The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities

The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities offers a vibrant exploration of the intersection and convergence between map studies and the humanities through the multifaceted traditions and inclinations from different disciplinary, geographical and cultural contexts.

With 42 chapters from leading scholars, this book provides an intellectual infrastructure to navigate core theories, critical concepts, phenomenologies and ecologies of mapping, while also providing insights into exciting new directions for future scholarship. It is organised into seven parts:

• Part 1 moves from the depths of the humans?maps relation to the posthuman dimension, from antiquity to the future of humanity, presenting a multidisciplinary perspective that bridges chronological distances, introspective instances and social engagements.


• Part 2 draws on ancient, archaeological, historical and literary sources, to consider the materialities and textures embedded in such texts. Fictional and non-fictional cartographies are explored, including layers of time, mobile historical phenomena, unmappable terrain features, and even animal perspectives.


• Part 3 examines maps and mappings from a medial perspective, offering theoretical insight into cartographic mediality as well as studies of its intermedial relations with other media.


• Part 4 explores how a cultural cartographic perspective can be productive in researching the digital as a human experience, considering the development of a cultural attentiveness to a wide range of map-related phenomena that interweave human subjectivities and nonhuman entities in a digital ecology.


• Part 5 addresses a range of issues and urgencies that have been, and still are, at the centre of critical cartographic thinking, from politics, inequalities and discrimination.


• Part 6 considers the growing amount of literature and creative experimentation that involve mapping in practices of eliciting individual life histories, collective identities and self-accounts.


• Part 7 examines the variety of ways in which we can think of maps in the public realm.

This innovative and expansive Handbook will appeal to those in the fields of geography, art, philosophy, media and visual studies, anthropology, history, digital humanities and cultural studies as well as industry professionals.

'Maps move, and this Handbook assembles a variety of vantage points to witness such movements: textual, sensorial and the more-than-representational, cinematic and the virtual, resistive and mundane, grounded and atmospheric, monumental and ephemeral. Careful to not recuperate mapmaking but make it more responsible, more resonating, this collection bends, without breaking, the reverberative potential of the drawn line. It leaves mapmaking practices more curious, more open, more vibrational, without the privilege of an ahistorical treatment.' 

Matthew W. Wilson, Professor of Geography, University of Kentucky, USA

'Tania Rossetto and Laura Lo Presti have compiled a state-of-the-art collection of commentaries on the many ways in which the humanities and cartography are joined at the hip. Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary cast of writers on the cutting edge of geohumanistic enquiry they show how the seemingly instrumental rationalities of the map have always been, and always should be, richly discursive endeavours embedded in strategies of domination and resistance. This is a must-read collection for scholars across the humanities interested in the role of cartography in human meaning-making.'

Tim Cresswell, Ogilvie Professor of Geography, University of Edinburgh, UK

'Mapping remains an extraordinarily diverse and generative technique for mediating the world. Committed to theoretical and methodological pluralism, this outstanding collection explores its technologies, politics and consequences through a rich range of case studies drawn from across "cartographic culture", both historical and contemporary.'

Gillian Rose, Professor of Human Geography, University of Oxford, UK