ABSTRACT
In the first part of this Introduction, I retrace my way through cartography and map theorisation in the Italian academe between the 1990s and the early 2000s. I provide this contextualisation to sketch the move from early critical cartography to more recent post-representational, more-than-critical understandings of maps and mappings, which marked cartographic thinking in the last decade, from a specific geographical perspective and through personal experience. The expansion of the scope of map studies, with the crucial role played by the digital shift and the appearance of multivocal accounts of cartography and mapping practices with a new protagonism of the ‘carto-humanities’, constitutes a productive background for the experimental contamination between cartography and object-oriented philosophy, which is at the core of the present book. In the final part of this Introduction, I describe how the idea of combining map theory with object-oriented ontology emerged, explaining my particular, eclectic and pragmatic way of importing OOO suggestions within the cartographic field as well as the need for a reconsideration of existing works on the objecthood of maps. Finally, I provide brief descriptions of the chapter contents.
