Critical GIScience in Canada in the new millennium

Critical GIS (CGIS) is an approach to evaluating GIS technology that draws upon multiple intellectual tool kits—from geography, social theory and computing science. While its roots are in the battles between human geographers and GIScientists in the 1990s, CGIS has emerged as an independent, constructive approach to enhancing the power and appeal of GIS. CGIS is also beginning to gain acceptance as a legitimate component of the broad tent that is GIScience. This short article reviews the emergence of CGIS, discusses its influence on the discipline of GIScience and finally explores the state of CGIS in Canada.     

当代西方人文地理学全球化概念与研究进展

在全球化主题的研究上当代人文地理学占据相当重要的地位。但人文地理学具有跨学科和追求时尚的学科特点,受多种理论和方法论的渗透和影响,形成了庞杂的全球化的概念和理论。对于地理学家而言,把握地理学的全球化观点,正确理解相关的名词和全球化理论具有重要的意义。本文按照时间顺序,对三大方面的问题进行梳理。一是当代人文地理学的主要理论方法演化及其全球化的研究主题;二是全球化概念及空间辩论的演化;三是通过全球化历史演化框架,了解全球化的动力机制,和制度空间结构的地理学观点的演化。     

Teaching creative geovisualization: Imagining the creative in/of GIS

Creative geovisualization is situated at the intersection of geography, arts, and digital humanities with a particular emphasis on visualization and mapping that preserves, represents, and generates more authentic, contextual, and nuanced meanings of space and people with an artistic and humanistic perspective and approach. This is a creative expansion in critical GIS practices and a new alternative to traditionally science-rooted approaches to GIS and mapping. Reflecting the experience of teaching a “creative geovisualization” course in an interdisciplinary curriculum, I demonstrate how critical and creative scholarship with mapping and geovisualization is introduced in the classroom and is illuminated in the students' creative practices. The class encompasses key epistemological and methodological groundings of creative geovisualization—including non-representational theories; critical cartography and GIS; the convergence of geography, arts, and humanities; psychogeography; and qualitative and affective geovisualization. Empirical examples of students' works illustrate the blending of different modes of creative engagements with GIS and geovisualization and specific ways to work with various forms of embodied, relational, interpretive, and expressive geographies. GIS and mapping become creative as they continue evolving in process, and it is time that we deeply (re-)imagine “the creative” in/of GIS in critical GIS pedagogies.     

信息时代的地理学研究——NCGIA对若干理论问题的探索

本文以美国国家基金委员会资助美国国家地理信息与分析中心(NCGIA)进行的瓦伦纽斯(Varenius)研究项目有关信息时代地理学研究的一系列中期研究报告与论文为基础,介绍了中心一些著名学者以地理学家独特的地理哲学思维,对信息时代的地理学研究若干理论问题所作的新探索与阐述,旨在为国内学者了解、追踪地理信息科学的新发展,开展地理信息科学的跨世纪研究提供借鉴。     

Australian Geographers and Geographical Information Science

Geographical Information Science (GIScience) has become an important sub‐discipline for North American geographers but in Australia few geographers are engaged in this ‘research in GIS’ area. Australian geographers seem more concerned with ‘research using GIS’ which has become absorbed into the geographical tradition of thinking and communicating with diagrams, images, and maps. The breakdown of disciplinary boundaries in Australia makes it difficult to be sure, but most of those engaged in GIScience in Australia seem to identify with disciplines other than geography.     

Teaching critical open GIS

Higher-education geographic information system (GIS) curricula largely marginalize and separate instruction of critical GIS and open GIS, paralleling a divide between GIS and non-GIS in geography. GIS is typically represented as a singular, infallibly objective, and universally applicable technology. GIS generally dismisses the critiques from human geography, while critical human geography dismisses GIS for its association with positivism and unethical applications. Teaching critical open GIS may bridge this divide, creating a transformative pedagogical space for human geography to affectively and effectively engage with open GIS technology at the level of code. Critical open GIS students practice and critique GIS as conflicted insiders, bridging the divide between GIS and non-GIS in their geography education. Reviews of GIS curricula find support for teaching critical and open GIS, but reviews of texts and syllabi confirm their marginalization and separation. A new critical open GIS course is introduced, using GIS in development and political ecology as integrative frameworks.     

