Representation, Politics of

H. V. Scott, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK

& 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary
New Cultural Geography A strand of cultural
geography that emerged in the 1980s, drawing above all
on British cultural studies and on post-structuralist
theory.
Representation A complex term which embraces
several distinct but interconnected meanings,
representation has become one of the most debated
concepts in human geography. It is possible, however,
to identify two principal ways in which the term is used
and understood. First, representation refers to a
portrayal, or equally to the act of portrayal of certain
ideas, objects, places, or people. It may therefore be
understood as an act or material object that stands for
something else. Representations may take the form of a
material product, such as a painting or a written text, but
are also produced by intangible means of
communication such as the spoken word. Second, the
term refers to the active inclusion and consideration of
the interests, needs, knowledges, and identities that
dene particular individuals or groups. While this can
mean inclusion in a formal political system (for instance,
through the granting and exercising of electoral rights), it
also refers more broadly to inclusion in diverse social,
cultural, intellectual, and economic spheres of human
life, as well as in real geographical spaces.
The Politics of Representation A phrase that
attained common usage in human geography by the
1990s, the politics of representation conveys the notion
that all forms of representation are biased and selective,
favoring the interests and ideas of certain groups while
marginalizing or excluding others, and hence are open
to contestation. It also refers to social struggles that are
played out over and through representation, in both
senses of the term.
Introduction
Until the latter half of the twentieth century, work in
human geography was founded upon a deep-seated faith
in the researchers ability to produce unbiased and
transparent representations of the world by means of
rigorous and objective investigation. The emergence
of positivist approaches in the 1950s signalled, on the
one hand, a radical break with existing practices of
representation in human geography, for the empiricist
traditions of detailed written description were rejected in
favor of abstracted visions of the world based on math-
ematical models. On the other hand, however, these
new theory-driven impulses, which were inspired by the
hard sciences, perpetuated what had gone before in
terms of their inbuilt assumptions about the possibility
of producing and conveying knowledge in a manner
untainted by factors such as personal experience, social
background, or cultural identity.
In the 1970s, a humanistic backlash against the ab-
stractions of quantitative geography fostered scholarly
recognition of the role of subjectivity, and hence of the
researchers presence, in the production of geographical
knowledge. Yet, despite the efforts of humanistic geog-
raphers to bring human experience and subjectivity to
the center of geographical inquiry, the politics that are
now deemed to be ever-present in representations of the
world (whether produced by academics or other groups)
and in the circumstances of their production remained
largely unchallenged. Only with the embrace of post-
structuralist thought in the late 1980s did the politics of
representation begin to achieve real prominence as a
focus of analysis and debate.
Geography and the Politics of
Representation: An Overview
The late twentieth-century diffusion of post-structuralism
resulted in the profound destabilizing of old certainties
that had once underpinned academic thought and prac-
tice across the humanities and social sciences. In human
geography, as in other academic arenas, the emergence of
doubts about the existence of a world lled with naturally
given and enduring meanings that could be unlocked, as
well as of new understandings of knowledge as inescap-
ably partial and power-laden, produced what is referred
to as a crisis of representation. Despite the negative
connotations of this expression, the emergence of
geographical anxieties about representation provided a
stimulus for intellectual creativity that encouraged the
development of new theoretical, methodological, and
thematic directions in social and cultural geography.
These new directions were guided by the argument that
representations are never mirror-images of reality, but
instead are always the product of diverse and ever-shifting
contexts, and hence are never innocent, unbiased, or di-
vorced from the realm of power and politics. Such con-
cerns have been shared by academics in a range of other
disciplines that include art history, literary criticism,
351
cultural studies, and anthropology, and human geog-
raphers have both drawn on and contributed to work in
these other disciplines. Despite the absence of clearly
dened disciplinary boundaries, geographical approaches
are nevertheless distinguished by a particularly pro-
nounced interest in exploring the politics of represen-
tation through the prism of geographical concepts such as
space, place, and landscape.
Since the late 1980s, critical geographical engagement
with the politics of representation has involved, rst, the
deconstruction or reading of diverse representations
both textual and material, ranging from written texts and
visual images (such as travel accounts, maps, and paint-
ings) to physical landscapes. Focused above all on rep-
resentations that are produced by powerful groups or
individuals, critical analyzes show how representations
work to promote particular ways of knowing and im-
agining the world and particular constellations of power
and privilege within it. Demonstrations of the ways in
which representational practices can have tangible effects
in the world, including the marginalization of certain
knowledges and peoples or social groups, have therefore
been central to geographical interest in the politics of
representation.
