Search results

Mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are widely used in disaster research and practice. While, in some cases, these practices incorporate methods inspired by critical cartography and critical GIS, they rarely engage with the theoretical discussions that animate those fields.

In this commentary, the author considers three such discussions, and draws out their relevance for disaster studies: the turn towards processual cartographies, political economy analysis of datafication and calls for theorising computing of and from the South.

The review highlights how these discussions can contribute to the work of scholars engaged in mapping for disaster risk management and research. First, it can counter the taken-for-granted nature of disaster-related maps, and encourage debate about how such maps are produced, used and circulated. Second, it can foster a reflexive attitude towards the urge to quantify and map disasters. Third, it can help to rethink the role of digital technologies with respect to ongoing conversations on the need to decolonise disaster studies.

The paper aims to familiarise disaster studies scholars with literature that has received relatively little attention in this field and, by doing so, contribute to a repoliticisation of disaster-related maps.

This chapter uses ethnographic data to explore the embodied aspects of parkour’s practice and how traceurs move around and navigate the city. It draws upon a blend of non-representational theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis to explain the attraction to parkour’s intensely embodied, effective and risk-taking practice. It then looks at how the traceurs exist in the interstices of hyper-regulated urban spaces and develop an alternative cartography of the city, which is generated from their situated knowledge and the temporal rhythms and flows in the city centre’s consumer economy. It is argued that this alternative cartography constitutes a spatio-bodily transgression that violates the hyper-regulated city’s command for its subjects to be passive bodies who accept the dominant cartography of the city geared towards consumption.

For almost 20 years, knowledge management projects hit various domains. This paper aims to describe briefly a set of four well‐tried knowledge management tools allowing practitioners to analyse and structure, describe and represent, share and store, teach and transmit knowledge.

This paper focuses on selected tools now of general practice and becoming popular among the practitioners.

The paper finds that, originally out of the information science laboratories, the tools introduced here have been proved tested efficient and reliable after hundreds of real projects, no matter what type of industry and domain use them. This now common practice should open the path to new models for the knowledge economy. Dealing with complexity becomes easier as well as putting the information system at the crossing of the interactive information flows instead of keeping it out of reach of a majority of knowledge workers. Because of the massive retirement of the baby boomers, a large loss of workforce challenges the companies for the first time in history. How to evaluate and pass to the next generation its core business of knowledge is thus of critical importance.

This paper reminds that knowledge management is no longer a solely academic issue since tools of the next generation are now available, beefing up the growing domain of the knowledge economy.

Representations of time are commonly used to construct narratives in visualisations of data. However, since time is a value-laden concept, and no representation can provide a full, objective account of “temporal reality”, they are also biased and political: reproducing and reinforcing certain views and values at the expense of alternative ones. This conceptual paper aims to explore expressions of temporal bias and politics in data visualisation, along with possibly mitigating user approaches and design strategies.

This study presents a theoretical framework rooted in a sociotechnical view of representations as biased and political, combined with perspectives from critical literacy, radical literacy and critical design. The framework provides a basis for discussion of various types and effects of temporal bias in visualisation. Empirical examples from previous research and public resources illustrate the arguments.

Four types of political effects of temporal bias in visualisations are presented, expressed as limitation of view, disregard of variation, oppression of social groups and misrepresentation of topic and suggest that appropriate critical and radical literacy approaches require users and designers to critique, contextualise, counter and cross beyond expressions of the same. Supporting critical design strategies involve the inclusion of multiple datasets and representations; broad access to flexible tools; and inclusive participation of marginalised groups.

The paper draws attention to a vital, yet little researched problem of temporal representation in visualisations of data. It offers a pioneering bridging of critical literacy, radical literacy and critical design and emphasises mutual rather than contradictory interests of the empirical sciences and humanities.

On top of their legal, economic, social and institutional marginalization, marginalized drug users (MDUs) also experience political marginalization: drug policies shape their lives without their political participation. From a scientific as well as a political perspective, the inclusion of their various viewpoints and situated knowledge is a major challenge, and one to which this paper aims to contribute in light of the experiences and imaginaries of MDUs urban spaces in several German cities.