Operating anew: Queering GIS with good enough software

In the last decade, conversations around queering of GIScience emerged. Drawing on literature from feminist and queer critical GIS, with special attention to the under‐examined political economy of GIS, I suggest that the critical project of queering all of GIS, both GIScience and GISystems, requires not just recognition of the labour and lives of queers and research in geographies of sexualities. Based upon a queer feminist political economic critique and evidenced in my teaching critical GIS at two elite liberal arts colleges, I argue that the “status quo” between ESRI and geography as a field must be interrupted. Extending a critical GIS focus beyond data structures and data ethics, I argue that geographic researchers and instructors have a responsibility in queering our choice and production of software, algorithms, and code alike. I call this production and choice of democratic, accessible, and useful software by, for, and about the needs of its users, good enough software.     

Emotions and affect in recent human geography

This paper seeks to examine both how emotions have been explored in emotional geography and also how affect has been understood in affectual geography. By tracing out the conceptual influences underlying emotional and affectual geography, I seek to understand both the similarities and differences between their approaches. I identify three key areas of agreement: a relational ontology that privileges fluidity; a privileging of proximity and intimacy in their accounts; and a favouring of ethnographic methods. Even so, there is a fundamental disagreement, concerning the relationship – or non-relationship – between emotions and affect. Yet, this split raises awkward questions for both approaches, about how emotions and affect are to be understood and also about their geographies. As importantly, mapping the agreements and disagreements within emotional and affectual geography helps with an exploration of the political implications of this work. I draw upon psychoanalytic geography to suggest ways of addressing certain snags in both emotional and affectual geography.     

GIS Methods in Time-Geographic Research: Geocomputation and Geovisualization of Human Activity Patterns

Over the past 40 years or so, human activities and movements in space‐time have attracted considerable research interest in geography. One of the earliest analytical perspectives for the analysis of human activity patterns and movements in space‐time is time geography. Despite the usefulness of time geography in many areas of geographical research, there are very few studies that actually implemented its constructs as analytical methods up to the mid‐1990s. With increasing availability of geo‐referenced individual‐level data and improvement in the geo‐computational capabilities of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), it is now more feasible than ever before to operationalize and implement time‐geographic constructs. This paper discusses recent applications of GIS‐based geo‐computation and three‐dimensional (3‐D) geo‐visualization methods in time‐geographic research. The usefulness of these methods is illustrated through examples drawn from the author's recent studies. The paper attempts to show that GIS provides an effective environment for implementing time‐geographic constructs and for the future development of operational methods in time‐geographic research.     

All Strings Attached: Negotiating Relationships of Geographic Information Science

Human geography has driven substantive improvements in methodologies and applications of Geographic Information Systems (GISs), yet Indigenous groups continue to experience erasure in geographic representations. GIS ontologies comprise categorised labels that represent lived contexts, and these ontologies are determined through the shared worldviews of those labelling spatial phenomena for entry into GIS databases. Although Western ontologies and spatial representations reflect Western understandings of human experience, they are often inappropriate in Indigenous contexts. In efforts to be represented in courts and land management, Indigenous groups nevertheless need to engage Western spatial representations to ‘claim space’. This paper examines what GISs are and do and shows that GIS technology comes with strings attached to the myriad social contexts that continue to shape the field of GIScience. We show that Intellectual Property Rights Agreements can sever and control these ‘strings’; the agreement between the Yorta Yorta Nation Aboriginal Corporation and university researchers reframes GIS from a technology of erasure to a technology of opportunity that enables Indigenous groups to define their own engagement. The visual and narrative outputs will contribute important understandings of the environmental crisis facing the Murray–Darling Basin and connect older and younger generations through knowledge sharing. We conclude the application of GIScience is never simply technological but always has potential to empower particular communities. Applying GIS technology to new circumstances is an engagement of new relationships in the social praxis of technology transfer, where worldviews meet and negotiations are made over what exists and how we know.     