Crucially, however, cultural and social geographers
have been concerned to show that representations are
always open to multiple readings and interpretations
and, consequently, to challenge and contestation. While
scholarly energies initially dwelled on uncovering the
politics embedded within particular representations, the
emphasis increasingly shifted toward exploring the dis-
cursive, spatial, and embodied ways in which dominant
representational practices may be challenged or sub-
verted by the marginalized or oppressed. In attending to
the ways in which representations are contested, social
and cultural geographers have placed at the center of
their inquiries a broad spectrum of groups and identities
which, both within academia and in the wider world,
have experienced varied forms of exclusion or margin-
alization on the grounds of categories such as race, class,
or sexuality.
Inspiration for such projects has undoubtedly been
drawn directly from the work of key post-structuralist
theorists such as Foucault and Derrida. However, currents
of thought in feminism, postcolonialism, and cultural
studies (all of which engage closely with post-structur-
alism) have played a prominent role in developing
geographers concerns, not only for analyzing represen-
tations and their effects in the world, but also for ad-
dressing the profoundly political issue of whose voices,
views, and ways of knowing are represented in discip-
linary geography, either as subjects of intellectual inquiry
or as examples of valid geographical knowledge.
The analysis of representations has necessarily been
accompanied by self-reexive engagements with issues
surrounding the politics of representation in contem-
porary academic geography. No longer a taken-for-
granted aspect of doing geography, the production of
representations is now understood as an undertaking
that brings with it serious moral responsibilities for the
researcher, precisely because representations advance
situated, partial understandings of the world that can
promote certain worldviews and practices beyond the
academy and therefore have real effects on peoples lives.
The difcult questions surrounding contemporary prac-
tices of representation in geography are illustrated by
past debates about whether contemporary researchers
who seek to undermine discriminatory representations
(such as those produced by agents of colonialism) by
making them the object of critical analysis run the risk of
inadvertently reinforcing the very ideas and ideologies
that these representations convey. Since the 1990s, the
impact of such concerns in social and cultural geography
has become increasingly apparent in the careful con-
textualization of contentious representations that are
reproduced as objects of critical study in research articles
and books, as well as in a heightened awareness of au-
thorial use of language and style.
At the same time, however, anxieties have emerged
over the legitimacy with which geographers may claim to
represent the views and experiences of other groups or
individuals or, to put it another way, to provide them with
a voice, especially when researchers and research sub-
jects are separated by profound cultural, social, or edu-
cational differences. The very complexity of recent
debates over representation in geography is reected,
therefore, in ongoing tensions between the desire to
achieve greater inclusiveness in terms of who is repre-
sented in contemporary geographical research, and the
recognition that any academic claims to speak with au-
thority on behalf of others are severely circumscribed.
Landscape
Since the emergence of the new cultural geography in
the late 1980s, landscape has constituted one of the most
prominent arenas of inquiry in which the politics of
representation have been explored by both cultural and
social geographers. Within this context, an ongoing
concern among academics is to contest the apparent in-
nocence and taken-for-granted existence of landscapes by
demonstrating that the interests and inuence of par-
ticular groups in society are reected in representations
that are made of certain landscapes as well as in the
material form that those landscapes take. While some
landscapes are self-evidently a focus of struggle (for in-
stance, those marked by overt military and political
conict, such as the highly contested barrier separating
Israel and the West Bank), others, such as afuent
352 Representation, Politics of
suburban landscapes of contemporary North American
cities or rural European scenes captured in eighteenth-
century paintings, partially conceal their politics beneath
a mundane or estheticized exterior. Departing from the
premise that all landscapes may be imbued with multiple
meanings that reect distinct and often competing
interests, identities, and beliefs, a great deal of research
has examined the conicts and negotiations over land-
scape that are played out by means of representational
practices, whether in the context of exceptional land-
scapes or those that appear to be everyday and mundane.
Work on landscape in social and cultural geography is
too disparate and diverse to allow one to trace a clear
progression in terms of how it has engaged with issues of
representation in recent decades. Nevertheless, since the
late 1980s, the focus has largely shifted away from the
critical analysis of representations of landscape such as
paintings and maps and toward an exploration of the
processes by which landscapes are continually (re)shaped
and struggled over by both material and representational
means. However, whether their work is predominantly
concerned with the analysis of individual representations
or with tracing how landscape unfolds as a process, cul-
tural geographers have displayed an ongoing interest in
examining which groups possess the power to shape and
inhabit particular landscapes in ways that reect and
reinforce their own interests and beliefs, and which are
marginalized within or excluded from them.
