Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age

Pol Bargués-Pedreny is Research Fellow at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, SpainDavid Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster, UKElena Simon is PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield, UK, and research assistant at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg, Germany

"Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age interrogates how mapping – seemingly simple yet profoundly complex - drives the way we understand and make our world. Historical exemplars lay bare how mapping actively builds and contests conceptions of the world. Mapping permeates and evolves with institutional practices and governance and, as this book shows, mapping is appropriated and deployed to bring about new forms of politics, countering and empowering and visualizing a more just world." — John Krygier, Ohio Wesleyan University, USA"Produced by an outstanding and eclectic group of established and emergent scholars and practitioners, this compelling volume is a must-read for those committed to understanding how mapping and governing are institutionalized, interrelated, and contested, and how, as a radical and open practice, mapping might provide opportunities to imagine critically and creatively different futures." — Elaine Stratford, Institute for the Study of Social Change, University of Tasmania, Australia"Mapping is not what it used to be! This collection of essays by scholars from across the social sciences and humanities shows why politics in the twenty-first century has been transformed by digital technologies, which reconfigure the knowledge practices through which the world is made knowable as a scene for intervention - by those seeking to impose order on an uncertain future as well as by those seeking to imagine alternative futures." — Clive Barnett, Professor of Geography and Social Theory, University of Exeter, UK"Contestation, governance and imaginaries are the stuff of politics. They are also the themes around which this volume presents its thought provoking arguments regarding a range of specific, situated, ongoing and embodied mapping practices. The result is a refreshingly political probing of the significance of the digital."— Anna Leander, Graduate Institute Geneva, Switzerland"A book with an impressive array of new ideas from an interesting collection of contributors. The editors are to be commended on their creativity in assembling such a valuable multidisciplinary examination of cartographic power in the new digital world. I find it highly encouraging that the collection draws lessons and perspectives from historic cartography to look forward and better describe the impacts of mapping practices that are coming into being now and in the near future." — Martin Dodge, Department of Geography, University of Manchester, UK"Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age shows us that maps reveal as much about human self-understanding as they do about the world. As mapping is transformed by digital technology we will find new possibility and new peril; this book is vital for understanding the political world we inhabit today." — Joe Hoover, Queen Mary University of London, UK

• List of Figures List of ContributorsAcknowledgmentsMAPPING AND POLITICS IN THE DIGITAL AGE: AN INTRODUCTIONPol Bargués-Pedreny, David Chandler and Elena SimonI. CONTESTATIONS1. On the epistemology of maps and mapping: De la Cosa, Mercator and the making of spatial imaginariesLuis Lobo-Guerrero2. From Cartographic Gaze to contestatory cartographiesDoug Specht and Anna Feigenbaum3. Horizontalism is a mapNicholas Michelsen4. (Analog) mapping the knowable and ways of knowing: Relational ontologies of chickens and ancestors in rural Sierra LeoneCaitlin RyanII. GOVERNANCE5. Mapping epidemics: securitisation, risk and geopoliticsAdam Ferhani and Gregory Stiles6. About ‘terms and conditions’: The Aadhar biometric identification programme as a mapping analyticHarshavardhan Bhat7. Mapping as governance in an age of autonomic computing: technology, virtuality and utopiaAntoinette Rouvroy8. Mapping without the world and the poverty of digital humanitarians Pol Bargués-PedrenyIII. IMAGINARIES9. Post(mortem) cartographies: Reframing the cartographic exhaustion in the age of mapping’s excessLaura Lo Presti10. Mapping beyond the human: correlation and the governance of effectsDavid Chandler11. Map-i: Mercator revisited: from mapping modernity to postmodern creative cartographiesInge Panneels12. Mapping’s intelligent agentsShannon MatternIndex