In sum, cartographic language
is composed of a multitude of ontological assumptions, any of which may be altered in order to express
a geographic concept better. We call for a transformation of cartographic language in all of its
dimensions, from graphic marks to the topologies, interrelationships, media, and distribution of those
marks, in ways that are epistemologically and ontologically meaningful for Indigenous cultural
knowledge. This trans - formation would consist of both the expansion of existing techniques and the
creation of new techniques (for example, new categories of graphic variables) that would better serve
Indigenous communities. In so doing, we would be rethinking cartographic language for
epistemological change as it has been so often rethought for technological change in the past. In the
following section, we explore one example of what that cartographic transformation might look like and
how it would improve on existing Western cartography to convey a sense of traditional resource
management at an Indigenous Hawaiian place.
AT: Indigenous CP - Aff Try/Die
We should still attempt to Counter-Map even if it does not perfectly emulate
Indigenous mapping
Pearce Geography Professor at the University of Kansas and Louis Affiliate Researcher
Institute of Policy and Social Research University of Kansas, ‘08
(Margret Wickens and Renee Pualani, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 32:3 “Mapping
Indigenous Depth of Place” P.123, Accessed 7/2/2014, ESB)
The problem that faces Indigenous peoples worldwide is to find a way to incorporate Western GT and
cartographic multimedia while minimizing the mistranslations, recolonizations, and assimilations of
conventional techno - science. As Stone writes, “Map or be mapped.” 36 We recognize that any rerepresentation of Indigenous knowledge by using Western cartographic techniques will entail some
loss of information in translation. 37 But we believe that by making that translation more accurate
through a theoretically informed and innovative application of cartographic language, the combi nation of “traditional wisdom” with “modern technical know-how,” we can demonstrate the
effectiveness of GT and multimedia as tools not only for protecting cultural sovereignty but also for
articulating exemplary carto - graphic practices for the shared knowledge space of the transmodern.
38 Through the informed practice of cartographic representation—inno - vation rooted in tradition—we
envision a future in which Indigenous communities formulate their cultural mapping programs in a
way that protects and fosters cultural sovereignty, maps the Indigenous without leaving the
Indigenous behind, and simultaneously transforms the way non-Indige - nous people read, interpret,
and make use of maps of Indigenous cultural knowledge. In so doing, we hope to overcome the chasm
of cultural miscom - munication between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds that so often
manifests in loss of territory and cultural rights under colonial conditions.
Disadvantages
AT: Scenario Planning
We need a radical new epistemology to understand the ontology behind mapping of
scenario projections
Kitchen, Geography Professor at National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Perkins
Senior Lecturer of Geography at University of Manchester and Dodge Senior Lecturer
of Human Geography at University of Manchester, ‘11
(Rob, Chris and Martin, June 2nd 2001, Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory, p. 2124, Accessed 6/30/14, ESB)
Maps do not then emerge in the same way for all individuals. Rather they emerge in contexts and
through a mix of creative, reflexive, playful, tactile and habitual practices; affected by the knowledge,
experience and skill of the individual to perform mappings and apply them in the world. This applies as
much for map making as for map reading. As such, the map does not re- present the world or make the
world, it is a co-constitutive production between inscription, individual and world; a production that is
constantly in motion, always seeking to appear ontologically secure. Conceiving of maps in this way
reveals that they are never fully formed but emerge in process and are mutable (they are re-made as
opposed to mis-made, mis-used or mis-read). In terms of cartographic research, this conceptualization
of maps necessitates an epistemology that concentrates on how maps emerge – how maps are made
through the practices of the cartographer situated within particular contexts and how maps re-make
the world through mutually constitute practices that unite map and space. As Brown and Laurier
(2005: 19, original emphasis) note, this requires a radical shift in approach from
‘ imagined scenarios, controlled experiments or retrospective accounts’ to examine how maps emerge
as solutions to relational problems; to make sense of the unfolding action’ of mapping. Their approach
is the production of detailed ethnographies of how maps become; map making and use is observed
in specific, local contexts to understand the ways in which they are constructed and embedded within
cultures of practices and affect. In their study they examined how maps are used in the context of
navigating while driving between locations through video-based ethnography. Their work
highlighted how a map, journey and social interaction within the car emerged through each other in
contingent and relational ways within the context of the trip.
Aff Pre-Requisite to Solve Ocean Impacts
The sea has an important role and link in everything, the aff is a pre-requisite to
resolve a lot of these major conflicts
Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cardiff, UK,
Peters, Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, UK., 2014
[Dr. Jon, Dr. Kimberley, February 2014, Ashgate, “Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the
Ocean,” http://www.ashgate.com/pdf/SamplePages/Water-Worlds-Human-Geographies-ofthe-Ocean-Intro.pdf, accessed 6-27-14, J.J.]
This emerging interest in human geographies of the ocean has considered, in manifold ways, the
spatialities bound up in and through water worlds. Studies have developed through a variety of
lenses, including, for example, the networks of flows across ocean spaces, the study of specific
maritime communities (sailors for example), the exploration of maritime places, such as the port, or
the ship and the ways in which some non-modern cultures have the water as central to their world
(see Peters 2010 for a review). Thus, as Lambert et al. identify, in recent years increasing attention has
been paid to ‘epistemological and historiographic perspectives, the imaginative, aesthetic and
sensuous, and material and social geographies’ of the oceans’ (2006: 480). Such a move is justified
when we consider the influence of the sea on our everyday lives. As Lavery tells us, in contemporary
society, approximately ‘95% of trade is still carried by ship’ (2005: 359). Gifts for Western celebrations
arrive freighted by sea from Asia; the global need for oil is serviced by giant tankers exporting
resources from the Middle East to far flung ports; whilst modern day piracy on the high seas raises the
costs of goods and insurance premiums, felt in consumers’ pockets across the globe. Such phenomena
alert us to the mobilities across the water that permeate and infiltrate our daily existence in often
unnoticed, but highly significant ways. No longer then, should we think of water worlds as empty of
activities, mobilities and lifeworlds. The seas are tied up with, and intrinsic to, a host of social,
cultural, economic, political and environmental questions. In this book, our studies launch from the
starting point that seas are significant. In Cooney’s words, we envision a study of the sea that is,
contoured, alive, rich in ecological diversity and in cosmological and religious significance and
ambiguity – [providing] a new perspective on how people actively create their identities, sense of
place and histories. (Cooney 2003: 323) Through each of the chapters that follow, the authors in this
collection assert that we should consider the sea not as a space defined in negative relationality to the
land, but as central to processes of knowledge production, embodied experience and to
understanding the more-than-humanness of our world. Firstly, therefore, this book aims to continue
to establish a human geography of the ocean which takes the water itself, and its central connections
to the land, seriously
AT: Sphere fo Influence DAs
The demarcation of oceans has historically been a method for enabling hegemonic
imperialism. Oceans are rarely distributed in a technical sense, but the underlying
assumptions of mapping carry with them the legitimization of imperial control
Steinberg, Florida State University Political Geography Professor, 1999
[Philip E., April, “Lines of Division, Lines of Connection: Stewardship in the World Ocean,” Geographical
Review, Volume: 89, page 254-264, JO]
Turning to the powers granted to each state in ocean space, the bull makes no mention whatsoever of
Spain's authority in the seas within the region in which it has exclusive rights to non-Christian land
space. It does state that any person who is found "to go for the purpose of trade or any other reason to
the islands or main lands" without the express permission of the Crown is to suffer excommunication,
but this clause does not necessarily imply any claim to authority, let alone possession, in ocean space; it
merely grants the kind of authority over overseas possessions that a sovereign would claim for the land
of his or her own nation. The treaty goes slightly farther than the bull in granting the two states a
degree of authority in their respective zones of ocean space: It notes that Portugal's ships shall not sail
west of the line unless the ships are engaged in transit to a Portuguese possession, and vice versa, in
which case the ships shall be guaranteed safe passage. This clause appears to grant each state certain
policing functions (for example, Spain has a right to question Portuguese vessels found west of the line
because, as the bull declares, another nation's ship may not go to a Spanish overseas territory without
the express permission of the Spanish Crown), but, again, it does not imply possession of the seas. 2
Rather, the seas are constructed as a legitimate arena for Spain and Portugal to implement the social
power that they are entitled to exercise based on their possession of land space. In contrast, if Spain
and Portugal were granted full possession, as opposed to mere authority, in their sectors, they would
presumably also be free to alienate "their" property or to enact use restrictions beyond those explicitly
permitted in the treaty.
In short, Spain's and Portugal's claims to exclusive rights should not be viewed as claims to possession
of the sea. Rather, the two countries' claims implied that the sea had been divided into "spheres of
influence" in which Spain and Portugal were granted rights of stewardship. Stewardship, though
generally associated with benevolent, or at least utilitarian, aims, embodies an assumption of power.
The stewarding entity is presumed to have a right to exert control both over the resource or space
being stewarded and over others who might wish to use the stewarded resource in a contrary
manner. Indeed, immediately after the treaty was signed, the Spanish and the Portuguese began to
construct the sea as a space supportive of their specific strategies for dominating distant land spaces.
The Spanish were fortunate in that, in most cases, they had little trouble conquering indigenous
cultures, whether by arms or by pathogens, and they soon established a system of mines and, later,
plantations. Following this conquest, Spanish sea power was exercised to restrict trade to certain ports
in Spain as well as in the Americas and to specially organized convoys. In part, this centralized control
was established to protect shipping from pirates, but it also served to prevent the resources of the
Crown's territories from escaping into the hands of other European powers or private Spanish
merchants who might be tempted to outbid the Spanish Crown and negotiate their own deals with
Creole settlers and miners. Thus Spain constructed its marine domain as a special space of commerce
over which the Crown exercised a degree of power and control as a means of projecting its power to
distant lands. As a mercantilist power, Spain used this land and sea power to establish and maintain
exclusive resource-extraction and trade relations, but it did not claim actual possession of ocean
space.
Critical Cartography Neg
Case Debate
Ocean Advantage
Objective Mapping Turn
Our understanding of the ocean and the implications of exploration rely on an
objective, scientific approach that can be universally verified through measurements
and statistics
Davis, research oceanographer for the Physical Oceanography Research Division of the
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego 76
Russ E Davis, 1976, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, “Technique for Objective Analysis and Design of
Oceanographic Experiments Applied to Mode-73”
http://scrippsscholars.ucsd.edu/redavis/content/technique-objective-analysis-and-designoceanographic-experiments-applied-mode-73 accessed 6/30/14) NM
A technique for the objective analysis of oceanic data has been developed and used on simulated data.