Politics in the Cartographic Landscape
One form of representation that attracted considerable
attention from cultural geographers in the 1990s was
cartography. Although the critical study of landscape
paintings by scholars such as Cosgrove and Daniels
provides a more frequently cited example, the seminal
work that exposed the biases and exclusions embedded
within cartographic representations has been equally
inuential, not only within human geography but also
beyond. Initiated above all by J. B. Harley, who drew
particular inspiration from Foucaults writings on power
and knowledge, these critical explorations of cartography
have presented a dramatic challenge to the notion that
scientic maps that is, those produced within a
modern, Western mapmaking tradition that emphasizes
mathematical accuracy are innocent, objective, and
universally valid. Some maps, of course, are overtly
political, such as world maps that were made to show the
territorial extent of the former British Empire. High-
lighting in red Britains colonies and protectorates, they
were intended to convey unequivocal messages to British
and colonial subjects alike about the global reach and
magnitude of the Empire. However, even if the overtly
political content is stripped away from such cartographic
representations, leaving only bare territorial outlines,
they are still neither innocent nor objective.
As Harleys work demonstrates, the historical rise to
dominance of a Europe-centered world map, accepted by
most inhabitants of the contemporary West as an objective
reection of geographical reality, is inextricably con-
nected to power and politics, for it involved the im-
position of a culturally specic way of imagining the
world that accompanied and propelled European imperial
expansion. Critical studies of cartography, however, are
not only concerned with what such representations con-
vey, but equally with what they leave out. By revealing
how (to cite one of many possible examples) colonial
maps of the Americas mask Amerindian ways of per-
ceiving and representing the continents landscapes and
geographies, the work of Harley and other scholars
demonstrates that such taken-for-granted representations
are in fact historically implicated in the marginalization of
non-Western knowledges and worldviews.
The Material Landscape as a Contested Site of
Representation
Just as certain knowledges are omitted from cartographic
representations, so too particular groups in society are
excluded from or rendered marginal (whether in a
physical, cultural, or political sense) in real or material
landscapes. Material landscapes may be regarded as sites
of representation that favor the interests of select groups
in society by giving their ideas and values tangible form.
Although a variety of research themes could be men-
tioned, the processes of gentrication that transformed
many urban landscapes of the industrialized West
throughout the 1990s, and the conicts and struggles that
accompanied these processes, generated numerous
studies by social and cultural geographers. A prevailing
objective of this work was to reveal the conicts that are
frequently concealed beneath the estheticized and glossy
exterior of revitalized city centers and urban neighbor-
hoods in cities such as Glasgow, Dublin, and New York.
As geographers have shown, the transformation of
these landscapes is inseparable from a politics of repre-
sentation that revolves around exclusions that are both
physical and symbolic in nature. While the visible fea-
tures of the gentried landscape (such as luxury housing
and boutiques) function as representations which com-
municate and reinforce the values of the privileged
groups who create and use them, other populations, such
as homeless people or those on low incomes, may be
physically removed or displaced. In examining the phe-
nomenon of gentrication, then, social and cultural
geographers such as Lees have asked questions about who
possesses the power to shape the urban landscape and
hence be represented through it, and how these inter-
ventions affect and are experienced by less powerful
Representation, Politics of 353
social actors. No less importantly, they have shown how
physical and symbolic exclusions are contested, whether
in the form of resistance to physical displacement,
through the modication or use of the gentried land-
scape in ofcially sanctioned ways, or by means of or-
ganized political protest that involves the production of
contestatory representations.
This subsection and the preceding one identify two
commonly encountered approaches to the politics of
representation in landscape research, one involving the
analysis of landscape representations such as paintings
and maps and the other focusing on the material land-
scape as a contested site of representation. By no means,
however, are these approaches mutually exclusive. The
struggle to be represented that is, to possess a recog-
nized place in a particular landscape and a stake in
shaping it is shown by social and cultural geographers
to be intimately connected to the production of textual
representations. Indeed, a signicant concern of many
recent studies has been, precisely, to explore the con-
nections between representations and material land-
scapes to show how each is inuenced by the other in
an ongoing process of interaction that changes (or per-
petuates) how landscapes are portrayed in diverse media
and whose interests and worldviews are represented in, or
excluded from, the material landscape.
