Revisiting Critical GIS

Discussion

Nick Lally:

"From late afternoon, October 17th, 2014, until early on the 20th, thirty researchers met at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories to revisit the spirit of ‘critical GIS’ in approaching questions both emerging and enduring around the intersection of the spatial and the digital. While the 1993 gathering at Friday Harbor, like much early work in critical GIS, can be read as ‘peace talks’ brokered between warring factions, with wary GIS-scientists and cautious Human Geographers on opposite sides of the table (Schuurman 2000), more than a decade into the twenty-first century, our meeting drew an open field of scholar-practitioners bursting with questions, varied experiences, and profound concerns.

Even as the meeting ‘revisited’ critical GIS, it offered neither recapitulation nor reification of a fixed field, but repetition with difference. Neither at the meeting nor here do we aspire to write histories of critical GIS, which have been taken up elsewhere.1 In the strictest sense, one might define GIS as a set of tools and technologies through which spatial data are encoded, analyzed, and communicated. Yet any strict definition of GIS, critical or otherwise, is necessarily delimiting, carving out ontologically privileged status that necessarily silences one set of voices in favor of another. Instead, we suggest that both ‘critical’ and ‘GIS’ evolve in unresolved tension, as geospatial technology and information becomes ever more present in daily life (Greenfield 2006, Kitchin and Dodge 2011, Dourish and Bell 2011), as new fields both claim and extend spatial inquiry and visualization (Drucker 2009), and as the academy itself grapples with its role in a neoliberalized world (Wyly 2015). Critical GIS offers trading zones (Barnes and Sheppard 2010) for discussion of these and other issues, for building alliances and interrogating tensions, and for a constant dialectical process of critique and renewal.

Notwithstanding the contemporary ubiquity of digital maps, ‘I want to be a GIS researcher when I grow up’, remains a rare aspiration, rarer still when the qualifier ‘critical’ is added. But, what critical means, how it might itself be critiqued, and what work it enables depends on the disciplinary background of individual scholars. For some, predominantly from earth science backgrounds, the groundwork for critical GIS is found in practitioners using the geospatial toolkit not only to inventory the natural world in quantitative terms, but also to spatially document its qualitative features. For others, mathematical models and economic analyses that engage critical social theory while retaining a focus on the spatial organization of the world define critical GIS (Sheppard and Barnes 1990). Still others produce critical GIS work through engagements with critical cartography (Crampton 2010), science and technology studies (Harvey and Chrisman 1998), a politics of reflexivity (Dunn 2007, Schuurman and Pratt 2002), and increasingly, the digital humanities (Drucker 2012).

As such, this commentary is meant as much for those who self-identify as critical GIS practitioners as it is for GIScientists; it is meant for those in the digital humanities, those in physical geography, and more. It is a constant tacking between old and new, between expert and novice as we seek new allies to ask new questions. As spatial data and its analysis seeps into ever more facets of modern life, we ‘revisit’ critical GIS seeking new connections, new concerns, and new paths forward. In this commentary we sketch some of those uncovered at our meeting. ‘Critical GIS’ operates as an affiliation, one with a variety of resonances and tensions to be explored, rather than resolved. One tension revolves around how the spatial and digital function in relation to issues of social justice.

Another around ‘hybrid’ strategies, such as critical quantification and the digital humanities, and their relationship to critical GIS. Despite some progress, particularly around geospatial data, we find that a political economy of geospatial technologies remains largely undeveloped. We thus revisit critical GIS not as a historical body of scholarship, but as a set of living, diverse, dynamic endeavors necessary in the present and invested in transforming the future." (http://www.nicklally.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Revisiting-Critical-GIS.pdf)

More Information

• in-depth conference review and discussion at http://www.nicklally.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Revisiting-Critical-GIS.pdf