Semantic ruminations on ‘post-representational cartography’

‘Post-representational cartography’ is a term currently used to describe an emerging shift within map theorization. Yet some misunderstanding, confusion and ambiguity may arise when trying to grasp the meaning of the phrase ‘post-representational’ in recent literature. This conceptual article discusses varieties of ‘post-representational cartography’ and seeks to contribute to some semantic clarification by comparing these different, similar or distant conceptions with the broader, well-established debate on the ‘post-/more-than-/non-representational’ within cultural geography. The paper also briefly hints about possible further developments on a more extreme ‘non-representational cartography’. ‘Map studies’ belong to an emerging, highly heterogeneous and transdisciplinary arena. Thus, reflections on words and phraseologies which are glowingly circulated among scholars of different backgrounds appear to be of some aid in gaining a deeper awareness of the terminological ambiguity that every interdisciplinary practice inevitably has to face.