Feminism
When feminist interventions began to make a tentative
mark on human geography in the 1970s, representation
was yet to attain prominence as a source of widespread
intellectual anxiety and as a focus of critical analysis.
Without doubt, these early interventions played a crucial
role in the development of broader geographical concern
for issues of representation and inuenced the theore-
tical and methodological directions that critical studies
of representation have taken. At a time when calls for a
feminist agenda in human geography were being made,
women were conspicuous in geography largely by their
absence, whether as subjects of geographical inquiry or
as academics. Initially, therefore, feminist geographers
were principally engaged in a practical politics that
strove simultaneously for the representation of women
in geographical research and within the academy.
In order to challenge womens invisibility as subjects
of inquiry, early feminist research in geography strove to
bring their lives and experiences to the fore. In doing so,
they not only demonstrated that womens mobility, their
everyday use of space and experiences of place can differ
markedly from those of men, they also drew attention to
the injustices and inequalities that these differences
represented. So, for example, it was shown that female
mobility in the industrialized West was severely
restricted in comparison to that of men, due to factors
that included their spatial isolation as suburban house-
wives, womens lower economic status, and their avoid-
ance of certain public spaces due to fear of crime or
harassment. Whereas many male geographers con-
ceptualized the home as a place of refuge and security,
the emerging feminist scholarship argued that such as-
sumptions sidelined the experiences of many women for
whom the home is instead experienced as a space of
violence, fear, and connement.
Feminism and Representation since the Late
1980s
Reecting broader trends in human geography, feminist
geographers increasingly turned their attention to the
analysis of visual and textual representations from the
late 1980s onward, drawing on psychoanalysis as well as
on post-structuralist theory. In particular, their work has
paid critical attention to the politics of representation
that surround depictions of the female body in Western
societies, whether in art, journalism, or advertising, and
has highlighted the ubiquity with which womens bodies
are represented as sexualized objects of heterosexual
male desire and as sites of moral danger and irrationality
that are in need of constant regulation and control.
Feminist scholars have examined, for instance, the in-
timate connections between representations of female
bodies and the imposition of discriminatory social ex-
pectations regarding womens bodily practices and their
behavior in a variety of public and private spaces such as
the workplace, the street, and the home. Research has
also focused, however, on the body as a contestatory site
of representation, and on how those female identities
which present a challenge to gender-based social ex-
pectations and norms are expressed by means of womens
embodied performances.
Feminist engagements with the politics of represen-
tation have also involved a critique of the repre-
sentational analyzes and practices employed by (pre-
dominantly) male academics. Cultural geographers ex-
plorations of the European tradition of landscape
painting and gardening became a particular target of
criticism in the 1990s. Associated above all with the
work of Gillian Rose, feminist discussions of landscape
research argued that cultural geographers had not only
ignored a crucial political dimension by sidelining the
gendered nature of landscape portrayals, but inadvert-
ently reproduced unequal gender relations by taking
pleasure in the visual mastery of landscape and in the
notion of landscape as a way of seeing. Not only have
women been historically subject to an exploitative male
gaze that identies them with and as part of a passive
natural landscape, Rose argues in a frequently cited
354 Representation, Politics of
essay, that male gaze is in fact perpetuated in the
landscape research of cultural geography.
Early feminist work in Anglo-American geography
tended to overlook the fact that the experiences of
women in the industrialized West do not necessarily
represent those of women in other parts of the world.
However, the reception of feminist critiques from beyond
the West, along with the embrace of postcolonial theory,
brought about the development of increasingly cautious
and self-reexive representational practices that recog-
nize the cultural, educational, and socioeconomic dif-
ferences that divide women as a group, and acknowledge
the limitations inherent in any attempt by Western
feminists to speak on behalf of other women. To a great
extent, this crisis of representation encouraged a pro-
nounced focus in Anglo-American research on Western
womens experiences a trend that is in fact widely re-
ected in post-1980s social and cultural geography.
However, these anxieties have also ensured that feminist
studies of representations produced by women have
largely been critical and nuanced, rather than merely
afrmative.
