Revisiting critical GIS

Abstract

Even as the meeting ‘revisited’ critical GIS, it offered neither recapitulation nor reification of a fixed field, but repetition with difference. Neither at the meeting nor here do we aspire to write histories of critical GIS, which have been taken up elsewhere.1 In the strictest sense, one might define GIS as a set of tools and technologies through which spatial data are encoded, analyzed, and communicated. Yet any strict definition of GIS, critical or otherwise, is necessarily delimiting, carving out ontologically privileged status that necessarily silences one set of voices in favor of another.