Scaling health and healthcare: re‐presenting Thailand's HIV/AIDS epidemic with world regional geography students

Authors of world regional geography textbooks have recently become more interested in the broader theoretical changes that have emerged in human geography. Relying on feminist and other critical perspectives, concepts such as space, place and scale are being re‐imagined in this ‘new world regional geography’. This paper intervenes on behalf of a more critical world regional geography by suggesting how world regional geography teachers can educate students about scale as a social construction through the use of empirical data. Relying on fieldwork conducted in Thailand, this paper lays out a lesson on the HIV/AIDS crisis and how different representations of that crisis, from the national to the individual, offer different ‘ways of knowing’ the epidemic. Furthermore, this paper examines how we can push students to consider the ways in which scales of analysis are constructed and constituted through our own geographic practices.     

The political geographies of D/decolonization: Variegation and decolonial challenges of /in geography

Anglophone and North Atlantic geography is enmeshed institutionally, epistemically and racially in colonial modern privilege, highlighting the urgent task of addressing its modes of theorization, interpretation, and research. Decolonizing analysis builds from postcolonial, critical, feminist and racism critiques, and problematizes accounts of knowledge, subjectivity and power. In pursuit of decolonizing knowledge production and addressing global inequalities, this paper enjoins political geography to more systematically engage with decolonial analysis, conceptualization and theory. Political geography has much to contribute to interdisciplinary decolonial scholarship through contextualized, grounded, multiscalar and granular analysis of socio-spatial relations. The paper examines the common ground and potential tensions between Anglophone political geographies and decolonial theory (῾decoloniality’), then examines the case of Ecuador's politics of plurinationalism to illustrate a decolonizing political geographical analysis. The case highlights how the variegated political geographies of decolonization arising within and against coloniality require from political geography a decolonial turn, which would entail divesting core political geography concepts of western norms, including plural epistemologies of space and power in analysis, and recalibrating knowledge production processes.     

Developing trainee teacher practice with geographical information systems (GIS)

There is general agreement that geographical information systems (GIS) have a place within the geography classroom; they offer the potential to support geographical learning, exploring real-world problems through student-centred learning, and developing spatial thinking. Despite this, teachers often avoid engaging with GIS and research suggests that the lack of GIS training in initial teacher education is partially to blame. In response to this, this article explores how 16 trainee geography teachers were supported to develop their use of GIS across a one-year, postgraduate teacher training course in England. The project, an interpretive case study underpinned by a constructivist epistemology, used questionnaires and interviews to elicit trainees’ understandings of the nature of GIS, and to explore their engagement with it across their training year. Results suggest a programme of embedded training developed in trainees a more nuanced understanding of the value of GIS for supporting geographical learning and, thereby, increased self-efficacy towards and engagement with it in their teaching practice. However, not all trainees embraced GIS as a pedagogical tool and the study raised several key issues for geography teacher education, including the knowledge culture within schools in the teacher training partnership, and the importance of trainee self-efficacy towards GIS.     

Editorial: Geography and the ‘European Year of Citizenship through Education’

The paper introduces a library of video podcasts (vodcasts) used to support the learning and teaching of geographical methods and techniques relating to physical geography and GIScience in particular. While the notion of video learning is not new, the accessibility of the multimedia snippets via lightweight mp4 players in a field context allows a geographical freedom to learning that goes beyond previous classroom-based work. Evaluation, conducted through the use of reflective diaries and focus groups, identified that all students thought the podcast reference library was a valuable learning resource, of particular appeal to students with a visual approach to learning.     