The technique is based on a standard statistical result—the Gauss-Markov Theorem-which gives an
expression for the least square error linear estimate of some physical variable (velocity, stream function,
temperature, etc.) given measurements at a limited number of data points, the statistics of the field
being estimated in the form of space-time spectra, and the measurement errors. An expression for the
r.m.s. error expected in this estimate is also derived and illustrated in the form of ‘error maps’. Efficient
sampling arrays can be designed through trial-and-error adjustment of array configurations until a
suitable balance of mapping coverage and accuracy, as measured by the error maps, is achieved.
Examples of the mapping ability of some simple arrays are given. Using statistics inferred from the
preliminary Mid Ocean Dynamics Experiments various realizations of likely flow fields were simulated.
The 16 element MODE-I array was tested by comparison of the simulated fields and the objective maps
based on inferred ‘measurements’ at the array points. The reliability of statistics inferred from
observations was estimated by comparing correlations derived from limited observations of the
simulated fields with the known statistics. Correlations derived from two realizations differed
significantly but most calculations reproduced the known statistics moderately well. An intercomparison
of Eulerian measurements (current meters) and Lagrangian measurements (neutrally buoyant drifters)
was also carried out using the objective interpolation method.
Science and objectivity are key to a sustainable ocean
Boesch, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science President, 1999
[Donald F., 1999, “The role of science in ocean governance,” Ecological Economics, 31: 2, page
190,http://elmu.umm.ac.id/file.php/1/jurnal/E/Ecological%20Economics/Vol31.Issue2.Nov1999/969.pdf
, Accessed 7-1-14, KMM]
In short, there is every reason to expect that at the threshold of the 21st Century our society would have
developed seasoned and effective governance mechanisms for the oceans to husband these shared
resources and the common environment. But this is not the case. Many fish stocks, particularly those
transcending national boundaries or occupying the high seas, have been seriously depleted and are
yet without sound plans for their recovery and sustainable use. Destruction of important coastal
habitats, such as coral reefs and wetlands, continues. Continental water resources are used and
loaded with wastes without understanding, much less considering, the effects on the coastal ocean;
and we continue to fly blindly regarding the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on ocean circulation
and its effect on climate regulation (Broecker, 1997).
For humankind to achieve sustainable governance of the oceans in the 21st Century will require more
effective use of science and involvement of scientists. Not only is it necessary for science to help
unveil the mysteries, complexities, relationships, and consequences of our actions in the natural
world and in human society, but, more than ever, science must meet its potential as a valued and
influential component of modern society. While it may not be as straightforward as ‘speaking truth to
power’, scientific discoveries and syntheses can be extremely catalytic in helping us move from
unsustainable business as usual.
Objective Mapping Extensions
Positivism is essential to an understanding of cartography – everything is objective
and can be verified by science – that’s the most effective approach and anything else
is useless
1AC Author Harley, American Geographical Society, Office of Map History, Director
2002
(JB, 2002, The New Nature Of Maps: Essays In The History Of Cartography, p 5-6, accessed 7/1/14) NM
Before examining Harley's own ideas, we should identify the attitude, described by him as "positivism,"
that he claims to be bringing under critical scrutiny. His opponents are said to maintain that
cartography can be, an usually is, objective, detached, neutral (in all disputes except that between
truth and falsehood), and transparent - four terms which in this context probably mean much the same.
Also, cartography is or can be exact and accurate. It can progress, and often has progressed, towards
greater accuracy. The accuracy of maps consists of mirroring their subject matter. Harley's word,
mirror, presents a difficulty, because it is hard to imagine any so-called positivist using it in this sense:
what might be said is that accuracy depends on the degree of resemblance between two sets of space
relations, one within the map itself and the other on the surface being mapped. Whether the
foregoing characteristics are sufficient to make cartography a "science" is an issue that (despite Harley's
interest in it) may be left to civil servants and educational administrators. Nor will detailed consideration
be given to Harley’s judgments on the moral integrity of the map-making profession. The standpoint
adopted here is that of a map historian interested in philosophical questions, not that of a present-day
cartographer or patron of cartographers. According to Harley, most practicing map makers are
positivists. Some readers may want proof of this. Before about 1930, cartographers made few general
pronouncements of any kind about their subject, and even after that time it is hard to discover the
stridency, hysteria, ideological fervor, and vigilantism that Harley claims to find (though, unusually for
him, without quoting examples) in cartographic discourse. However, positivism in some sense does
seem an appropriate doctrine for practicing cartographers, whatever its limitations on a purely
philosophical plane. Harley does not reject cartographic positivism in its entirety. At one point he
denies that maps themselves can be true or false but immediately adds the proviso "except in the
narrowest Euclidean sense." He expands this phrase by admitting that an accurate road map will help
a traveler reach his destination. This is surely a major concession. Harley does not disagree with what
cartographers say about the part of cartography that interests them. His point is that there are other
aspects of the subject to which these opinions are irrelevant. Cartographers, he seems to think, are less
tolerant in this respect than he is. They not only ignore the nonpositivistic element in their subject but
also refuse to accept its existence. His own belief, in its stronger form, is that "an alternative
epistemology, rooted in social theory rather than in scientific positivism, is more [not equally]
appropriate to the history of cartography is seldom [not not always] what cartographers say it is."
Objective science is the valid epistemology—refusing to reject any other ‘truth’ results
in extinction
Coyne, University of Chicago, Ecology and Evolution, Professor, PhD, 06
[Jerry A. Sep 6 2006, “The Times [UK] Literary Supplement: A plea for empiricism”,
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/intelligently_sequenced/conversations/topics/757, PAC]
But after demolishing creationists, Crews gives peacemaking scientists their own hiding, reproving them
for trying to show that
there is no contradiction between science and theology. Regardless of what they say to placate the
faithful, most scientists probably know in their hearts that science and religion are incompatible ways
of viewing the world. Supernatural forces and events, essential aspects of most religions, play no role
in science, not because we exclude them deliberately, but because they have never been a useful way
to understand nature. Scientific ‘truths’ are empirically supported observations agreed on by
different observers. Religious ‘truths,’ on the other hand, are personal, unverifiable and contested by
those of different faiths. Science is nonsectarian: those who disagree on scientific issues do not
blow each other up. Science encourages doubt; most religions quash it.
But religion is not completely separable from science. Virtually all religions make improbable claims that
are in principle empirically testable, and thus within the domain of science: Mary, in Catholic teaching,
was bodily taken to heaven, while Muhammad rode up on a white horse; and Jesus (born of a virgin)
came back from the dead. None of these claims has been corroborated, and while science would never
accept them as true without evidence, religion does. A mind that accepts both science and religion
is thus a mind in conflict.Yet scientists, especially beleaguered American evolutionists, need the support
of the many faithful who respect science. It is not politically or tactically useful to point out the
fundamental and unbreachable gaps between science and theology. Indeed, scientists and philosophers
have written many books (equivalents of Leibnizian theodicy) desperately trying to show how these
areas can happily cohabit.
In his essay, “Darwin goes to Sunday School”, Crews reviews several of these works, pointing out with
brio the intellectual contortions and dishonesties involved in harmonizing religion and science. Assessing
work by the evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould, the philosopher Michael Ruse, the theologian John Haught
and others, Crews concludes, ‘When coldly examined . . . these productions invariably prove to have
adulterated scientific doctrine or to have emptied religious dogma of its commonly accepted meaning’.
Rather than suggesting any solution (indeed, there is none save adopting a form of ‘religion’ that makes
no untenable empirical claims), Crews points out the dangers to the survival of our planet arising from
a rejection of Darwinism. Such rejection promotes apathy towards overpopulation, pollution,
deforestation and other environmental crimes: “So long as we regard ourselves as creatures apart who
need only repent of our personal sins to retain heaven’s blessing, we won’t take the full measure of our
species-wise responsibility for these calamities”.
Crews includes three final essays on deconstruction and other misguided movements in literary theory.
These also show ‘follies of the wise’ in that they involve interpretations of texts that are unanchored by
evidence. Fortunately, the harm inflicted by Lacan and his epigones is limited to the good judgement of
professors of literature. Follies of the Wise is one of the most refreshing and edifying collections of
essays in recent years. Much like Christopher Hitchens in the UK, Crews serves a vital function
as National Sceptic. He ends on a ringing note:
“The human race has produced only one successfully validated epistemology, characterizing all
scrupulous inquiry into the real world, from quarks to poems. It is, simply, empiricism, or
the submitting of propositions to the arbitration of evidence that is acknowledged to be such by all of
the contending parties. Ideas that claim immunity from such review, whether because of mystical faith
or privileged ‘clinical insight’ or the say-so of eminent authorities, are not to be countenanced until they
can pass the same skeptical ordeal to which all other contenders are subjected.”
Debate of facts is essential to policy making—it checks manipulative actors that result
in scenarios like the war in Iraq
Sokal, New York University, Department of Physics, Lecturer, 8
[Alan, Professor of Mathematics at University College London, Feb 27 2008, “What is
science and why should we care?”,
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/sense_about_science_PUBL.pdf, PAC]
In all these examples I have been at pains to distinguish clearly between factual matters and ethical or
aesthetic matters, because the epistemological issues they raise are so different. And I have restricted
my discussion almost entirely to factual matters, simply because of the limitations of my own
competence.
But if I am preoccupied by the relation between belief and evidence, it is not solely for intellectual
reasons — not solely because I, like my friend Norm Levitt, am “[a] grumpy old fart who aspire[s] to
the sullen joy of having it known that [I] don’t suffer fools gladly”.33 Rather, my concern that public
debate be grounded in the best available evidence is, above all else, ethical.
To illustrate the connection I have in mind between epistemology and ethics, let me start with a
fanciful example: Suppose that the leader of a militarily powerful country believes, sincerely but
erroneously, on the basis of flawed “intelligence”, that a smaller country possesses threatening
weapons of mass destruction; and suppose further that he launches a preemptive war on that basis,
killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians as “collateral damage”. Aren’t he and his supporters
ethically culpable for their epistemic sloppiness?
I stress that this example is fanciful. All the available evidence suggests that the Bush and Blair
administrations first decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and then sought a publicly presentable
pretext, using dubious or even forged “intelligence” to “justify” that pretext and to mislead Congress,
Parliament and the public into supporting that war.34
Which brings me to the last, and in my opinion most dangerous, set of adversaries of the evidencebased worldview in the contemporary world: namely, propagandists, public-relations flacks and spin
doctors, along with the politicians and corporations who employ them—in short, all those whose goal is
not to analyze honestly the evidence for and against a particular policy, but is simply to manipulate
the public into reaching a predetermined conclusion by whatever technique will work, however
dishonest or fraudulent.
Solvency
No Solvency – AT: Harley
Harley’s method ignores the relationship people have with maps—it’s not about the
maps but rather the bad things people do with maps
Kitchen, Geography Professor at National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Perkins
Senior Lecturer of Geography at University of Manchester and Dodge Senior Lecturer
of Human Geography at University of Manchester, 11
( Rob, Chris and Martin, June 2nd 2001, Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory, p.
