CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 61Decolonial Thought and EpistemologiesLatin American Cultural PoliticsHistorical Geography and Cartography

Decolonizing cartography and ontological conflict: Counter-mapping in Colombia and “cartographies otherwise”

Oslender, Ulrich·2021·Political Geography
DOI 10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102444
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Discussions in decolonial literature have recently drawn on the concept of “ontological conflict” to reflect on the conflictual entanglements of diverse cosmologies. In Latin America (as elsewhere) these conflicts are frequently of a territorial nature, with indigenous and black communities making claims to communal land rights as indispensable part of their respective ways of being-in-the-world, which the post-colonial state has increasingly begun to acknowledge, often in the form of new political constitutions. In this article I examine the role of cartography in the resolution of such ontological conflicts; in particular a participatory mapping exercise in Colombia known as “social cartography,” which aims to challenge dominant cartographic representations and empowering local communities vis-à-vis the state. At the same time, I reflect on the limits of such an emancipatory vision and on the ways in which Colombia's version of counter-mapping has been coopted by dominant power. Inspired by the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality framework, I contextualize this experience within other radical mapping exercises, or “cartographies otherwise,” in places such as Australia, Palestine and the Straits of Gibraltar, to finally suggest that the art of decolonizing cartography may be seen as a tool of Hardt & Negri's project of a multitude in resistance.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102444

Cites

58 of 58 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Oslender, U.
Affiliations
Florida International University (US)
Corresponding author
Oslender, Ulrich
ORCID
Oslender, Ulrich
Venue
Political Geography
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2021-08
Volume
89
Pages
102444
ISSN
0962-6298 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102444
OpenAlex
W3181298062
Cited by
61
References
58
Citations by year
2026: 21 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 2
FWCI
13.99
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
Locations
Political Geography (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Decolonial Thought and Epistemologies
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Latin American Cultural Politics
  • Social Sciences › Geography, Planning and Development › Historical Geography and Cartography
Keywords
ontological conflict, counter-mapping, social cartography, participatory mapping, territorial claims, indigenous land rights, Black communities, multitude, Hardt and Negri, Colombia

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review