Decolonizing mapping practices: Tools, tensions, and issues of translation in creating counter-cartographies

Decolonization is more than the undoing of colonial nation-state borders and has grown to become a more critical lens of understanding the ways in which colonial worldviews still shape everyday life (Smith 2012;Liboiron, 2021;Ferdinand, 2021).To think decolonially includes an understanding of the role colonization plays in today's systems of inequality, such as how it has shaped development, and exacerbated climate change particularly in the Global South, and to identify ways of resistance (Sultana, 2022).Therefore the work of decolonization and decolonial thinking is not only an acknowledgement of colonial histories, systems, and structures, but is also highlighting Indigenous and other ways of knowing and being made marginal by colonial violence (Smith, 2012;Kimmerer, 2013).Decolonial thinking offers a rich theoretical starting point in order to assert, enact, and envision worlds outside of the literal and figurative borders of colonialism.Given that what would it mean to take this theory and apply it to the way we make maps?