10,11, Accessed 6/30/14, ESB)
Despite the obvious advances of the various social constructivist approaches in rethinking maps, more
recent work has sought to further refine cartographic thought and to construct post-representational
theories of mapping. Here, scholars are concerned that the critique developed by Harley and others did
not go far enough in rethinking the ontological bases for cartography, which for them has too long been
straitjacketed by representational thinking. As Denis Wood (1993) and Jeremy Crampton (2003) outline,
Harley’s application of Foucault to cartography is limited. Harley’s observations, although opening a new
view onto cartography, stopped short of following Foucault’s line of inquiry to its logical conclusion.
Instead, Crampton (2003: 7) argues that Harley’s writings ‘remained mired in the modernist conception
of maps as documents charged with “confessing” the truth of the landscape’. In other words, Harley
believed that the truth of the landscape could still be revealed if one took account of the ideology
inherent in the representation. The problem was not the map per se, but ‘the bad things people did with
maps’ (Wood 1993: 50, original emphasis); the map conveys an inherent truth as the map remains
ideologically neutral, with ideology bound to the subject of the map and not the map itself. Harley’s
strategy was then to identify the politics of representation in order to circumnavigate them (to reveal
the truth lurking underneath), not fully appreciating, as with Foucault’s observations, that there is no
escaping the entangling of power/knowledge. Crampton’s solution to the limitations of Harley’s social
constructivist thinking is to extend the use of Foucault and to draw on the ideas of Heidegger and other
critical cartographers such as Edney (1993). In short, Crampton (2003: 7) outlines a ‘non-confessional
understanding of spatial representation’ wherein maps instead of ‘being interpreted as objects at a
distance from the world, regarding that world from nowhere, that they be understood as being in the
world, as open to the disclosure of things’. Such a shift, Crampton argues, necessitates a move from
understanding cartography as a set of ontic knowledges to examining its ontological terms. Ontic
knowledge consists of the examination of how a topic should proceed from within its own
framework where the ontological assumptions about how the world can be known and measured are
implicitly secure and beyond doubt (Crampton 2003). In other words, there is a core foundational
knowledge – a taken for granted ontology – that unquestioningly underpins ontic knowledge.
Lol Harley
Kitchen, Geography Professor at National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Perkins
Senior Lecturer of Geography at University of Manchester and Dodge Senior Lecturer
of Human Geography at University of Manchester, 11
( Rob, Chris and Martin, June 2nd 2001, Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory, p.
10,11, Accessed 6/30/14, ESB)
Despite the obvious advances of the various social constructivist approaches in rethinking maps, more
recent work has sought to further refine cartographic thought and to construct post-representational
theories of mapping. Here, scholars are concerned that the critique developed by Harley and others did
not go far enough in rethinking the ontological bases for cartography, which for them has too long been
straitjacketed by representational thinking. As Denis Wood (1993) and Jeremy Crampton (2003) outline,
Harley’s application of Foucault to cartography is limited. Harley’s observations, although opening a
new view onto cartography, stopped short of following Foucault’s line of inquiry to its logical
conclusion. Instead, Crampton (2003: 7) argues that Harley’s writings ‘remained mired in the modernist
conception of maps as documents charged with “confessing” the truth of the landscape’. In
other words, Harley believed that the truth of the landscape could still be revealed if one took account
of the ideology inherent in the representation. The problem was not the map per se, but ‘the bad
things people did with maps’ (Wood 1993: 50, original emphasis); the map conveys an inherent truth
as the map remains ideologically neutral, with ideology bound to the subject of the map and not the
map itself. Harley’s strategy was then to identify the politics of representation in order to
circumnavigate them (to reveal the truth lurking underneath), not fully appreciating, as with Foucault’s
observations, that there is no escaping the entangling of power/knowledge. Crampton’s solution to the
limitations of Harley’s social constructivist thinking is to extend the use of Foucault and to draw on the
ideas of Heidegger and other critical cartographers such as Edney (1993). In short, Crampton (2003: 7)
outlines a ‘non-confessional understanding of spatial representation’ wherein maps instead of ‘being
interpreted as objects at a distance from the world, regarding that world from nowhere, that they be
understood as being in the world, as open to the disclosure of things’. Such a shift, Crampton argues,
necessitates a move from understanding cartography as a set of ontic knowledges to examining its
ontological terms. Ontic knowledge consists of the examination of how a topic should proceed from
within its own framework where the ontological assumptions about how the world can be known
and measured are implicitly secure and beyond doubt (Crampton 2003). In other words, there is a core
foundational knowledge – a taken for granted ontology – that unquestioningly underpins ontic
knowledge.
No Solvency
Mapping can be used for bad ends - aff can’t control outcome
Steinberg, Florida State University Political Geography Professor, 1999
[Philip E., April, “Lines of Division, Lines of Connection: Stewardship in the World Ocean,” Geographical
Review, Volume: 89, page 254-264, JO]
Discourse on the geography of the sea, particularly by political geographers, frequently revolves
around lines of division: How is a boundary line calculated? How is it communicated? What activities
should be permitted behind the line? The confusion and misunderstanding surrounding the Tordesillas
line should demonstrate that a perspective wherein lines are perceived solely as graphic
representations of division leaves one with, at best, a partial understanding of history and the social
construction of space. I have argued that the Tordesillas line should be viewed not so much as a radical
division of the ocean but, rather, as one in a long series of events adjusting a long-standing, and
continuing, system of marine stewardship.
In fact, lines in ocean space frequently serve purposes quite apart from the end of division. For
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sailors from Europe and North America, perhaps the most socially
meaningful "line" was the equator. "Crossing the line" was an event celebrated by the ritual dunking of
sailors upon their first venture into Southern Hemisphere waters. Other lines often found on maps,
such as those depicting common ocean routes, graphically represent vectors of connection. Still other
lines, including latitude and longitude lines, rhumb lines, and bathymetric lines, facilitate the making
of these connections. Indeed, even the Tordesillas line may be viewed as a line of connection, because it
facilitated the connection of Portugal and Spain with their distant land territories. When one destroys
the myth of individual states having or even desiring absolute control of ocean space—which is
implied by graphic representations but has never been a reality—lines take on a variety of meanings
that constitute, complement, and, at times, push the limits of the dominant norm of stewardship.
Just as this discussion suggests that we think twice before accepting that lines drawn across ocean
space necessarily divide, it also suggests that we rethink the entire dichotomy of division and
connection in the context of the broader norm of marine stewardship. Stewardship historically has
been exercised by various entities, including the state, the church, commercial interests, and the
populace at large. At different times the norm of stewardship has been operationalized by one actor
over all known ocean space, by individual actors in their discrete, parceled domains, and collectively
by a community of actors. It has been implemented for a range of ends, from military mobility to the
conservation of the ocean's living resources.
Cartography can be manipulated
Lennox, Assistant Professor of History at the Public Affairs Center Wesleyan, 2007
[Jeffers, September 2007, “An Empire on Paper: The Founding of Halifax and Conceptions of
Imperial Space, 1744–55” Canadian Historical Review, 88 (3), Project Muse, accessed 6-25-14,
J.J.]
As the late John Brian Harley has argued, maps are more than precise representations of physical
space; they are tools of empire that create knowledge and power through their representative
functions. Harley pioneered the field of ‘critical cartography’ and encouraged historians to engage with
the social, political, economic power of maps. Geographic and cartographic knowledge can be
interpreted in two ways: first, maps and geographic surveys attempt to reflect accurately the position
and characteristics of physical landforms, thereby bestowing on cartography the status of a science;
second, because of this perceived scientific authority, cartography can be manipulated by the mapmaker or map-reader and infused with symbolic meaning to illustrate a certain point of view, be it
political, social, or otherwise. Working from the tenets of critical cartography, this article will examine
the influence of cartographic and geographic knowledge on the founding of Halifax in 1749.
Harley concedes aff can’t control outcome
Harley, Director of the Office of Map History in the American Geographical Society
Collection, 89
[JB, Spring 1989, “Deconstructing the Map,” CARTOGRAPHICA VOL 26 No 2 , page 13-14,
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/passages/4761530.0003.008/--deconstructing-themap?rgn=main;view=fulltext, PAC]
I come now to the important distinction. What is also central to the effects of¶ maps in society is what
may be defined as the power internal to cartography. The focus of inquiry therefore shifts from the
place of cartography in a juridical system of power to the political effects of what cartographers do
when they make¶ maps. Cartographers manufacture power: they create a spatial panopticon. It is a¶
power embedded in the map text. We can talk about the power of the map just as¶ we already talk
about the power of the word or about the book as a force for¶ change. In this sense maps have
politics .76¶ It is a power that intersects and is¶ embedded in knowledge. It is universal. Foucault
writes of¶ The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything¶
under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every¶ point,
or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not¶ because it embraces
everything, but because it comes from everywhere.77¶ Power comes from the map and it traverses the
way maps are made. The key to this¶ internal power is thus cartographic process. By this I mean the
way maps are¶ compiled and the categories of information selected; the way they are generalized,¶ a set
of rules for the abstraction of the landscape; the way the elements in the¶ landscape are formed into
hierarchies; and the way various rhetorical styles that¶ also reproduce power are employed to
represent the landscape. To catalogue the¶ world is to appropriate it ,78¶ so that all these technical
processes represent acts of¶ control over its image which extend beyond the professed uses of
cartography.¶ The world is disciplined. The world is normalized. We are prisoners in its spatial¶ matrix.
