A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Charts the role that maps and various other forms of geo-visualisation play in the production of space. Offers a critical forum for investigating older modes of cartographic representation as well as newer approaches to big data and the politics of algorithmic and other data-driven processes.
In 2016, Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched a visual campaign about its disputed borders. A poster, entitled “Do you know the shape of Japan?” [日本のカタチ知っていますか], highlights three points of tension—the Northern Territories, Takeshima, and Senkaku Islands, disputed with Russia, Korea, and China respectively.
This constitutes Brenner’s “inside out” approach, which, in part, is his attempt to invalidate the notion of “urban age” and claims like “50 per cent threshold of world population now living in cities” as a starting point for urban study. The investigation of what stands outside cities and of their processes, he thinks, proves to be far more relevant to comprehending the global urban than a demographic threshold that threatens to hide radically different local situations.
The transformation of GIS into GIScience was a de-reifying move in a succession of moves that have gradually brought geospatial tools and technologies into realms of scholarly reputability. It is now no longer a knee-jerk reaction to assume that the use of GIS as part of scientific, cultural, political, or economic inquiry must be part of a positivistic conspiracy to colonise (and ultimately degrade or destroy) geographic inquiry once and for all.
The map hides the interdependence of regions and countries in many domains, and the ways in which the “developed” and the “developing” world interact with and affect each other. The stigmatization of certain countries suggests that the problem at hand has only “national roots,” narrowing the debate towards “national solutions” in the form of development.
Drawing from multisensory visual ethnography, this paper explores the perspective of ‘tactile empathy’ through photographic/video recordings based on the matching of seen and experienced touch described by neuroscientists.