The digital age has thrown questions of representation, participation and humanitarianism back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms and big data centres take over the process of mapping the subjugated and subaltern. Since the rise of Google Earth in 2005, there has been an explosion in the use of mapping tools to quantify and assess the needs of those in crisis, including those affected by climate change and the wider neo-liberal agenda. Yet, while there has been a huge upsurge in the data produced around these issues, the representation of people remains questionable. Some have argued that representation has diminished in humanitarian crises as people are increasingly reduced to data points. In turn, this data has become ever more difficult to analyse without vast computing power, leading to a dependency on the old colonial powers to refine the data collected from people in crisis, before selling it back to them.
This book brings together critical perspectives on the role that mapping people, knowledges and data now plays in humanitarian work, both in cartographic terms and through data visualisations, and questions whether, as we map crises, it is the map itself that is in crisis.
Table of Contents:
Mapping Crisis: a reflection on the Covid-19 pandemic
Doug Specht
Introduction: mapping in times of crisis
Doug Specht
1. Mapping as tacit representations of the colonial gaze
Tamara Bellone, Salvatore Engel-di-Mauro, Francesco Fiermonte, Emiliana Armano and Linda Quiquivix
2. The failures of participatory mapping: a mediational perspective
Gregory Asmolov
3. Knowledge and spatial production between old and new representation: a conceptual and operative framework
M. Rosaria Prisco
4. Data colonialism, surveillance capitalism and drones
Faine Greenwood
5. The role of data collection, mapping and analysis in the reproduction of refugeeness and migration discourses: reflections from the Refugee Spaces project
Giovanna Astolfo, Ricardo Marten Caceres,
Falli Palaiologou, Camillo Boano and Ed Manley
6. Dying in the technosphere: an intersectional analysis of European migration maps
Monika Halkort
7. Now the totality maps us: mapping climate migration and surveilling movable borders in digital cartographies
Bogna M Konior
8. The rise of the citizen data scientist
Aleš Završnik and Pika Šarf
9. Modalities of united statelessness
Rupert Allan
About the Author :
Doug Specht is director of teaching and learning at the University of Westminster. He has taught across a range of age groups and educational settings around the world.
Review :
"The development of web 2.0 technologies applied to mapping was at first heralded as a means of democratizing online mapping by enabling everyday people to collect and share spatial data across an array of digital media. However, this edited volume demonstrates and critiques the misapplication of web mapping and provides many examples of how the technology can reinforce neocolonialism in the developing world or promote 'datafication,' understood as the use of individuals as data resources to exploit for profit. . . .Overall, this text will be welcomed by readers interested in a mature discussion of the social implications of web mapping technologies, including graduate and advanced undergraduate students in geography, global studies, human rights, political science, and science and technology studies programs."
