Map-mobilities: Expanding the Field

The spread of digital technologies and the complex notion of mobility have led to extensive sociological research on mapping in the form of spatial media, algorithmic spaces, locative mobile devices and digital navigation. However, there is still little reflection on the cultural, imaginative, emotional, expressive, visual and aesthetic dimensions of digital and nondigital maps, mapping and artifacts within the framework of the new mobilities paradigm, especially in the emerging subfield of ‘mobility and the humanities’. By intersecting mobility and migration studies with recent cultural cartographic theory, we argue for the further widening of the framework of ‘map-mobilities’ and thus propose alternative theoretical and methodological lines of enquiry that address critical and post-critical cartography, mobility and migration studies from a humanistic angle. While reviewing existing works, we suggest other paths to follow that make the movement-ness of maps meaningful and enticing within the speculative ground of ‘mobility and the humanities’.