Radical Cartography
Maps are typically tools of the powerful, created by governments or large corporations to reflect and reinforce the status quo. Their power comes not just from what they show, but also from *how* they show it. Most of our familiar maps—everything from world maps of pastel jigsaw-puzzle pieces to data-rich maps of race, income, or religion—show a tidy world of homogeneous areas and hard boundaries, not a messy world of overlapping identities, rights, and inequalities. This talk is an exploration of how new kinds of cartography can challenge the entrenched politics of mainstream mapping. It combines historical research on the history of data maps with Rankin’s own work as a cartographer over the last twenty years. The ultimate argument is that new forms of data or technology are less important than new values, and that the usual emphasis on objectivity and geographic regularity should be replaced by a more humanistic focus on uncertainty, subjectivity, and multiplicity.
