From Points to Pixels: Feminist Approaches to Mapping

Seminar Critical Development Studies, Fall 2024

Abstract

Feminist interventions have instrumentally shaped critical perspectives in mapping. Yet, feminist mapping has often been erased or considered niche within both GIScience and critical GIS conversations. Drawing on recent work in data feminism, design justice, and feminist digital geographies (among others), I engage with a feminist mapping framework to reveal and challenge systems of power within spatial data, map design, and mapping processes. In this talk, I will discuss “points” and “pixels” as two dimensions of spatial data and two sites for feminist intervention. First, map icons or “points” are tiny pixel-based symbols that locate people, places, and events saturating our digital lives. Despite their ubiquity, map icons often go unseen and unquestioned. Through a series of feminist icon design workshops, I asked mapmakers to incorporate feminist principles in their redesign of icons. Next, I turn to satellite data in news media and explore the use of “pixels” as a mode of digital storytelling from above. Through a series of interviews, I unravel the politics of commercial data production, the visuality and seduction of satellite data, and the broader processes of creating pixelated stories. In sum, I argue for feminist interventions in mapping and GIScience, more broadly. 

About the speaker

Meghan Kelly is an assistant professor in Geography and mapmaker at Syracuse University with prior appointments at Dartmouth College and Durham University (UK). Broadly, her research explores the theory and practice of feminist mapping. As a researcher and practicing cartographer, Meghan has applied this frame to questions of borders and migration, policing, housing and evictions, public health, and climate change.

About the series

The Critical Development Studies Seminar Series is a graduate student-led effort that aims to provide space for junior scholars to share innovative research and discuss emergent debates within critical development studies.

Invited speakers cover a range of geographical areas, disciplinary backgrounds, and research topics. Examples of potential topics include agroecology and food justice issues, state-building, land and labor, extractivist politics, the gendered and racial dynamics of ongoing capitalist development, and the political ecological histories of the global development project. The target audience for the series is graduate students and faculty interested in critical development studies both within the Cornell community as well as external scholars. 

Seminar organizers for 2024-25 are Natalia Correa Sanchez, Kyunghee Kang, Jenny Goldstein, and Mariah Doyle-Stephenson.