To give a brief example, feminists working within
cultural geography have insistently challenged mascu-
linist accounts of geographys history by highlighting
the largely unacknowledged contributions that women
have made to the construction of Western geographical
knowledges since the nineteenth century, whether as
travel writers, missionaries, or as the companions and
assistants of male geographers. However, recent work on
Victorian womens representations of colonial worlds
beyond Europe not only emphasizes their distinctive
geographical insights and spatial experiences, but also
demonstrates how their diaries and descriptions reveal
complicities with the Empire and the articulation of
perceived race- and class-based differences that divided
women as a group. Such studies provide a powerful re-
minder that representations are never innocent, even
when produced by relatively disenfranchised individuals
(in this case, nineteenth-century European women), and
demonstrate that they are always complex products of
multiple, intersecting identities.
Since its emergence in social and cultural geography,
feminist research has actively engaged with a politics
of representation that endeavors to provide a place for
women as academic contributors to geography or as
subjects of geographical research, as well as for members
of other groups who experience exclusion on the
grounds of categories such as sexuality, race, or dis-
ability, whether female or male. Just as signicantly, it
has played a leading role in imbuing human geographers
with a sensitivity toward the inescapably partial and
situated nature of their own practices of representation
and with a consequent awareness of the need for self-
reexivity.
A New Crisis for Representation?
Recent years have brought growing discontent among
social and cultural geographers with regard to the study
of representation and increasing interest in the non-
representational or the more than representational. As
Castree and Macmillan explain in a detailed analysis of
these trends, many human geographers feel that there is
no longer any need to provide further examples of how
representations are power-laden and partial, or of how
certain spaces, places, and landscapes favor or exclude a
bewildering spectrum of cultural groups and identities.
Indeed, as the example of landscape studies illustrates,
recent work in social and cultural geography has pro-
gressively moved away from the critical scrutiny of rep-
resentations toward a concern for exploring embodied,
precognitive practices and experiences. Although schol-
arly enthusiasm for the analysis of representations is
clearly on the wane, a broader concern for representation
in human geography is unlikely to disappear. Recent
lively debates about the extent to which the voices and
knowledges of non-Anglophone scholars are marginal-
ized in Anglophone human geography provides just one
of many clear indications that the politics of represen-
tation will continue to be a prominent focus of discussion
and inquiry.
See also: Cultural Geography; Feminism/Feminist
Geography; Gentrication; Humanism/Humanistic
Geography; Landscape; Non-Representational Theory/
Non-Representational Geographies; Positivism/Positivist
Geography; Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist
Geographies.
Further Reading
Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S. (eds.) (1988). The Iconography of
Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barnes, T. and Duncan, J. S. (eds.) (1992). Writing Worlds: Discourse,
Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. London:
Routledge.
Barnett, C. (1997). Sing along with the common people: Politics,
postcolonialism, and other gures. Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 15, 137--154.
Castree, N. and Macmillan, T. (2004). Old news: Representation and
academic novelty. Environment and Planning A 36, 469--480.
Desbiens, C. and Ruddick, S. (2006). Speaking of geography:
Language, power, and the spaces of Anglo-Saxon hegemony.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, 1--8.
Duncan, J. S. and Duncan, N. G. (2004). Landscapes of Privilege: The
Politics of the Aesthetic in an American Suburb. New York:
Routledge.
Harley, J. B. (2001). The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of
Cartography. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.
Lees, L., Slater, T. and Wyly, E. (2007). Gentrication. New York:
Routledge.
Livingstone, D. (1998). Reproduction, representation and authenticity:
A rereading. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23,
13--19.
Representation, Politics of 355
McDowell, L. and Court, G. (1994). Performing work: Bodily
representations in merchant banks. Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 12, 727--750.
McDowell, L. and Sharp, J. P. (eds.) (1997). Space, Gender,
Knowledge: Feminist Readings. London: Arnold.
Nash, C. (1996). Reclaiming vision: Looking at landscape and the body.
Gender, Place and Culture 3, 149--169.
Nash, C. (2000). Performativity in practice: Some recent work in cultural
geography. Progress in Human Geography 24, 653--664.
Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical
Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press.
So derstro m, O. (2005). Representation. In Atkinson, D., Jackson, P.,
Sibley, D. & Washbourne, N. (eds.) Cultural Geography: A Critical
Dictionary of Key Concepts (1st edn.), pp 11--15. London: I. B.
Taurus.
Relevant Websites
http://www.sagepub.co.uk
Cultural Geographies (journal), Sage.
http://www.tandf.co.uk
Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography; Social
and Cultural Geography (journal), Taylor and Francis.
356 Representation, Politics of