For cartography as much as other forms of knowledge, " All social action¶ flows through boundaries
determined by classification schemes. "79¶ An analogy is¶ to what happens to data in the cartographer's
workshop and what happens to¶ people in the disciplinary institutions - prisons, schools, armies,
factories - described by Foucault:80¶ in both cases a process of normaliztion occurs. Or similarly,¶ just as
in factories we standardize our manufactured goods so in our cartographic¶ workshops we standardize
our images of the world. Just as in the laboratory we¶ create formulaic understandings of the processes
of the physical world so too, in¶ the map, nature is reduced to a graphic formula.81¶ The power of the
mapmaker¶ was not generally exercised over individuals but over the knowledge of the world¶ made
available to people in general. Yet this is not consciously done and it¶ transcends the simple
categories of 'intended' and 'unintended' altogether. I am¶ not suggesting that power is deliberately
or centrally exercised. It is a local¶ knowledge which at the same time is universal. It usually passes
unnoticed. The¶ map is a silent arbiter of power.¶
What have been the effects of this 'logic of the map' upon human consciousness, if I may adapt Marshall
McLuhan's phrase ("logic of print")?82¶ Like him I¶ believe we have to consider for maps the effects of
abstraction, uniformity,¶ repeatability, and visuality in shaping mental structures, and in imparting a
sense¶ of the places of the world. It is the disjunction between those senses of place, and¶ many
alternative visions of what the world is, or what it might be, that has raised questions about the effect
of cartography in society. Thus, Theodore Roszac writes The cartographers are talking about their maps
and not landscapes. That is why what they say frequently becomes so paradoxical when translated into
ordinary language. When they forget the difference between map and landscape — and when they
permit or persuade us to forget that difference — all sorts of liabilities ensue.83 One of these 'liabilities'
is that maps, by articulating the world in mass-produced and stereotyped images, express an
embedded social vision. Consider, for example, the fact that the ordinary road atlas is among the best
selling paperback books in the United States84¶ and then try to gauge how this may have affected
ordinary Americans' perception of their country. What sort of an image of America do these atlases
promote? On the one hand, there is a patina of gross simplicity. Once off the interstate highways the
landscape dissolves into a generic world of bare essentials that invites no exploration. Context is
stripped away and place is no longer important. On the other hand, the maps reveal the ambivalence of
all stereotypes. Their silences are also inscribed on the page: where, on the page, is the variety of nature,
where is the history of the landscape, and where is the space-time of human experience in such
anonymized maps?85 The question has now become: do such empty images have their consequences in
the way we think about the world? Because all the world is designed to look the same, is it easier to act
upon it without realizing the social effects? It is in the posing of such questions that the strategies of
Derrida and Foucault appear to clash. For Derrida, if meaning is undecidable so must be, pari passu, the
measurement of the force of the map as a discourse of symbolic action. In ending, I prefer to align
myself with Foucault in seeing all knowledge86¶ — and hence cartography — as thoroughly enmeshed
with the larger battles which constitute our world. Maps are not external to these struggles to alter
power relations. The history of map use suggests that this may be so and that maps embody specific
forms of power and authority. Since the Renaissance they have changed the way in which power was
exercised. In colonial North America, for example, it was easy for Europeans to draw lines across the
territories of Indian nations without sensing the reality of their political identity.87¶ The map allowed
them to say, "This is mine; these are the boundaries."88¶ Similarly, in innumerable wars since the
sixteenth century it has been equally easy for the generals to fight battles with colored pins and dividers
rather than sensing the slaughter of the battlefield.89¶ Or again, in our own society, it is still easy for
bureaucrats, developers and 'planners' to operate on the bodies of unique places without measuring
the social dislocations of 'progress.' While the map is never the reality, in such ways it helps to create
a different reality. Once embedded in the published text the lines on the map acquire an authority that
may be hard to dislodge. Maps are authoritarian images. Without our being aware of it maps can
reinforce and legitimate the status quo. Sometimes agents of change, they can equally become
conservative documents. But in either case the map is never neutral. Where it seems to be neutral it is
the sly "rhetoric of neutrality"90 that is trying to persuade us.
No Solvency
Mediated ocean encounters can’t overcome landed thinking
Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Cardiff University, & Peters,
Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, 2014
[Jon & Kimberly, Water Worlds Human Geographies of the Ocean, p. 9 -10, J.J.]
The alternative, if one is to write about the ocean as a non-objectified arena, is to approach it as a
space that is not so much known as experienced; less a space that we live on (or, more often, gaze at)
than one that we live in; less a two-dimensional surface than a four-dimensional sphere; a space that
we think from (Anderson 2012).
However, there are two obstacles to applying this perspective to ocean-space. The first is that the
ocean, as a material space, is particularly difficult to grasp. As Massey (2005) has demonstrated, a
representation of space extracted from time obscures the social processes that constitute space (and
time). Therefore, a point on and, as represented on a map, or, for that matter, in a planning
document, is a false staticization of social processes. The same is certainly true for a point in the
ocean. However, unlike a point on land (unless one thinks in geological time), the representation of a
point in ocean-space is also a false staticization of geophysical processes. The ocean is constituted by
vectors of movement - tides, currents, and waves - but these vectors do not simply occur in the ocean;
they are the ocean (Steinberg 2011). As such, it is impossible to 'locate' a point at sea as an actual
material lace. Baudrillard's (2001) observation about the map preceding territory is as true at sea as it
is on land. But in the ocean there is a further iteration because the territory subsequently washes
away the map. Thus we can never truly 'locate' ourselves within the ocean. Or, if we must locate
ourselves, we require a different kind of 'map'.
And this connects to the second problem that emerges as we approach the ocean: Our encounters with
the sea are always mediated. Whether by ships, scuba tanks, surfboards, or bodily movements, as well
as, less physically, by stories, memories, sea shanties, fears, or dreams, our encounters with the sea are
never 'pure'. There is always an outer layer between us and the sea that keeps us - and our
experiences and thoughts - afloat. As countless philosophers, most notably Kant (1999), have shown,
this is a problem endemic to humans regardless of their environment. But it is particularly profound at
sea, where both survival and interpretation require reliance on resources that we are aware we have
borrowed from somewhere else.
To understand the subjectivity of the map, we should focus on the relationships things
have with each other
Wood, Cartographer and Fels North Carolina State University GIS Program Graduate 8
[Denis; John; “The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World,” Cartographica
Volume 43, Issue 3, page 191-192, accessed via ebscohost, PAC]
This is there – that tree – and this is there and this is there:¶ through spatial magic the existence of
the tree is¶ transmuted into the existence of a forest, the existence¶ of the forest is transfigured into
the existence of an¶ ecosystem, the existence of the ecosystem is transmogrified into the existence of
nature. Nature. In space. As a¶ spatial thing.¶ But the map can’t leave well enough alone. It wouldn’t
be¶ a map if it did. If it stopped at this atomic level – at the¶ level of spatialized thing – the map would
amount to a¶ kind of spatial ontology. What makes the map a map is its¶ exploitation of spatialized
things – themselves propositions (this is there) – as the subjects of yet higher order¶ propositions
(this is there and therefore it is also ...). The¶ map is these propositions. Technically, a proposition is
a¶ statement in which the subject is affirmed or denied by its¶ predicate (this is there). Take this
ginseng plant. The map¶ affirms of this ginseng plant (the proposition’s subject)¶ that it is, and
therefore that it is also in, which is to say of,¶ the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (the
proposition’s predicate). It could be the other way around (there¶ is this). The map equally affirms of
the park (the new¶ proposition’s subject) that it is, and therefore that it also¶ contains ginseng (the new
proposition’s predicate). Either¶ way the map links the plant and the park.¶ In so doing it connects the
plant to the system of rules and¶ regulations that is just another way of saying ‘‘national¶ park.’’ The
park is not a collection of trees, shrubs, and¶ other wildlife. That would just be a forest. The park is
a¶ way of relating to trees, shrubs, and other wildlife . These¶ ways of relating are codified in rules and
regulations.¶ Some of these forbid the culling of ginseng. To cull¶ ginseng in the Great Smoky Mountains
National Park is¶ therefore to poach. To cull ginseng outside the park, say¶ across the road in a national
forest (Pisgah or Nantahala),¶ or on private land, is either to harvest or to steal,¶ depending on how
the map in question links the theres of¶ the plants in question to the relevant systems of rules and¶
regulations, codes and laws (to the relevant property¶ rights). In the national forest, where trees can be
cut,¶ animals hunted, and plants gathered and sold, anyone can¶ get a permit to cull ginseng. Poaching
from private land,¶ on the other hand, is a larceny.¶ Note that at this point a territory has been invoked.
It has¶ a national park, national forests, and parcels of private¶ property. These are all equivalently
subjects of different¶ propositions made by the maps that invoke the territory.¶ It is through the
simultaneous affirmation of these¶ propositions that the territory as such is brought into¶ being.
What assures us that the propositions are true?¶ That they state facts? Only the social assent given
them, the¶ confirmation by the courts and by the court of public¶ opinion, the voice of newspapers,
and friends: ‘‘You¶ shouldn’t have been in the park. You should have stayed¶ in the forest on the other
side of the road.’’
No solvency – Aff is Landed
Aff remains trapped in landed thinking
Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cardiff, UK,
Peters, Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, UK., 2014
[Dr. Jon, Dr. Kimberley, February 2014, Ashgate, “Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the
Ocean,” http://www.ashgate.com/pdf/SamplePages/Water-Worlds-Human-Geographies-ofthe-Ocean-Intro.pdf, accessed 6-27-14, J.J.]
According to Raban, this intimate knowing of water worlds was supplanted in the West by the advent
of modern technology, starting with the use of a compass and sextant and extending through to
twenty-first century exploitation of satellite telemetry and geographical positioning systems. For
Raban, ‘the arrival of the magnetic compass caused a fundamental rift in the relationship between
man [sic] and sea’ (1999: 95). Possession of a compass, rendered obsolete a great body of inherited,
instinctual knowledge, and rendered the sea itself – in fair weather, at least – as a void, an empty
space to be traversed by a numbered rhumb line. (1999: 97) Yet, as this volume demonstrates, there
remains an embodied knowledge waiting to surface in Western (as well as non-Western)
contemporary engagements with the water. Many individuals and cultures now understand and
experience the sea as a ‘place’ with character, agency and personality (see Laloe, Anderson, Merchant,
Hallaire and McKay, this volume). As Anderson explains with respect to surfing practice, when
encountering and riding a wave, boarders experience ‘stoke’, a ‘“feeling of intense elation’”, ‘“a fully
embodied feeling of satisfaction, joy and pride’” (2012: 576, citing Evers 2006: 229–300). As such, this
volume examines how humans do not just imagine water worlds, they actively engage with them in a
wholly embodied way. Such embodied practice with water makes possible the writing of new
corporeal experiences, impossible to fathom through landed, grounded explorations alone.
Cartography of Debate
Aff uses ocean as simply site to explore landed live, recreates ocean inferiority
Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cardiff, UK,
Peters, Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, UK., 2014
[Dr. Jon, Dr. Kimberley, February 2014, Ashgate, “Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the
Ocean,” http://www.ashgate.com/pdf/SamplePages/Water-Worlds-Human-Geographies-ofthe-Ocean-Intro.pdf, accessed 6-27-14, J.J.]
Although using the sea as a conceptual device to understand such processes is an important objective,
such studies nevertheless serve to reinforce the apparent superiority of landed life to the detriment of
investigation into the sea in and of itself. To be clear, this is not to advocate that water worlds are
taken as a ‘perfect and absolute’ bounded space to examine in opposition to the attention paid to the
land. Indeed, much of the richness of recent work that has incorporated the sea demonstrates how
water worlds are spaces across which new connections, knowledges and experiences are realized (see
Armitage and Braddick 2002, Featherstone 2005, Lambert 2005, Ogborn 2002). Indeed, the sea is a
space intrinsically connected to and absorbed within a broader network of spaces (earth and air)
which are also, likewise, porous, open and convergent with each other. However, we do argue that
oceans and seas are recognized as equally fundamental within processes of socio-cultural, political
and economic transformation, rather than acting merely as conceptual devices for understanding
those processes. Accordingly, we contend (along with others, Steinberg 2001, Lambert et al. 2006) that
where the seas feature in scholarship, they are not merely present as a secondary concern, but are
fully folded into geographical research, ‘demonstrating the potential – perhaps even freedom –
offered by the sea’ (Lambert et al. 2006: 480).
