1. Human Geography, Indigenous Mapping, and the US Military: A Response to Kelly and Others' "From Cognitive Maps to Transparent Static Web Maps".
- Author
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Wainwright, Joel
- Subjects
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HUMAN geography , *MILITARY discipline , *MAPS , *NORMATIVITY (Ethics) , *SOCIAL scientists , *GEOGRAPHERS - Abstract
In 2017, Cartographica published an article that criticized some human geographers for misguided oversensitivity to the use of funding from the US military to map indigenous lands. According to Kelly and others, geographers who map indigenous lands with funding from the US military – as they have done in Honduras – do not compromise the discipline's ethical norms as long as they openly reveal their source of funds. We re-evaluate this claim by considering the specific source of funding used by Kelly and others to map indigenous lands in Honduras: the US military's Minerva Research Initiative. Awards from Minerva, we show, are neither arbitrary nor based principally upon scholarly evaluation. Rather, the program is organized to increase the power of the US military through the development of new tactics and weapons through collaboration with social scientists. We conclude by discussing implications of our critique of Kelly and others for the ongoing debate regarding the involvement of the US military in the discipline of geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2019
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