Creative geographies think critically about representation – what is shown and not shown. New visualisations allow new interpretations, new imaginings, new knowledge – to enable new worlds.
The aim is to counteract the dominant images – the dominant stories – as forms of social and political resistance.
Maps can be an especially powerful method of representation – and misrepresentation – and counter-mapping challenges the misrepresentation, the misinterpretation, and the previously and deliberately hidden geographies.
The new issue of “You Are Here: the journal of creative geography” focuses on counter/cartographies – highlighting that “Any act of map-making (conceptual, physical, material, or visual) is about relations of power and to countermap is to redistribute or reclaim power. It’s a practice that considers power at different scales, as it appears in different modes, represented in different places, as it occurs at different times, and perceived through different ways of knowing.”
Chapters include indigenous and activist mapping – claiming place, space and identity – questioning who makes the maps and who tells the stories that define our world.
Counter/cartographies is organised around four themed sections: boundaries, borders & place; counter-mapping & storywork; technology & information; and land & environment.
In the Countermapping and Storywork section, there are contributions to trouble and rework dominant cartographies – including a chapter[1] on this research: rendering visible the displacement journeys of women and children escaping domestic violence. In the United Kingdom, the dominant policy and practice story focuses on domestic violence rooted in place – with statutory duties only within local authority boundaries – and ignores the tens of thousands of women and children forced across those boundaries. The counter-mapping of journeys across administrative boundaries makes visible the need for a new acknowledgement of border-crossings – to accept the new knowledge – and to recognise and respond better to the tens of thousands of women and children affected.
Counter-mappings critique the dominant assumptions and make alternative understandings knowable – requiring alternative understandings and policy and practice responses.
You can watch the launch event, download a copy of Counter/Cartographies, and buy a print copy of the journal.
[1] Bowstead, Janet C. 2023. “The Spatial Churn of Women’s Domestic Violence Displacement.” You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography. Counter/Cartographies, no. 24: 92–95.