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Back in the month of May, as part of a political push regarding Canada, President Donald Trump referred to as the dividing line separating the two nations a constructed boundary that was established using a straightedge “cutting across the upper portion of the nation”. He remarked that the atlas of the continent would look more coherent if it were removed.

Researchers observed that this boundary represented a complicated past and a practical situation for a vast population, though they recognized that his point had merit. A significant stretch of the 49th parallel indeed follows a linear path – and the representatives who drew it up knew almost nothing about local geography.

This gambit underscored the reality that the maps standard in classrooms present a deceptively tidy worldview – one split into monolithic countries that admits scant opposition to its perceived neutrality, infallibility or factual basis.

Historian William Rankin links this perspective to eighteenth-century UK geographers who produced “jigsaw-puzzle maps” for instructional purposes for pupils of the upper class. These representations, that depicted territories with sharp boundaries and doubled as the original puzzles, stayed as a mainstay in schooling for more than a century. They still mold current understanding: what was initially a teaching tool developed into a way of depicting differences in statistics such as average lifespan or national wealth, with every state depicted by a solitary figure. “I believe that inflicts actual detriment, not only to how we understand those countries, but also to the way we see disparity,” says Rankin.

Advocacy for Transforming Maps

Certain experts are advocating for a cartographic overhaul. Last year, political geographer an expert from Radboud University launched an initiative to “Liberate Cartography”. He proposes to exchange the country-centered view with an approach that prioritizes migration and social networks. Or as he puts it, to replace the figure bearing the globe, bending under the heavy world, for the agile figure – the wearer of winged sandals, intermediary among domains.

This geographer specializes in border management and migration, which is frequently represented on maps via imposing vectors that suggest invasion (for those old enough, think a famous title sequence). “The dehumanizing, massive arrow is chiefly the institutional lens,” he writes. “It emphasises the imagined homogeneity of the nation and the distinctiveness of movement by outsiders.” In response to his and others’ critiques, a major European border agency has changed the fear-inducing lines on its data presentations with less dramatic – though not entirely objective – proportional circles, and numerous educators have committed to revise the pictorial story in education.

Integrating Different Map-Making Ethics

For his part, the Yale scholar advocates for geographic representation to welcome different principles. The gathering of data and depiction of data are imperfect human endeavors that need analysis, he says. Instead of striving for neutrality, neutrality and clear divides, geographers should embrace uncertainty, bias a plurality of views. His publication, named Radical Cartography, contains cartographic examples that dispute the conventional wisdom.

One presents Western exploration across five centuries beginning in the 1400s, not by highlighting where flags were planted, but rather the locations they found that had never previously been inhabited. These totaled “a few dozen islands and extensive ice fields”.

That’s informative about both the area of Earth societies had already populated by the middle ages, and on the real exploration that happened after that. This differs from an antique map of the continent currently on display at a famous library, which portrays aboriginal areas as empty spaces, “to give the idea that they were deserted and ready for taking,” comments a principal historian of antiquarian maps.

The Role of Grassroots Cartography

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