Thinking Outside the Box: Engaging Critical Geographic Information Systems Theory, Practice and Politics in Human Geography

Abstract

Over the past decade or more, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been re-imagined and reconfigured through critical GIS research and practice, as scholars and activist have sought new ways of engaging GIS beyond its characterization in the 1990s as a rationalist and rationalizing tool. Where many existing discussions of the contributions of critical GIS have focused on its position and impacts in GIScience, here I review recent work in critical GIS with an eye toward highlighting its contributions and possibilities in critical human geography. This study examines the theorizations, epistemological frameworks, and methodological innovations are enabling human geographers to engage with GIS, cartography, and geovisual methods in their work in creative ways. I begin by unpacking the ‘critical’ in critical GIS, illustrating how it has drawn upon theory and politics from critical theory to offer a series of key reconceptualizations of GIS and its knowledge-making repertoire. Then, I illustrate the ever-diversifying ways in which critical GIS theory and practice are being woven into geographers’ research and activism.