Abstract
Geospatial technologies have been subjected to critique in geography and other fields over the past ten to fifteen years for their actual or potential complicity in providing knowledge for unjust regimes of control or illegitimate warfare. This chapter argues that in the atmosphere of dramatically intensified concern for ‘security’ since 9/11, one of the chief dangers of using geospatial technologies lies not in the knowledge they produce but rather in the ways they tend to transform a lack of knowledge into grounds for the withdrawal of rights from disadvantaged groups. Using some of Foucault’s ideas on ‘race war discourses,’ I suggest that it thus makes sense to see the ‘underscrutinized’ as an emerging ‘race’. The cultural context for this claim is set via a survey of stigmatizations of groups deemed ‘inscrutable’ or ‘subversive’ in US history. The bulk of the chapter is then devoted to setting a second, ‘techno-political’ context through an account of the nationwide census boycott movement in West Germany in 1987. This controversy from an earlier stage in the history of the information age illustrates one of the ways in which the inevitably uneven geographical coverage of a geospatial data set can lead to stigmatization and discrimination against the unregistered, even in the absence of any intent on the part of experts and state authorities.
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Hannah, M. (2008). Mapping the Under-Scrutinized: The West German Census Boycott Movement of 1987 and the Dangers of Information-Based Security. In: Sui, D.Z. (eds) Geospatial Technologies and Homeland Security. The GeoJournal Library, vol 94. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8507-9_15
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