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Harnessing the cartographic attributes of line, contour and legend, this paper generates a conceptual vocabulary attentive to the proliferation in everyday mapping. By developing theoretical work that questions the representational certitude of cartography, the paper argues that attention needs to be focused on the non-representational vectors of mapping. This is to establish the grounds for future empirical research into quotidian cartographies and their politics. Instead of categorizing these variegated, mapping practices as either ‘counter’ or ‘indigenous’ movements, the notion of ‘vernacular mapping’ is proposed as one way in which geographers might begin to encounter the vibrant micropolitics of contemporary cartography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that human geography has neglected the issue of ‘missing people’. Following an introduction, the paper uses four thematics, ‘mapping, searching, feeling and moving’, in order to explore a range of responses to missing absence and missing experience. It argues that attention to the voices of returned adult missing people would help establish new emotional geographies of embodied absence which would complement, and in places challenge, ‘left behind’ knowledges of absence. It is also argued that ‘peopling’ missing research would enable sensitive reconstructions of missing mobilities which both (1) challenge operational categorizations and cartographies of missing people as disembodied units, and (2) contribute to conceptual reassessments of disruptive human mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper notes a growing, diverse and yet somewhat partial and disparate interest among geographers in the illicit. Within this there has been little substantive interest in organized criminality despite it constituting a range of activities comparable in their significance to other aspects of the illicit that have attracted extensive attention from geographers. This paper argues that the development of a geographical perspective on organized crime is timely and seeks to map out connections with both the extant literatures of organized crime and those of human geography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The goal of this second report is to review how social media are changing the way we collectively map the world. To reach this goal I review different collective mapping practices that characterize the social media era. First I examine the situation of community mapping in the context of new cartographic processes and technologies, with a focus on indigenous cartographies. I then review the use of volunteers in the production and representation of geospatial knowledge, with an emphasis on crisis mapping. Finally, I discuss how map-making in the social media era reflects major trends in terms of power relationships that occur between the state, its citizens and the private sector. These trends reveal the replacement of the state as the main reference for the collection and dissemination of cartographic data, by a combination of private interest and individually volunteered contributions. Just as the specific interests of the nation state have largely helped to shape the reality produced by paper maps throughout the centuries, this new convergence of interests is now helping to shape the reality produced by digital maps through geosocial media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reflecting on conversations between geography and science and technology studies (STS) over the last 15 years or so, this paper addresses their shared interest in knowledge controversies as generative political events. It explores how such events give rise to new ways of practising relations between science and democracy focusing on the case of environmental knowledge claims and technologies. This exploration interrogates three mobilizations of environmental knowledge controversies that have different implications for redistributing expertise, including that of (social) scientists, in the composition of knowledge polities. The first version sets out to map the language commitments of contributors to a controversy with the aim of enabling interested citizens to trace the 'partisanship' of scientific knowledge claims. The second is also a cartographic exercise designed to teach students how to account for the political force of technoscientific controversies by mapping the intense entanglements of scientific knowledge claims with legal, moral, economic and social concerns on the web. The third is concerned less with mapping knowledge controversies from an analytical distance than with an experimental research methodology that sets out to intervene in extant controversies in ways that map researchers' own knowledge claims into what is at stake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last 10 years have seen a sudden rise in interest in the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in historical research. This has led to a field that has become known as ‘historical GIS’. This development started in the more quantitative ends of the discipline but has spread to encompass qualitative research as well. Interest in historical GIS is not restricted to researchers who would previously have regarded themselves as historical geographers, but has in fact led to an increased awareness of the importance of geography from across the discipline of history. This paper introduces historical GIS and critically evaluates how it is affecting the practice of historical geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that cartography is profitably conceived as a processual, rather than representational, science. Building on recent analysis concerning the philosophical underpinnings of cartography we question the ontological security of maps, contending that it is productive to rethink cartography as ontogenetic in nature; that is maps emerge through practices and have no secure ontological status. Drawing on the concepts of transduction and technicity we contend that maps are of-the-moment, brought into being through practices (embodied, social, technical); that mapping is a process of constant reterritorialization. Maps are never fully formed and their work is never complete. Maps are transitory and fleeting, being contingent, relational and context-dependent; they are always mappings; spatial practices enacted to solve relational problems (eg, how best to create a spatial representation, how to understand a spatial distribution, how to get between A and B, and so on). Such a rethinking, we contend, provides a fresh perspective on cartographic epistemology, and could work to provide a common framework for those who undertake mapping as applied knowledge (asking technical questions) and those that seek to critique such mapping as a form of power/knowledge (asking ideological questions). We illustrate our argument through an analysis of mapping practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]