Critical Engagement into GIS Methods While Wrestling with Slavery’s Archive

Abstract

This chapter reflects on how methodological application within geography using Geographic Information Systems complicates research into obscured people and places in history, in this case, enslaved freedom seekers. It begins with a brief survey of disciplinary shifts in the geography that stemmed from its precarity within the university, which ushered in a focus on quantitative geography. It then foregrounds the ideas of critical geographers and my own experience embodying slavery’s past and my anxieties with archival features within slavery’s documentation. Utilizing critical readings within Katherine McKittrick’s work Demonic Ground: Black Women and Cartographies of Struggle and, more recently, Dear Science and Other Stories, it then offers, by way of my own discoveries in? using GIS, a framework for working with GIS while remaining attuned to ethics of care in writing about Black geographies within the archive of slavery.