Borderlands Mestiza Identity Bad
Metaphorical readings of the “borderlands” displace the cultural reality of the site in
favor a particular vision that silences the Mexican perspective
Vaquera-Vásquez, Assistant Professor of Hispanic Southwest Studies, ’98 (Santiago,
“WANDERING IN THE BORDERLANDS: MAPPING AN IMAGINATIVE GEOGRAPHY OF THE BORDER”, Latin
American Issues, Texas A&M - Latin American Issues 14 Article 6, AA).
http://sites.allegheny.edu/latinamericanstudies/latin-american-issues/volume-14/#article-vi)
In contemporary cultural theory, the metaphor of the Borderlands has become a repository in which
all manners of cultural Otherness is contained. The assumption is that "border thinking" posits a
contestatory space for emerging cultures; it shapes the concepts of national and cultural authenticity
and promotes global and transnational processes. The border has become referred to so often, as Trinh
T. Minh-ha notes, that "it already runs the risk of being reduced to yet another harmless catchword
expropriated and popularized among progressive thinkers" (2). And yet, the Borderlands metaphor
resonates even more at the end of the century, when borders are continually crossed and recrossed. In
focusing on geographic borderlands, more specifically, the borderlands between Mexico and the United
States, metaphorical readings often displace the cultural reality of the site in favor of a particular
border vision. In cultural discourse on the US/Mexico Borderlands, the dominant inscriptions are most
often that of the Chicano and that of a global communal space. The region has been variously encoded
as Aztlán--the pre-Columbian mythic past which is the cornerstone of the Chicano movement--and more
recently as "Borderlands," the universal cultural construct representing the encounter of diverse
cultures, genders, social classes, and world-views. As observed by Claire Fox, the Borderlands has come
to replace Aztlán as "the metaphor of choice to designate a communal space" (61). This favoring of a
universal reading of the Borderlands in contemporary criticism tends towards the collapsing of the
distinct geographic differences between border regions and the abrogation of the cultural production
of writers and critics in that region for an authentication of the border "reality" through a small
number of primarily Chicano critics and writers. In this appropriation of the border, the Mexican
perspective is largely silenced; there has been little interest in promoting the vision of the border as
viewed from the northern Mexican border provinces.1 As a result, the image of the borderlands that is
generally preferred is far removed from the multi-faceted reality of the site, a fact which puts into
question the validity of the Borderlands metaphor: To what degree does current discourse on the
Borderlands illuminate the border region, and to what degree does it obscure the very region to which
much of this discourse is addressed? The present work aims to redress this oversight by focusing on the
diverse "imaginative geographies" which arise from the Borderlands. In so doing, the work contributes
to the formulation of a more extensive and complete account of border culture in general, and of the
US/Mexico border in particular.
The adoption of the mestiza identity erases all cultural traditions and history where it
becomes one disembodied metaphor anyone can claim.
Donadey , Department of European Studies and Women’s Studies at SDSU,‘7 (Anne,
Department of European Studies and Women’s Studies at San Diego State University, “Overlapping and
Interlocking Frames for Humanities Literature Studies: Assia Djebar, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Gloria Anzaldua,” College
Literature, Fall, Volume: 34(4), p. 23,AA)
In an important essay on the centrality of Anzaldúa’s work, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano cautions against
“universalizing the theory of mestiza or border consciousness, which the text painstakingly grounds in
specific historical and cultural experiences” (1998, 13) in order to preclude “[a]ppropriative readings” in
which everyone becomes a mestiza and difference and specificity are erased (14; see also Phelan 1997;
Castillo 2006). While I agree with Yarbro-Bejarano that what Emma Pérez (1999) would call Anzaldúa’s
“decolonial imaginary” should not be flattened out by a post-modern translation of the concept of
borderlands that would erase its historical and cultural grounding by turning it into a disembodied
metaphor that all can come to claim, it is also important to remember that Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La
Frontera has at least two levels of address: one deals with the specificity of the Chicana/o history in the
U.S./Mexican borderlands; the other seeks to make a space for Chicanas/os and others whose identities
cannot be reduced to binaries in a variety of locations, including the academy. Anzaldúa’s first words in
Borderlands/La Frontera emphasize this very multiplicity of addresses: “The actual physical borderland
that I’m dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological
borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest.”
(1999, 19). Thinking of academic fields of study through the model of borders and borderlands is, I
believe, a way to follow up on an important insight of Anzaldúa’s, rather than an appropriation of her
work.
Their border analogy is ridiculous – not only are all borders different, but their silly
comparison to T devalues the experiences of migrants
Vila, Associate Professor of Sociology at the UT San Antonio,05 - (Pablo, “Conclusion: The
Limits of American Border Theory,” Ethnography at the Border, Ed. Pablo Vila, p.307-315,AA)
After dominating the field for some time, this corpus of work has come under criticism in recent years. This criticism does not deny the
pathbreaking character of those books but seeks to address several short- comings that have now become apparent. As Heyman points out, "A
single-image representing grand theoretical assertions is too general for the political and economic environment
of the border. I propose that we specify our analytical tools for the border: that is, that we respect the concretely located
nature of the Mexico-U.S. border" (1994, 43). Thus several authors have lately advanced different criticisms of mainstream border
theory. First, some Mexican scholars (Tabuenca, Barrera) have complained that the U.S.-Mexico border most of this work portrays
with such theo- retical sophistication has little resemblance to the border they experience from the other side of the
(literal) fence. Second, other writers have noted the exclusionary character of border studies and theory exemplified in these major works
and claim that current mainstream border theory essentializes the cultures that must be crossed . Third, as I claim
hereafter, in the vast majority of recent border scholarship, there is a general failure to pursue the theoretical
possibility that fragmentation of experience can lead to the reinforcement of borders instead of an
invitation to cross them. Thus crossing borders, and not reinforcing borders, is the preferred metaphor in current border studies and
theory. Fourth, a corollary of the previous trend is the tendency to construct the border crosser or the hybrid (in some cases the Latin American
inter- national immigrant in general, but in others the Chicano in particular— at least in the books I am criticizing here) into a new "privileged
subject of history." Fifth, border
studies have recently moved from the study of is- sues related to the U.S.-Mexico border
in particular to broader themes, in which the metaphor of borders is used to represent any situation
where limits are involved. Border studies thus takes as its own object of inquiry any physical or psychic
space about which it is possible to address problems of boundaries: borders among different countries, borders
among ethnicities within the United States, borders between genders, borders among disciplines, and the like. Borderlands
and border crossings seem to have become ubiquitous terms to represent the experience of (some)
people in a postmodern world described as fragmented and continually producing new borders that
must again and again be crossed. And if current border studies and theory propose that borders are everywhere,
the border-crossing experience is in some instances assumed to be similar: that is, it seems that for the "border crosser"
or the "hybrid," the experience of moving among different disciplines, different ethnicities, and different
countries and cultures is not dissimilar in character (Grossberg 1996). This approach not only homogenizes
distinctive experiences but also homogenizes borders.' Sixth, there is a tendency in current border studies and theory to
confiise the sharing of a culture with the sharing of an identity, so that use of the
"third country" metaphor promotes the
idea that Fronterizo Mexicans and Mexican Americans construct their social and cultural identities in similar
ways. My criticism here is that it is quite possible to share aspects of the same culture while developing quite different narrative identities, to
the point, in some instances, where the "other kind of Mexican" is constructed as the abject "other." Finally, in some extreme circumstances
and in particular locales, these theoretical processes have developed a version of identity politics on the U.S.-Mcxico border that rely on the
metaphor of "brotherhood"-— meaning the purportedly intrinsic connections between Mexican na- tionals, Mexican immigrants, and Chicanos.
Yet because that brotherhood
does not exist in particular border situations (as exemplified, for instance, in Mexican
American support for Operation Blockade in the region dealt with in this collection), this form of identity politics is doomed to
failure.
Border analogies lead to poor analysis about oppressive structures – turns the case
Ang, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Western Sydney,98 -, Nepean (Ien,
“Doing cultural studies at the crossroads,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 1 Article 1, p. 27-28,AA)
As I have already suggested, an explicitly comparative e perspective is called for here, as the strategy of comparison implies an awareness of
difference as its episte- mological stimulus while at the same time, in its very requirement of juxtaposing at least two realities, being a guard
against exaggerated notions of uniqueness and incommensurability. Thus, we
should expect as much as we can, say, from a dialogue
as much effort as we can in the substantiation and
specification of the metaphors and concepts we use to establish our common grounds. This is not altogether
between Gloria Anzaldua and Iain Chambers; and put
different from the ideal of cosmopolitalism, embraced by Bruce Robbins not, in his words, 4as a false universal1 but *as an impulse to
knowledge that is shared with others, a striving to transcend partiality that is itself partial, but no more so than the similar cognitive strivings of
many diverse peoples' (ibid.: 194). This, of course, returns us straight to the borderlands, the arena where the sharing of partial
perspectives and knowledges are supposed to take place, in what Robbins (ibid.: 196) calls 'a long-term process of translocal connecting". What
I have tried to emphasize in this chapter, however, is the practical fact that there
are limits to the sharing we can do, that there
is only so much (or so little) that we can share. Indeed, I think we could only stand to gain from the recognition that any process of
'translocal connecting' not only needs hard work, but, more importantly, can only be partial also. I would even
suggest that our crossroads encounters would be more productive if we recognize the moments of actual
disconnection rather than hold on to the abstract Utopian ideal of connection so bound up with
celebrations of the borderlands. For it is in the realization and problematization of such moments of actual
disconnection - that is, moments when the act of meaningful comparison and communication reaches its limits - that the material
consequences of difference, of the irreducible and unrepresentable specificity and particularity of 'the
local' are most bluntly exposed, but always-already within the translocal context within which that 'local' is distinctively
constituted. In short, it is at moments when comprehending my local-specific narrative becomes problematic to you, my reader, when such
comprehension seems muted because I do not seem to speak in familiar discourse, that the malleability of general
theoretical concepts such as 'race', 'nation' and 'identity', not to mention metaphors such as the
'borderlands' and the 'crossroads', becomes evident. It is the ways in which we both do and do not share these (and many
other) concepts and metaphors across local/particular/spccific boundaries that we should begin to interrogate and highlight.
