Critical GIS as a tool for social transformation

When Critical GIS emerged in the 1990s and gained momentum in the 2000s, its potential for enabling progressive social change generated considerable excitement. By combining the powers of mapping, information technologies, and critical social theory, it promised new possibilities for acting upon the growing social contradictions of the neoliberal era. Critical GIS seemed to open a pragmatic plane of action by fusing progressive geographic imaginations with concrete and tangible maps. As I reflect on the state of critical GIS in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, new configurations of class power, patriarchy, and racism are rapidly reshaping our social and geopolitical worlds and are precipitating environmental destruction. Yet, I attempt to develop the idea that GIS is a tool for social transformation because it can produce new cartographies and spaces of possibility and build and expand geographies of hope and care that change social imaginaries in favour of non-hierarchical class, gender, and race relations. In short, critical GIS scholarship both engages ongoing progressive politics and can create new possibilities for change. In particular, I examine two interventions of critical GIS: creating cartographies of solidarity and teaching.