Following a socio-geographical approach, this paper interrogates how MDUs appropriate and imagine the city, drawing on Lefebvre’s Production of Space and mixing critical cartographic with grounded theory, in the attempt to both understand and reconstruct the world from the situated perspective of MDUs based on their own words, drawings and emotions.

The narratives and drawings of participants show another cityscape, radically different from the hegemonic discourses and mappings antagonizing MDUs and making their existence a social problem. Space appears as a means of marginalization: there are barely any places that MDUs can legitimately appropriate-least of all so-called “public space.” By contrast, MDUs’ imaginaries of an ideal city would accommodate their existence and address further social justice issues.

The notion of “public places” appears unable to express MDU’s experiences. Instead of focusing on the problem of public spaces, policymakers should tackle the question of placemaking for MDUs beyond the level of solely drug-related places.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss Deveron Project’s (DP) Walking Institute, the only programme in the UK dedicated to commissioning artists to create walks. The author argues that the Walking Institute offers a model for tourism practices that engage local and international stakeholders in the creation of new global relationships. His research expands current critical discourse around the intersection between walking, tourism and art, and argues for DP’s approach as a way to create community-based, critically reflexive modes of tourism.

This paper is based on research completed for his doctoral thesis and combines practice-based and qualitative methods. The author has visited Huntly on two separate occasions, and have had conversations with project stakeholders, spent time visiting local attractions, and participated in local events and artists’ walks. The analysis draws on theories from performance studies and those being developed within cultural geography and the mobilities paradigm.

The Walking Institute provides a model for a community based approach to global tourism that calls on the artistic medium of walking to create a critical, reflexive mode of engagement. Through this model, the Walking Institute provides an innovative approach to tourism that offers potential tourists with a mode of local engagement beyond the consumption of the picturesque.

There is very little research into DP’s model, or the intersection between tourism and the burgeoning artistic medium of walking. This paper offers original insight into DP’s model and its relationship to a new field: walking art. Additionally, it informs current understandings of tourism through a demonstration of how a rural arts organisation is engaging with the global tourism industry.

Literary tourism is a developing niche of cultural tourism, which is important to study and for which it is important to define paths. In this chapter, the author makes a framework of literary tourism as a niche, the author presents its definition and a listing of its main products and experiences. The author also sees some examples of resources and products that link literature to digital technologies, checking to what extent they are or may be at the service of the development of literary tourism. After the presentation of these cases, we position our proposal to articulate literary tourism and digital technologies, based on the possibility of improving the visitor’s experience and increasing the attractiveness of literary places with digital applications.

The authors use media research and crowdsourced mapping to document how the first wave of the pandemic (April–August 2020) affected the Mapuche, focussing on seven categories of events: territorial control, spiritual defence, food sovereignty, traditional health practices, political violence, territorial needs and solidarity, and extractivist expansion.

Research on the effects of the pandemic on the Mapuche and their territories is lacking; the few existing studies focus on death and infection rates but overlook how the pandemic interacts with ongoing processes of extractivism, state violence and community resistance. The authors’ pilot study addresses this gap through a map developed collaboratively by disaster scholars and Mapuche journalists.

The map provides a spatial and chronological overview of this period, highlighting the interconnections between the pandemic and neocolonialism. As examples, the authors focus on two phenomena: the creation of “health barriers” to ensure local territorial control and the state-supported expansion of extractive industries during the first months of the lockdown.

The authors intersperse our account of the project with reflections on its limitations and, specifically, on how colonial formations shape the research. Decolonising disaster studies and disaster risk reduction practice, the authors argue, is an ongoing process, bound to be flawed and incomplete but nevertheless an urgent pursuit.

In making this argument, the paper responds to the Disaster Studies Manifesto that inspires this special issue, taking up its invitation to scholars to be more reflexive about their research practice and to frame their investigations through grounded perspectives.