Rossetto T., Lo Presti L. (edited by), The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities, Routledge, London, 2024
The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities (2024), edited by Tania Rossetto and Laura Lo Presti, offers a vibrant exploration of the intersection and convergence between map studies and the humanities through multifaceted traditions and inclinations emerging from different disciplinary, geographical and cultural contexts.
With 42 chapters, the book covers the unique involvement of maps and mapping in critical theory, geographical thought, literary studies, archaeology, history, music, cinema, advertisement, digital culture, ethnography, art, curatorial practice and public humanities, among others. A broad humanistic perspective is adopted not just to show how cartography traverses distinct disciplinary fields of the humanities but to suggest foundational nodes, shared instances, ongoing contradictions, recurring interrogations and exciting new directions for future scholarship in the transdisciplinary field of the cartographic humanities.
The Handbook is organised into seven parts:
- Part 1: Preludes and trends
- Part 2: Textural connections
- Part 3: Mediations and intermedialities
- Part 4: Cultural digitalities
- Part 5: Troubles and disruptions
- Part 7: Public cartographic humanities
ISBN 9781032355931
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Critics’ Reviews:
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
