This thematic issue will explore how counter-data and counter-maps are being used by diverse global communities to visually construct new social realities that support their social justice aims (see Jeppesen & Sartoretto, 2023), both contesting data power and engaging the counter-power of map-making practices beyond cartographic representation (Calvo & Candón-Mena, 2023).
Communities may engage in resistant data appropriation, either reappropriating big datasets and/or creating community datasets (Ricaurte, 2019). Counter-data maps produced by diverse marginalized groups can reveal hidden inequalities, enhance communities’ visibility, and support calls for intersectional justice. They may express a community’s demands, contesting top-down categorizations imposed by states and corporations, and engage in counter-mapping as a form of data power embedded in notions of experienced spatiality and relationality.
We invite contributions that interrogate community data mapping practices and consider practices of data visualization and visual communication that contest the narratives of big data produced in hegemonic data mapping by states and corporations.
Potential contributors should address dimensions of counter-mapping that might include:
- Data mapping practices;
- Collaborative mapping;
- Inclusive dashboard design;
- Mapping ecologies and flows;
- Data visualizations;
- Map interactivity;
- Data mapping imaginaries;
- Data justice;
- Territorial justice;
- Data sources for counter-mapping;
- Community objectives and imaginaries in counter-mapping;
- Uses and capacities for digital mapping;
- Map production by diverse communities;
- Community ownership of data and maps, etc.
Contributors may also consider how communities, activists, and grassroots groups are appropriating data and/or data maps to address:
- Data colonialism;
- Racialized data and maps;
- Gendered data and maps;
- Rural mapping (or rural exclusions);
- Regional representations;
- Hegemonic data and mapping processes;
- Data mapping imaginaries;
- Queering data maps;
- Mapping disabilities;
- Accessibility to data mapping technologies;
- Mapping poverty or food deserts;
- Eviction mapping;
- Mapping ecologies;
- Mapping alternative economies;
- Intersectional mapping, etc.
