Mapping Up

Repositioning Critical Cartographic Practice

Abstract

This article considers the methodological stance of critical cartography, proposing “mapping up” as a form of critical cartographic practice. Beginning with reflections on cartography in the first issue of Antipode and the posthumous work of Howard Fisher, we consider how cartography has figured the relationship between colonizer and colonized, the colony and the metropole, the ground and the surface. Building on these reflections, we respond to a recent resurgence of interest in the work of the anthropologist Laura Nader, thinking through how her arguments for “studying up” pertain to persistent debates in both critical cartography and the social sciences more broadly. We argue that critical cartography has often taken an epistemic shortcut to a positional question: who is the mapmaker to the mapped? By too consistently focusing on the power of the map (and assuming the power of the mapmaker), we have narrowed our methodological focus and developed few resources for theorizing mappings of relative elites by mapmakers in relatively less powerful positions. We examine this contention in the context of work that “maps up”: tenant solidarity projects by Mutual Aid Medford and Somerville, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, and JustFix.nyc, as well as High Country News’s “Land Grab U.” Finally, we share recent work on a cartographic R package, unknownpleasur, that is indebted to the work of Fisher, but also oriented towards the simultaneous representation of systems of oppression alongside their effects.