Map Worlds

``The vignettes draw together perhaps the only source for personal biographies of female pioneers in heavily male-dominated professions.'' -- Julie Sweetkind-Singer -- The Portolan, Spring 2014
`Map Worlds provides a social and cultural analysis of the intersections between gender and cartographic practice. By focussing on maps themselves, Map Worlds fits within the new materialist turn within the social sciences, rejecting binaries between matter and discourse and attributing agency to things. There is also a focus on the epistemic uniqueness of women-made maps which is a real point of interest for readers (like myself) broadly concerned with gender and technology. The major strength of the book is built on interviews with 25 women occupied in cartography.... Attention to the structural and normative environment of cartography is a proper area of focus for a sociologist but one that has until now remained understudied.... The author is particularly interested in how the contours of this map world have circumscribed the lives of female cartographers.... Map Worlds seeks some redress for the exclusion and exploitation of female cartographers, both by providing detailed visibilty on the role of women in the production of cartographic knowledge from the 13th C on (29168) and by telling the in-depth stories of particular women map-makers (169204).... Van den Hoonaard makes the claim that theoretical shifts within cartography away from realist approaches has made some wiggle room for the simultaneous recognition of women cartographers because women make maps differently, more subjectively. This is a tricky argument to make without sliding toward essentialism. There is of course a wealth of good research demonstrating that female scientists set different sorts of research questions and may even bring a unique epistemological perspective on the same sets of questions or data (eg. Fox-Keller 1985). Map Worlds engages with such empirical researchspecifically that coming out of feminist geography and cartography (269284)which helps to provide nuance to the claim about gendered cartographic practice.'' - Kelly Bronson, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 39 (3), 2014