Maps and Politics

Maps and Politics
Author: Jeremy Black
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2000-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1861898371

?We all rely on the apparent accuracy and objectivity of maps, but often do not see the very process of mapping as political. Are the power and purpose of maps inherently political? Maps and Politics addresses this important question and seeks to emphasize that the apparent ‘objectivity’ of the map-making and map-using process cannot be divorced from aspects of the politics of representation. Maps have played, and continue to play, a major role in both international and domestic politics. They show how visual geographical representations can be made to reflect and advance political agendas in powerful ways. The major developments in this field over the last century are responses both to cartographic progression and to a greater emphasis on graphic imagery in societies affected by politicization, democratization, and consumer and cultural shifts. Jeremy Black asks whether bias-free cartography is possible and demonstrates that maps are not straightforward visual texts, but contain political and politicizing subtexts that need to be read with care.

The Politics of Maps

The Politics of Maps
Author: Christine Leuenberger
Publisher:
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190076232

Blending science and technology studies, sociology, and geography with a host of archival material and gorgeously produced maps, The Politics of Maps explores how the geographical sciences came to be entangled with the politics, territorial claim-making, and nation-state building of Israel/Palestine.

Prisoners of Geography

Prisoners of Geography
Author: Tim Marshall
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2016-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501121472

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Elliott and Thompson Limited.

100 Maps

100 Maps
Author: John O. E. Clark
Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2005
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1402728859

Presents a chronological overview of the history of cartography, from the earliest maps of prehistory to the engraved maps of the seventeenth century and beyond. Includes illustrations.

Close Up at a Distance

Close Up at a Distance
Author: Laura Kurgan
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2013-03-26
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1935408283

Maps poised at the intersection of art, architecture, activism, and geography trace a profound shift in our understanding and experience of space. The maps in this book are drawn with satellites, assembled with pixels radioed from outer space, and constructed from statistics; they record situations of intense conflict and express fundamental transformations in our ways of seeing and of experiencing space. These maps are built with Global Positioning Systems (GPS), remote sensing satellites, or Geographic Information Systems (GIS): digital spatial hardware and software designed for such military and governmental uses as reconnaissance, secrecy, monitoring, ballistics, the census, and national security. Rather than shying away from the politics and complexities of their intended uses, in Close Up at a Distance Laura Kurgan attempts to illuminate them. Poised at the intersection of art, architecture, activism, and geography, her analysis uncovers the implicit biases of the new views, the means of recording information they present, and the new spaces they have opened up. Her presentation of these maps reclaims, repurposes, and discovers new and even inadvertent uses for them, including documentary, memorial, preservation, interpretation, political, or simply aesthetic. GPS has been available to both civilians and the military since 1991; the World Wide Web democratized the distribution of data in 1992; Google Earth has captured global bird's-eye views since 2005. Technology has brought about a revolutionary shift in our ability to navigate, inhabit, and define the spatial realm. The traces of interactions, both physical and virtual, charted by the maps in Close Up at a Distance define this shift.

Maps and Politics

Maps and Politics
Author: Jeremy Black
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2000-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226054940

Do maps accurately and objectively present the information we expect them to portray, or are they instead colored by the political purposes of their makers? In this lively and well-illustrated book, Jeremy Black investigates this dangerous territory, arguing persuasively that the supposed "objectivity" of the map-making and map-using process cannot be divorced from aspects of the politics of representation.

Mapping the Cold War

Mapping the Cold War
Author: Timothy Barney
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2015-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469618559

In this fascinating history of Cold War cartography, Timothy Barney considers maps as central to the articulation of ideological tensions between American national interests and international aspirations. Barney argues that the borders, scales, projections, and other conventions of maps prescribed and constrained the means by which foreign policy elites, popular audiences, and social activists navigated conflicts between North and South, East and West. Maps also influenced how identities were formed in a world both shrunk by advancing technologies and marked by expanding and shifting geopolitical alliances and fissures. Pointing to the necessity of how politics and values were "spatialized" in recent U.S. history, Barney argues that Cold War–era maps themselves had rhetorical lives that began with their conception and production and played out in their circulation within foreign policy circles and popular media. Reflecting on the ramifications of spatial power during the period, Mapping the Cold War ultimately demonstrates that even in the twenty-first century, American visions of the world--and the maps that account for them--are inescapably rooted in the anxieties of that earlier era.

The Cartographic State

The Cartographic State
Author: Jordan Branch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107040965

This book describes the emergence of the territorial state and examines the role that cartography has played in shaping its linear boundaries.

Music and Politics

Music and Politics
Author: John Street
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2013-04-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0745636551

It is common to hear talk of how music can inspire crowds, move individuals and mobilise movements. We know too of how governments can live in fear of its effects, censor its sounds and imprison its creators. At the same time, there are other governments that use music for propaganda or for torture. All of these examples speak to the idea of music's political importance. But while we may share these assumptions about music's power, we rarely stop to analyse what it is about organised sound - about notes and rhythms - that has the effects attributed to it. This is the first book to examine systematically music's political power. It shows how music has been at the heart of accounts of political order, at how musicians from Bono to Lily Allen have claimed to speak for peoples and political causes. It looks too at the emergence of music as an object of public policy, whether in the classroom or in the copyright courts, whether as focus of national pride or employment opportunities. The book brings together a vast array of ideas about music's political significance (from Aristotle to Rousseau, from Adorno to Deleuze) and new empirical data to tell a story of the extraordinary potency of music across time and space. At the heart of the book lies the argument that music and politics are inseparably linked, and that each animates the other.

The Power of Geography

The Power of Geography
Author: Tim Marshall
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2021-11-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1982178647

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Prisoners of Geography, a fascinating, “refreshing, and very useful” (The Washington Post) follow-up that uses ten maps to explain the challenges to today’s world powers and how they presage a volatile future. Tim Marshall’s global bestseller Prisoners of Geography offered us a “fresh way of looking at maps” (The New York Times Book Review), showing how every nation’s choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas, and walls. Since then, the geography hasn’t changed, but the world has. Now, in this “wonderfully entertaining and lucid account, written with wit, pace, and clarity” (Mirror, UK), Marshall takes us into ten regions set to shape global politics. Find out why US interest in the Middle East will wane; why Australia is now beginning an epic contest with China; how Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the UK are cleverly positioning themselves for greater power; why Ethiopia can control Egypt; and why Europe’s next refugee crisis looms closer than we think, as does a cutting-edge arms race to control space. Innovative, compelling, and delivered with Marshall’s trademark wit and insight, this is “an immersive blend of history, economics, and political analysis that puts geography at the center of human affairs” (Publishers Weekly).