Critiques
Indigenous Mapping K
Indigenous PIK
Vote neg to affirm _____ from an Indigenous starting point
Counter Cartography fails within indigenous communities—experts lose the
knowledge in translation and create a façade for western epistemology to thrive
behind and turns the case
Johnson, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Department of Anthropology and
Geography, et al, 6
[Jay T., Renee Pualani Louis, Department of Geography, Univeristy of Hawai’I at Mānoa,
Albertus Hadi Pramono, Department of Geography, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa,
“Facing the Future: Encouraging Critical Cartographic Literacies In Indigenous
Communities”, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, Volume 4,
Number 1, pg 87-88 PAC]
Many, if not most “counter-mapping” projects, are projects designed to dramatically increase the
power of people living in a mapped area to control the representations of themselves and to increase
their control of resources (Peluso, 1995: 387), and in addition assume that a basic level of Western
cartographic knowledge is sufficient for Indigenous communities to engage with this technoscience .
Many, if not most “counter-mapping” projects leave cartographic literacy to the imported ‘expert’
who attempts to translate Indigenous place biographies onto the Western map that underlies their
project. Unfortunately, as Rundstrom observes, “[the] prevailing Cartesian-Newtonian… epistemology
does not prize key characteristics of indigenous thinking, including; the principle of the ubiquity of
relatedness; non-anthropocentricity; a cyclical concept of time; a more synthetic than analytic view of
the construction of geographical knowledge; non-binary thinking; the idea that facts cannot be
dissociated from values; that precise ambiguity exists and can be advantageous; an emphasis on oral
performance and other non-inscriptive means of representation; and the presence of morality in all
actions” (1998: 7-8). Counter-mapping projects face the task of translating community information
based within these key characteristics of Indigenous thinking and when this task is left to the
uninitiated outside expert, much is lost in that translation.
One issue in Indigenous mapping projects which effectively demonstrates this loss of information in
translation is the pervasive difficulty with fixed boundaries (Brody, 1982; Chapin, 1998; Chapin et al.,
2001; Fox, 1998; Kosek, 1998; Peluso, 1995; Rundstrom, 1998). While Indigenous communities generally
recognize fluid and flexible boundaries over land and resource use, once these boundaries become
fixed within a Western cartographic representation, the fluid and flexible nature of Indigenous
thinking is lost (Fox, 1998: 3). Based on several case studies from Southeast Asia, Fox et al. (2005) have
noted that within Indigenous counter-mapping projects these newly fixed boundaries serve to shift the
social relations both within and between communities, unfortunately encouraging the development
of a notion of private property where one did not previously exist. One attempt to translate
Indigenous understandings of boundaries onto Western maps is in drawing a distinction between use
and occupancy observing that use maps generate artificial overlap (Tobias, 2000). This is one technique
which can force Indigenous knowledge to fit within the fixed boundaries of the Western map and can
provide valuable representations in legal proceedings but in the end, it is a technique which further
perpetuates the loss of Indigenous geographic knowledge. Another failure of translation can be seen in
the loss of place names and their associated role in creating and re/creating local knowledge. As Louis
has observed, “[i]n Hawaiian cartography place names are mnemonic
symbols [which when] performed in daily rituals are a conscious act of reimplacing genealogical
connections, re-creating cultural landscapes, and regenerating cultural mores” (2004: 4). With the
introduction of Western cartography, Hawaiian place names, and the essential role they have played
in ‘recreating cultural landscapes’ become the (un)intentional victims of cartographic translation. In
both examples the underlying problem is the difference of worldviews and practices in which Western
and Indigenous cartographies evolve.
Encouraging the development of critical cartographic literacy within Indigenous communities
requires more than the basic level of cartographic education developed in many, if not most
‘ counter-mapping’ projects. When these projects maintain the cartographic expertise with the
outside expert and do not encourage the development of Western cartographic literacy within
Indigenous communities they are denying these communities the ability to become agents in their
own mapping projects. The political and epistemological effects of involving outside experts in the
form of researchers, NGOs and cartographers is too often overlooked (Kosek, 1998: 4). Unfortunately,
as Rundstrom observes, “most still imagine that the production of a “one-world” view through pursuit
of countermapping projects worldwide is benign and helpful in protecting the status of others. I have
come around to thinking though, that our little habit may be just another manifestation of the White
Man’s Burden” (1998: 8).
The development of critical cartographic literacy within Indigenous communities has been the work of
a handful of cartographers, academics and organizations engaged in ‘counter-mapping’ projects, such
as the Indigenous Communities Mapping Initiative and the Aboriginal Mapping Network. Well trained
Indigenous cartographers, like Moka Apiti in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Renee Pualani Louis in Hawai‘i,
have been using their education within the Cartesian/Newtonian cartographic epistemology to
translate Indigenous geographic knowledge for Western audiences, producing autoethnographic
cartographies (see Louis, 2004; Pratt, 1992). Both the work of these organizations and Indigenous
cartographers trained in Western techniques assists in bringing a greater degree of cartographic literacy
to Indigenous communities. In the end though, we must admit as Rundstrom has, that “ countermapping and GIS can provide at best no more than a simulacrum of indigenous or non-Western
geographies ” (1998: 9). And, the initiatives encouraging critical cartographic literacy within
Indigenous communities are far from the norm among ‘counter-mapping’ projects.
Only an indigenous based method solves
-Also solves the entirety of the aff
Johnson, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Department of Anthropology and
Geography, et al, 6
[Jay T., Renee Pualani Louis, Department of Geography, Univeristy of Hawai’I at Mānoa,
Albertus Hadi Pramono, Department of Geography, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa,
“Facing the Future: Encouraging Critical Cartographic Literacies In Indigenous
Communities”, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, Volume 4,
Number 1, pg 89-90 PAC]
In order to re-educate the ‘colonized mind’ in relation to cartography’s role in colonial dispossession a
pedagogic focus is called for within ‘counter-mapping’ projects. Indigenous communities need to
become aware not only of the historical role of cartography in their dispossession but also in the ways
in which cartography continues to betray these same communities today, even when the maps/GIS
being produced are objectively intended to benefit their interests. Of course we agree with Sparke when
he says that “[s]howing how cartography can operate both for and against colonialism not only
deepens the scholarly work of critical cartography, it also counters the too-speedy denunciation of
maps and mapping as metaphors of domination” (1998: 466). Let us paint a worst case scenario though
for how the uncritical adoption of Western cartographic techniques can serve to perpetuate colonial
dispossessions. First, putting indigenous knowledge into a GIS makes it tangible and accessible. It may
even diminish it, as Rundstrom has observed, because it is no longer contextually defined (1998).
Secondly, storing information within a GIS makes it easier for that information to be used beyond its
original intent and context. Lastly, because the source and recipient of the information is separated in
space and time it becomes more difficult to impose moral restraint on its use. Indigenous
communities need to understand the full implications of their engagement with Western cartographic
techniques and we believe that can be achieved through education that encourages a critical
cartographic literacy.
We envision two different but not mutually exclusive paths toward creating critical cartographic literacy
within Indigenous communities. First, as has been alluded to, ‘counter-mapping’ projects need to make
critical education, preferably through a Freirean ‘problem posing’ technique, an integral part of their
program. Here the outsiders and Indigenous community members, as knowing Subjects, learn together
to problematize the spatial realities represented within the mapping process and investigate the
impacts of this process on Indigenous mapping . In this process both groups gain and give new
meanings to the world which feeds into their map production. To date, dialogue in counter-mapping
has been problematic because many researchers/map makers envision Western cartographic
techniques as the perfect/sole solution to the land and resource dispossessions of the communities in
which they are working. To truly engage in a dialogic counter mapping process, it would be beneficial
if outside experts engage in identifying their own ‘colonized mentality’ before attempting to create
critical consciousness among the community. They should embrace a ‘border crossing’ in order to move
beyond their own cultural roots allowing them to feel comfortable within various zones of cultural
diversity (Giroux, 1995). This means that outside cartographers/mapmakers must understand
Indigenous cartographies and make every effort to incorporate these diverse knowledge systems into
a ‘new’ mapping endeavor which will strive toward a post-colonial, post-modern cartography
(Turnbull, 1998). This understanding though may require an extensive apprenticeship within which
outsiders learn the language, cultural values and knowledge systems that underlie Indigenous
cartographies.
The second path we envision for bringing critical cartographic literacy into Indigenous communities
entails community members becoming adept in the Cartesian/Newtonian cartographic epistemology.
Skilled Indigenous cartographers can act as advocates as well as technicians for their own and other
Indigenous communities. They can also become key agents and educators within Indigenous
communities, building critical cartographic literacy through their understanding of the epistemological
divide between Western and Indigenous cartographic systems. These steps toward critical
cartographic literacy are only the beginning of what will be required for Indigenous communities in
their response to and engagement with Western cartographic technologies. We envision that the
development of a critical consciousness in relation to cartographic representation will lay the
foundation to addressing more concrete issues related to this engagement such as reflexivity
concerning the use of these technologies and the internal community critique of the maps produced.
Perspectives of the Pacific are flawed—need to take indigenous mapping into perspective
Jolly, Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia 7
(Margaret Jolly, “Imagining Oceania: Indigenous and Foreign Representations of a Sea of Islands”, The
Contemporary Pacific, Volume 19, Number 2, 508–545, accessed 6/30/14) NM
In imagining any region of the world today we often start with cartography—
with a map.1 Yet the maps we draw are never reflections of the world as it is, but always partial
representations of it—representations powerfully shaped by who we are, where and when we are, and
what motivates our interests in that place.2 Maps of Japan appropriate to tourist sojourning, to seismic
charting, to military conquest, or to developmentalist economics would differ radically.3 In this article I
look at several maps of the Pacific, generated in different places and times and for different purposes.
