Manuela Boatcă: Counter-Mapping as Method: Locating and Relating the (Semi-)Peripheral Self. [Abstract]

Drawing on several critical cartographers’ approach to counter-mapping as method and on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ “sociology of absences,” I discuss their combination – counter-mapping as a method for the sociology of absences – as a means of enhancing sociological reflexivity through a transdisciplinary lens. Such a lens reveals the very constitution of those academic disciplines that deal with the social world as shaped by the colonial and imperial context of their emergence. I argue that counter-mapping can serve as a decolonial strategy to the essentialization of nation-states and world regions in social scientific and political discourse and propose a relational perspective capable of revealing the constitutive entanglements through which a global capitalism grounded in colonial expansion interlinked all areas of the world. The focus lies on the entanglements that counter-mapping as a method uncovers between semiperipheries such as Eastern Europe and Latin America, constructed as fixed and unrelated locations on imperial maps.

Order this Article (PDF)
Access via EBSCO for Registered Users
All about Special Issue "Positionality Reloaded"