Critical GIS

History, including contemporary history, is as much about time as it is about space, place, and territory. Not accidentally, historians have long used paper maps as their data (maps made at different time periods) and as a form of analysis (e.g., historical atlases, maps of historic battles, etc.). Maps have always been an incredibly succinct and visually powerful way to tell a story. On the one hand, therefore, turning to digital mapping technologies is continuous with this tradition.

In less than a decade, qualitative GIS became widely used not only in geography but across social sciences and humanities. Following critical GIS debates and feminist GIS interventions, qualitative GIS has emerged as a field that pioneered ways to map new types of data derived from qualitative interviews, historical archives, literary texts, and, more recently, social media, neogeography, and artistic visions of place.

When Critical GIS emerged in the 1990s and gained momentum in the 2000s, its potential for enabling progressive social change generated considerable excitement. By combining the powers of mapping, information technologies, and critical social theory, it promised new possibilities for acting upon the growing social contradictions of the neoliberal era. Critical GIS seemed to open a pragmatic plane of action by fusing progressive geographic imaginations with concrete and tangible maps.