Not Just Navigation: Thinking About the Movements of Maps in the Mobility and Humanities Field

ABSTRACT

At a time characterized by the pervasive presence of – and enthusiasm for – maps in everyday life, interest in the cartographic humanities is growing among map scholars who approach cartography through a cultural lens. A mobility and humanities approach helps us move beyond the factual consideration of maps as mobile navigational devices that are used to move from one location to another. By considering mobility as a dense, elastic concept and adopting a humanistic perspective, I delineate a set of map mobilities emerging from the existing literature. A movement as process section focuses on post-representational, practice-based and historical approaches to mapping practices; a movement as elusiveness section focuses on material, more-than-human, surficial appreciations of cartographic objects; a movement as reimagination section focuses on theoretical, literary and art-based approaches to cartographic concepts. This focus on map mobilities illuminates the multiple theoretical and methodological possibilities of a renewed humanistic perspective in map studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Cartographic humanities
• cartographic theory
• cultural cartography
• map mobilities
• mobility and humanities
• movement

Acknowledgements

A first draft of this paper was presented at the Mobility in Historical Perspective Workshop of the Oxford-Berlin-Padua Research Network (University of Padova, 3rd October 2019). This article has been published under the frame of the Mobility and Humanities project of the University of Padova’s Department of Historical and Geographical Sciences and the Ancient World. The Mobility and Humanities project is funded as a Project of Excellence (2018–2022) by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on the contributor

Tania Rossetto is Associate Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Padua, Italy. Her research interests include the relationship between map studies and visual studies, the embodiment of maps, cultural cartographies, the ethnography of mapping practices, cartographic aesthetics, the portrayal of maps, and image theories. She has also worked on the linkage between cartographic theory and literary studies, and in particular on literary geovisuality. Through a humanistic approach she researches the life of maps in physical and imaginary spaces. In her recent book titled Object-Oriented Cartography: Maps as Things (Routledge, 2019), rather than asking how maps map onto reality, she explores the possibilities of a speculative-realist map theory by bringing cartographic objects to the foreground.