Constructing Spatial Narratives:  Considerations and Practices Across Communities

1. Abstract

This panel considers how critical, innovative approaches with GIS draw our attention to new pathways of digital mapping. How can the practice of digital mapping within a critical lens produce new cartographies for spaces of possibility? How can spatial narratives restore the tarnished lineages of cultural geographies obscured from history?

We want to engage with these questions in our panel. Our hope is to highlight the ethical responsibilities of critically engaged mapping projects. The assorted projects that we propose to present on in this panel are connected through a theoretical grounding that harnesses the power of imagining cultural recovery of landscape as a means of redress from historical obscurity. Ultimately our panel seeks to challenge the matrix of colonial epistemic power underlying traditional foundations of how we construct spatial constructions of communities.