Cudney, Z. and Craig, B. Critical Geographies of Representations. (Session organized, American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, Detroit, 2025).
All maps are liars; all representations are failures. Yet they are so in multiple different ways. In this proposed paper session, we recognize that the exclusions and excesses of geographic representations have spatial traces of their own. What kinds of things are situationally or structurally absent(ed) from geographic representations, and how can we think spatially about the traces that they leave? Questions such as these are nothing new to geography and its subfields, such as non-representational geographies, new cultural geographies, and critical cartographies, but we aim here to highlight new ways of approaching representations through contemporary critical theory. We welcome diverse and creative contributions, as well as works-in-progress, which help to spatialize that which is excluded from or excessive of geographic representations. Representations here might take many forms, such as maps, models, texts, images, or performances. Their exclusions or excesses might take varied forms as well, such as bodies or emotions, or dimensions such as processuality or materiality.
Contributors might think through and beyond affect theory, non-representational theories, Black feminist theory, queer theory, critical theory, media studies, or science and technology studies. Given the way representations have been theorized and critiqued within many of these fields, we're particularly interested in papers which think across them. In doing so, we invite contributors to think at the intersection of the two common meanings of the word 'representation': as a process and as a thing. As a political action, representation is a process through which ideologies, values, and identities are made visible. And as a material depiction, representations are mediated artifacts and texts which portray and produce geographic phenomena. Papers may take various forms, such as critiques of a theoretical turn, analyses of an artifact, reflections on methodologies, and descriptions of creative, critical-, or counter-representational practices. We encourage contributors to go beyond 'filling in the gaps' of a geographic narrative by also attending to the palpability of those gaps themselves: the way they register materially and spatially.
Some guiding questions include, but are not limited to:
What kinds of embodied, emotional, and affective experiences inform or 'haunt' geographic representations?
What kinds of practices help attune us or orient us toward the excessive, exceptional, or excluded?
Where does the work of translation, transcription, or abstraction occur? How are these processes sited in places, at scales, in time, and in bodies?
What dimensions of experience are situationally or structurally absent(ed) from representations?
How are counter-cartographic or creative geographic practices still implicated by critiques of representations as partial, exclusive, and imperfect?
How do contemporary critical geographies respond to or rework non-representational or more-than-representational geographies?
Where 'are' things which are left off of the map or left out of a text?