Matej BLAŽEK, Juraj MAJO

Kartografia a kritická sociálna teória: o mapách, etike, praxi a moci

Blažek, M., Majo, J.: Cartography and critical social theory: Maps, ethics, praxis and power. Kartografické listy, 2008, 16, 6 figs., 44 refs.

Abstract: The aim of our paper is to situate theoretical perspectives of the cartography into the dialogue with a critical social theory. As a foundation for our approach we employ the late writings of John Brian Harley and his attempts to reflect the history as well as the cartographical praxis of the time in the prism of the theory of representation, in particular considering works of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In the paper, we focus the attention not only on a compositional aspect of the cartography and on an issue of the interpretation of maps that are dominant in a professional discussion. Our attention turns towards the social context of maps, their productions, textual analyses of their contents and analyses of a political application of maps, again in the social context. Our strategy is to abandon a sole field of the composition and hermeneutics of a map as a phenomenon and to employ the deconstructionist procedures. Our theoretical framework is illustrated on examples of selected empirical studies.

Keywords: cartographic praxis, ethics, deconstruction, power/knowledge, representation, textuality of maps, critical social theory