On the Study of the History of Geographical Ideas

The author rebuts the criticism by Yu. G. Saushkin that the book Razvitiye geograficheskikh idey [The Evolution of Geographical Ideas] is in effect a history of physical geography rather than a history of geography as a whole. Isachenko contends that concepts of natural science have been at the root of geography throughout its history and it is therefore natural for a history of geographical ideas to deal predominantly with the ideas of physical geography. Far from having ignored human geography, Isachenko contends, his book traces the anthropocentric school through its various stages of development. Only the survey of Soviet geography was restricted to physical geography, the author says, because Soviet geography consists of two virtually independent disciplines and the author happens to be a physical geographer viewing his discipline as the foundation of all geography.     

对城市社会-生活空间的本体解构

根据国外著名学者的观点与权威性文献总结国外地理学社会论(学派)形成与发展的思维观,重点探讨城市社会-生活空间理论的思想与方法论,并力图用概念化结构模式(图)表示出来,作为理解城市社会-生活空间本体构成,以及进一步对其研究的解构理念。全文从地理学社会论创立解剖社会空间的思想观逻辑,预示城市社会-生活空间规律的研究代表了当今人文地理学前沿理论水平的重要方面。     

空间理论解读:基于人文地理学的透视

对空间概念的认识至今仍处于不断的争论中,人文地理学不同流派对空间的理解多种多样。空间究竟是什么?人文地理学该怎么理解和认识空间,以及怎样对空间进行研究?对上述问题的回答必然涉及对空间概念的讨论和对空间本体论和认识论的再认识。为此,本文从人文地理学中的空间的哲学透视、空间的流派解读、空间的主、客观研究以及空间的辩证法等几方面解读空间理论,认为存在的三元辩证法是空间本体论,空间性的三元辩证法是空间认识论,而社会空间辩证法是空间生产论。     

他者,权力与地方建构:想象地理的研究进展与展望

本文通过对相关文献的梳理,对想象地理的理论起源及研究内容进行了总结与分析。根据想象的主体和想象对象的地理尺度差异,国外想象地理研究主要分为两个流派:一是探讨后殖民主义语境下"西方"对"东方"的文化形象的话语建构;二是研究"作者"通过地理文本的生产,以想象的方式对地方的文化形象进行重构的过程。同时,文章通过分析国外近30个实证案例,指出想象地理在地方的文化建构和空间文化意义的生产等文化地理重要话题的研究中都具有重要的作用,并据此对国内想象地理研究提出了展望。     

技术学习与创新:经济地理学的视角

技术学习与创新是20世纪90年代以来经济地理学研究的核心领域之一,它与"异端经济学"之间的互动,既促进了经济地理学的繁荣和学科地位的提升,也为"异端经济学"对技术学习与创新的研究提供了独特的地理视角。本文试图全面梳理经济地理学技术学习与创新研究兴起与深化的过程,从地理接近与面对面交流,关系接近与实践社区,制度接近、嵌入、路径依赖与创新场三个既相互争论又高度互补的方面,来系统阐述技术学习与创新的经济地理机制,并针对当前研究的局限性提出了建构高层次综合的技术学习创新与区域发展理论的设想。     

空间思想演变视角下的西方滨海旅游研究

以往滨海旅游研究综述大多限于对所涉研究领域的横向分类,缺乏基于特定学科演进视角下的纵向考察。本文从人文地理学空间思想演变视角出发,重新审视和梳理西方滨海旅游研究的脉络。与空间思想流变过程对应的是,西方滨海旅游研究主题也经历了从"滨海旅游地空间模型与演化"到"滨海旅游空间文化解读与社会建构"再到"滨海旅游空间政治与权力景观"的过程,亦即从关注滨海旅游空间的物质性转变到社会性和政治性。借助人文地理学空间思想演变视角,可以厘清滨海旅游研究视角转换的内在逻辑,并能从空间的生产视角重新思考中国滨海旅游的新一轮发展热潮,为国内滨海旅游研究提供新的思路和方向。