But let me start with two maps that derive from the late eighteenth century. The first is the map of
Tupaia, a man from Ra‘iatea, priest of the ‘Oro religion, member of the arioi cult, and adviser to the
chiefs of Tahiti.4 (See figure 1). Tupaia joined the Endeavour when Captain Cook left Tahiti in the Society
Islands in July 1769. Cook thought him immensely intelligent and knowledgeable both about the
geography of the islands and the varied customs of its peoples. Joseph Banks sought his assistance as an
interpreter
and desired to take him back to England as a “curiosity.” Unlike Omai (see Hetherington 2001; Jolly nd
b), Tupaia never made it to England; he died en route, in Batavia in December 1770. But some of his
extensive knowledge of his island world was passed on as a map. The original drawing was lost, but
several copies were made, including the version published in Johann Reinhold Forster’s magnum opus,
Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World (Forster 1778; 1996, 304–305). Forster and his
son Georg were the naturalists on the second of Cook’s voyages—voyages that generated another
cartography of the Pacific, as reflected in a map of the tracks of the sailing ships on Cook’s three
voyages. (See figure 2). I juxtapose these two maps to ponder the relationship between indigenous and
foreign representations of Oceania and to situate such representations in the changing histories of
relations between Pacific peoples and strangers, between Islanders and those who are called (tongue-incheek, in an important volume [Borofsky 2000]), “Outlanders.” Indigenous and foreign representations
of the place and its peoples are now not so much separate visions as they are “double visions,” in the
sense of both stereoscopy and blurred edges. Foreign knowledges of the Pacific have both used and
aspired to eclipse indigenous knowledges, as is obvious from the earliest forms of ethnology in the
region.5 Indigenous visions have, since the late eighteenth century, been challenged and partially
transformed through encounters with the imagined cartographies of travelers, missionaries, traders,
planters, and other agents of colonialism, capitalism, and development. As Tongan scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa
has suggested (1994), outsiders’ representations of the Pacific matter not just because of their
geopolitical and discursive hegemony but because Islanders have, in part, come to see themselves
through the Outlanders’ lenses. But how far and how do constructs of place and people that emanate
from “beyond the horizon” displace local visions? Tupaia’s map is a good example. Though he is the
author, this map is not his indigenous view. We will never know the details of that view, but his vision
was likely a rather differently “situated knowledge.”6 I suspect it located the observer not soaring high
above the islands, powerfully riding on the confident coordinates of longitude and latitude, plotting a
changing global position relative to east and west, north and south, but rather lying low in a canoe,
looking up at the heavens, scanning the horizon for signs of land, and navigating the powerful seas with
the embodied visual, aural, olfactory, and kinesthetic knowledge passed down through generations of
Pacific navigators. His knowledge would have been communicated to other Tahitians through
genealogical stories and chants, through the materials of the canoe and the sails, and through the
embodied practice of navigation (see Finney 1992; Finney and others 1994; and the film Sacred Vessels
[Diaz 1997]).7 Such full-bodied knowledge is here etiolated and converted through the agency of a quill
and a piece of parchment into a map. Moreover, the Tahitian names and dispositions of islands are not
just written down and graphed as a map, but situated in and saturated by the discursive frame of
“discovery” of Enlightenment voyaging.8
Counter mapping projects fail to address indigenous needs
Johnson Professor of geography at the University of Kansas, Louis affiliate Researcher
Institute of Policy and Social Research University of Kansas and Promanono
department of Geography at University Hawai‘i at Mānoa, ‘6
(Jay, T, Renee Pualani, Albertus Hadi, Facing the Future: Encouraging Critical Cartographic Literacies, In
Indigenous Communities, 2006, P. 87-88, Accessed 7/1/14, ESB)
Many, if not most “counter-mapping” projects, are projects designed to dramatically increase the power
of people living in a mapped area to control the representations of themselves and to increase their
control ofresources (Peluso, 1995: 387), and in addition assume that abasiclevel of Western cartographic
knowledge is sufficient for Indigenous communities to engage with this techno- science. Many, if not
most “counter-mapping” projects leave cartographic literacy to the imported ‘expert’ who attempts to
translate Indigenous place biographies onto the Western map that underlies their project.
Unfortunately, as Rundstrom observes, “[the] prevailing Cartesian- Newtonian... epistemology does not
prize key characteristics of indigenous thinking, including; the principle of the ubiquity of relatedness;
non-anthropocentricity; a cyclical concept of time; a more synthetic than analytic view of the
construction of geographical knowledge; non-binary thinking; the idea that facts cannot be
dissociated from values; that precise ambiguity exists and can be advantageous; an emphasis on oral
performance and other non-inscriptive means of representation; and the presence of morality in all
actions” (1998: 7-8). Counter-mapping projects face the task of translating community information
based within these key characteristics of Indigenous thinking and when this task is left to the
uninitiated outside expert, much is lost in that translation. One issue in Indigenous mapping projects
which effectively demonstrates this loss of information in translation is the pervasive difficulty with fixed
boundaries (Brody, 1982; Chapin, 1998; Chap in et al., 2001; Fox, 1998; Kosek, 1998; Peluso, 1995;
Rundstrom, 1998). While Indigenous communities generally recognize fluid and flexible boundaries
over land and resource use, once these boundaries become fixed with in a Western cartographic
representation, the fluid and flexible nature of Indigenous thinking is lost (ox, 1998: 3). Based on several
case studies from Southeast Asia, Fox et al. (2005) have noted that within Indigenous counter-mapping
projects these newly fixed boundaries serve to shift the social relations both within and between
communities, unfortunately encouraging the development of a notion of private property where one
did not previously exist. One attempt to translate Indigenous understandings of boundaries onto
Western maps is in drawing a distinction between use and occupancy observing that use maps generate
artificial overlap (Tobias, 2000). This is one technique which can force Indigenous know ledge to fit
within the fixed boundaries of the Western map and can provide valuable representations in legal
proceedings but in the end, it is a technique which further perpetuates the loss of Indigenous
geographic knowledge. Another failure of translation can be seen in the loss of place names and their
associated role in creating and re/creating local knowledge. As Louis has observed, “[i]n Hawaiian
cartography place names are mnemonic symbols [which when] performed in daily rituals are a conscious
act of reimplacing genealogical connections, re-creating cultural landscapes, and re- generating cultural
mores” (2004: 4). With the introduction of Western cartography, Hawaiian place names, and the
essential role they have played in ‘recreating cultural landscapes’ become the (un)intentional victims
of cartographic translation. In both examples the underlying problem is the difference of worldviews
and practices in which Western and Indigenous cartographies evolve. creating cultural landscapes’
become the (un)intentional victims of cartographic translation. In both examples the underlying
problem is the difference of worldviews and practices in which Western and Indigenous cartographies
evolve
AT: Perm
Indigenous use of Western based mapping reinstates colonialism—only a historical
investigation of mapping solves
Johnson, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Department of Anthropology and
Geography, et al, 6
[Jay T., Renee Pualani Louis, Department of Geography, Univeristy of Hawai’I at Mānoa,
Albertus Hadi Pramono, Department of Geography, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa,
“Facing the Future: Encouraging Critical Cartographic Literacies In Indigenous
Communities”, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, Volume 4,
Number 1, pg 81-82 PAC]
As Indigenous academics engaged with mapping initiatives and working as cartographers within
various Indigenous identified communities across North America, Indonesia and the Pacific, we have
become concerned about the ways in which these communities, and other Indigenous communities
around the world, are engaging with Western cartographic technologies. The mapping techniques and
GIS software being used by Indigenous communities around the world to establish land claims, map
culturally important sites and protect community resources, has a long and distinct history; a genealogy
intrinsically intertwined within Western knowledge systems (see Harley and Woodward, 1987; Harley,
1988; Peluso, 1995). What we are labeling here as ‘Western cartography’ is not only founded within a
Cartesian-Newtonian epistemology but is also connected with and has been informed/transformed
within both historical and current ‘contact zones’(Pratt, 1992) of the colonial projects of the West. To
engage the technologies of Western cartography is to involve our communities and their knowledge
systems with a science implicated in the European colonial endeavor (Harley, 1992b) and is a decision
which should be made only after examining not only our past experiences of colonial
mapping/surveying but also the long history of Western cartographic traditions.
While we caution Indigenous communities about how they engage with Western cartography, we also
recognize the value these technologies have brought to the struggles of our communities. One cannot
deny the value of works such as the Nunavut Atlas (1992) or the mapping efforts of the Wet’suwet’sen
and Gitxsan (Sparke, 1998) in establishing Indigenous connections to lands, resources and cultural sites.
Our aim in this paper is to encourage the development of a critical literacy, concerning how
Indigenous peoples engage with and employ modern cartography and GIS, and how in this process we
safeguard and encourage a literate continuation of our own Indigenous cartographic traditions.
Our paper is inspired by the Hawaiian concept of ‘facing future’, a concept based within an
epistemology born in the navigational exploits of the colonizers of the Pacific. The concepts of ‘past’
and ‘future’ are explained by Hawaiians using bodily directions, the front of the body faces the ‘past’
while the back faces ‘future’. Hawaiians ‘face’ their ‘future’ with their backs because the future is an
unknown. On the other hand, ‘past’ is knowable; it can be ‘seen’ in front of each of us, shaping our
character and consciousness. Hawaiians believe that knowing who they are, genealogically, and
where they came from, geographically and metaphysically, makes them capable of making more
informed decisions about the direction to move in the future. By allowing this concept to guide our
work we are focusing our attention first on Western cartography’s history, including its role in creating
and perpetuating European colonialism (Harley, 1992b: 532) and second on the history of Indigenous
cartographies.
Object Oriented Ontology
Link: Critical Cartography
The 1AC’s obsession with the way humans force their ideologies onto maps treats the
map itself as a blank slate waiting for human intervention. This locks in an
anthropocentric frame of thought that ignores the importance of non-humans
Bryant, Collin College Philosophy Professor, 2012
[Levi, September, “The Gravity of Things: An Introduction To Onto-Cartography,”
http://larvalsubjects.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/bryantontocartographies.pdf, accessed: 7/1/14, JO]
I begin with Einstein’s general theory of relativity and theory of gravity because it provides us with a
helpful analogy for understanding the basic theoretical claims of onto-cartography. Onto-cartography
is both a theory of the space-time of objects as they interact and a method for mapping these
interactions. To be sure, “gravity”, as I am using the term here is a metaphor—or, more optimistically, a
philosophical concept in Deleuze’s sense of the word – chosen to draw attention to how things and signs
structure spatio-temporal relations or paths along which entities move and become. In terms more
familiar within currently existing theory, we could refer to “gravity” as “force” or “power”. If, however, I
have chosen to speak of gravity rather than power, then this is because the concept of power within
the world of philosophy and theory has come to be too anthropocentric , immediately drawing
attention to sovereigns exercising power, class power, symbolic power, and things such as micropower and biopower. While I have no wish to abandon forms of analysis such as those found in Marx,
Foucault, and Bourdieu, the manner in which these anthropological connotations have become
sedimented within the institutions that house the humanities, both at the level of training and
scholarship— itself a form of gravity –have rendered it difficult to imagine nonhuman things exercising
power as anything more than blank screens upon which humans project their intentions and
meanings . As Stacy Alaimo has written, “[m]atter, the vast stuff of the world and of ourselves, has
been subdivided into manageable ‘bits’ or flattened into a ‘blank slate’ for human inscription.”4 By
far, the dominant tendency of contemporary critical theory or social and political theory is to see
nonhuman entities as but blank slates upon which humans project meanings. Things are reduced to
mere carriers or vehicles of human power and meaning , without any serious attention devoted to
the differences that nonhumans contribute to social assemblages. While I have no desire to abandon
more traditional semiotically driven forms of critical analysis insofar as I believe they have made
tremendous contributions to our understanding of why our social worlds are organized as they are, it is
my hope that the term “gravity” will be foreign enough to break old, familiar habits of thought, to
overcome a certain blindness at the heart of much contemporary theory, providing us with a far richer
understanding of why social relations take the form they take, thereby expanding the possibilities of our
political interventions.
