Representation and Re-presentation

Abstract

The cultural turn in human geography focused attention on the importance of representation in a number of important methodological ways. Geographers began to pay more attention to a wide range of landscape texts that represent the human environment, or representations of the environment that occur in maps, photographs, paintings, or other graphic images. Influenced by Foucauldian notions of power/knowledge, the act of representation is regarded as a powerful means of positioning and organizing human bodies in normative ways. Ethical concerns have arisen over the geographical eye and its power to re-present Others. Attempts to develop representations for rather than of others have led to activist scholarship that empowers communities through novel means of representation such as Photo Voice or GIS. Controversy remains, however, over whether the interpretive practice of representation results in essentialized and deadened landscapes in which the potential of the human body is not fully realized. Nonrepresentational theories attempt to go beyond representation, but raise questions about whether such a practice is possible and how such practices might result in a non-normative geographical vision.