Impact: Environment
Failure to recognize humans within a broader material system ensures the total
destruction of the environment - turns the aff
Bryant, Collin College Philosophy Professor, 2014
[Levi, “Onto-cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media”, page 4, JO]
On the other hand, the shift from materialism to the discursivism of variants of historical materialism
rendered it impossible to address one of the central political issues of our time: climate change.
Thinking climate change requires thinking ecologically and thinking ecologically requires us to think
how we are both embedded in a broader natural world and how non-human things have power and
efficacy of their own. However, because we had either implicitly or explicitly chosen to reduce things
to vehicles for human discursivity, it became impossible to theorize something like climate change
because we only had culture as a category to work with. Having brought about the dissipation of the
material in the fog of binary oppositions introduced by signs, there was no longer a place for thinking
the real physical efficacy of fossil fuels, pollutants, automobiles, sunlight interacting with the albedo
of the earth, and so on. Even among the ecotheorists in the humanities we find a preference for
discussing portrayals of the environment in literature and film, rather than the role that bees play in
agriculture and the system of relations upon which they depend.
Alt: Onto-Cartography
Alt: Onto-Cartography
Bryant, Collin College Philosophy Professor, 2012
[Levi, September, “The Gravity of Things: An Introduction To Onto-Cartography,”
http://larvalsubjects.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/bryantontocartographies.pdf, accessed: 7/1/14, JO]
The "onto" of "onto-cartography" refers to the word "ontic", from the Greek ovro;, denoting materially
existing entities, substances, or objects. "Cartography", of course, is the practice of constructing or
drawing maps. An onto-cartography would thus be a map or diagram of things —and more precisely
things and signs—that exist within a field, situation, or world. By "situation" or "world" I mean an
ordered set of entities and signs that interact with one another. A world or situation is not something
other than the externally related entities and signs within it, but is identical to these entities and signs.
Onto-cartography is thus not a map of space or geography—though we can refer to a "space of things
and signs" in a given situation or field and it does help to underline the profound relevance of geography
to this project insofar as onto- cartographies are always geographically situated –but is rather a map of
things or what I call machines. In particular, an onto-cartography is a map of the spatio-temporal
gravitational fields produced by things and signs and how these fields constrain and afford
possibilities of movement and becoming.
But towards what end? When we do an onto-cartography are we merely making a list of things and
signs that exist? A list is an inventory of entities that exist within a situation, but is not yet a map or
cartography. Rather, in order for something to count as a cartography, it must show how things are
distributed and related to one another rather than merely enumerating or listing them. In particular, a
central thesis of onto-cartography is that space-time arises from things and signs. Onto-cartography is
thus the practice of mapping the spatio-temporal paths , the gravitational fields, that arise from
interactions among things. Central to this project is the recognition that things and signs produce
gravity that influence the movement and becoming of other entities. This gravity is not, of course, the
gravity of the physicist—though it would include that sort of gravity as well—but is a far broader type
gravity that influences the movements and becomings of all entities. With Einstein, onto-cartography
argues that the gravity of things and signs produce spatio-temporal paths along which entities are
both afforded certain possibilities of movement and becoming and where their possibilities of
movement and becoming are constrained. Further, with Einstein, onto-cartography rejects the notion
that there is one space-time that contains all entities, instead arguing that there are a variety of spacetimes arising from the gravity exercised by entities in a milieu or situation.
Prior question
The K is a prior question. Their affirmative can be entirely correct, but a lack of
understanding material properties leads them to just reproduce the social relations
they criticize
Bryant, Collin College Philosophy Professor, 2012
[Levi, September, “The Gravity of Things: An Introduction To Onto-Cartography,”
http://larvalsubjects.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/bryantontocartographies.pdf, accessed: 7/1/14, JO]
Attentiveness to signifying entities always raises questions about just who ideological interventions
are for. While I don’t share a number of his meta-theoretical claims, I think many of Žižek’s ideological
critiques are on target. Aping Žižek’s style, the question to ask, however, is that of precisely who these
critiques are for . We would imagine that Žižek’s critiques are directed at those who labor under these
ideologies. After all, it wouldn’t make much sense to critique an ideology if it wasn’t directed at
changing those who labor under that ideology. Yet when we reflect on Žižek’s critiques, we notice that
they require a high degree of theoretical background to be understood, requiring acquaintance with
Lacan, Hegel, and a host of other theorists. Every entity requires a sort of “program” to receive and
decipher messages of a particular sort from another entity. Reading Žižek’s work requires a particular
sort of training if the recipient is to decipher it. When we evaluate Žižek’s work by this criteria and
critique him immanently—clearly he endorses the Marxist project of not simply representing the world
but of changing it –we can ask, on material grounds, about the adequacy of his project. Such a
critique is not a critique of the accuracy of his critiques, but rather of the adequacy of his practice . It
is a question that only comes into relief when we evaluate the material properties of texts, the
entities to which they’re addressed, and the adequacy of how these texts are composed. When judged
by these criteria, we might conclude that such critiques are not addressed at those laboring under
such ideologies at all, but rather at others that possess the requisite programs to decipher these
sendings. We might thereby conclude that such a practice is actually a mechanism that reproduces
these sorts of social relations rather than transforming them as it leaves the ideology itself
untouched while simultaneously giving the ideological critic the impression that he’s intervening in
some way. Note, this critique has nothing to do with the accuracy and truth of these critiques —in
many instances, they’re quite true –but with how they materially function. Such an analysis would
then not dismiss these ideological critiques, but would instead ask what additional operations must
be engaged in to insure that the critiques reach their proper destination and produce effects within
those networks.
AT- Perm
The perm fails. The alt requires the suspension of all other modes of thought, or else
risks footnoting the importance of material distribution
Bryant, Collin College Philosophy Professor, 2012
[Levi, September, “The Gravity of Things: An Introduction To Onto-Cartography,”
http://larvalsubjects.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/bryantontocartographies.pdf, accessed: 7/1/14, JO]
This might appear to be a minor, obvious point, but I believe it has tremendous implications. What we
need is a sort of inverted transcendental ἐποχή [epoch], that for the moment suspends any focus on
the sense of signifying entities , instead attending solely to their material or embodied being. This
would entail that like the distribution of a virus or microbe in a particular environment, signs also
have an epidemiological distribution in the world, a geography of where they are located in the world.
Because every text requires a material embodiment in order to travel throughout the world, they will be
located in particular times and places. To see why this important take projects such as critiques of
ideology. Critiques of ideology tend to focus on the incorporeal dimension of cultural artifacts and
practices— their meaning or sense — ignoring the material distribution of ideologies. While I do not
doubt the veracity of many of these critiques, the problem is that in focusing on the incorporeal
dimension of ideological texts, their sense or meaning, these critiques behave as if these ideologies
exist everywhere. Yet different places have different ideologies because ideologies, like anything else,
are spatio- temporally situated entities. Just as we wouldn't want to spray a pesticide for West Nile
Virus in an area where West Nile Virus doesn't exist, it is a waste of time and effort to critique an
ideology when it doesn't exist in this particular place. We need means of identifying where the
signifying constellations are and of discerning ways of intervening in those particular signifying
constellations.
Capitalism
Cap Link – Identity Politics
[Cap link to identity politics]
Rectenwald, NYU Liberal Studies Professor, 2013
Michael, 12-2-13, The North Star, “What’s Wrong With Identity Politics (and Intersectionality Theory)? A
Response to Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” (And Its Critics),”
http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11411, 7-1-14, KMM]
Identity politics and its variants developed during a moment when the Marxist critique of capitalism
had lost a degree of credibility due to the fiascos of the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere. Labor
movements had given way to the New Left movements that attracted students and others toward
liberal variants of political activism. Housed in the academy, theory became abstracted from social
relations and the social totality. In a field of free play, divorced from working class politics, it focused on
various kinds of putative determinations, including those of language, rationality, identity, “power”
(vaguely conceived), and other “prison houses,” as Frederic Jameson referred to the categories of
poststructuralist containment. Identity politics marked the limits of postmodern political engagement.
But, identity politics has not since “been absorbed into capital,” as suggested in the quote above. As
forms of alienated labor, capitalist relations have always determined them. They have been the
products of capitalism from the outset. By treating such categories as ends in themselves, therefore,
a politics based on identities necessarily leads down the blind alley of reification. That is, such politics,
even when “successful,” necessarily ends at the limits of identity itself. The problem is, while
theoretically, we might all wake up tomorrow to changed identities, or to changed conditions for our
identities, we would still be exploited under capitalism. Running the circuits of capital from
production through consumption, identity can only lead us back to the office, the factory, or the
streets, allowing at best our coalescence around particular consumer cultures.
CounterPlans
CP – Individual Counter Mapping/PIC USfg
Maps are the crux of a movement towards a more people centered epistemology. Our
movement is key to seize power from oppressive technocratic structures
Crampton, Associate Professor of Geography, University of Kentucky, 10
[Jeremy W, Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS, page 25-26, PAC]
The crux of the challenge that these recent developments pose lies in the way that cartography has
long been practiced. For most of its history mapping has been the practice of powerful elites – the socalled “sovereign map” (Jacob 2006). The sovereign¶ map for Jacob refers to the fact that the map was a
dominant political force; one which held sway as a way of knowing the world (even as we look back on
them¶ now and see just how inaccurate they were). Maps held power; they were sovereign. But maps
were sovereign also in the sense that it was literally only sovereigns and those in power who made
and used maps. Maps were elitist and were mademfor elites. Nation states, governments, the
wealthy, and the powerful all dominated¶ the production of maps (Buisseret 1992). For example
Buisseret tells the story of¶ a Lucayan Indian who was brought back to Spain by Christopher Columbus
and¶ presented to King Ferdinand. The Indian was able to lay out on the table a rough¶ map of the
Caribbean using stones as markers, and it seems likely that Columbus¶ and his crew benefited from this
indigenous knowledge in making their maps for¶ the royal court (Buisseret 2003).¶ Map sovereignty is
now being challenged by the emergence of a new populist cartography in which the public is gaining
(some) access to the means of production of maps. This is certainly not an isolated development. It is
part of a larger movement of counter-knowledges that are occurring in the face of ever-increasing
corporatization of information such as the consolidation of the news media into the¶ hands of a few
global multinationals and their dominance by fairly narrow interests.¶ The internet and web, blogs, and
the netroots (online political activism) are all¶ reasons for this “people-powered” control of information
(Armstrong and Zúniga¶ 2006). In this chapter I focus on some of the exciting new developments that
can¶ help create, visualize, and disseminate geographical information. And yet at the same¶ time many of
these developments are in the hands of quasi-monopolistic media companies¶ (Google, Yahoo,
Microsoft). We’ll ask what it means for traditional expert driven GIS and mapping if “map amateurs are
reshaping the world of mapmaking.” Is there a tension between this and traditional GIS? What do these
tools offer – only visualization and sharing or analysis as well? And if so, will they transform or even
replace GIS as we know it? In sum: is there a new politics of knowledge?