ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief overview of the research field of critical GIS. It begins with an introduction of the emergence of critical GIS,which was stimulated by critiques of GIS by social theorists in the early 1990s. The following two sections provide more detailed discussions on questions of epistemological implications and power regarding GIS usage and development respectively. GIS has been critiqued of being underpinned by positivism and prioritizing an abstract Cartesian space. However,research has shown that GIS is not inherently positivist. Another key question in critical GIS research is about power,which is illustrated through examples from participatory GIS and feminist GIS to show efforts in researching how spatial knowledge is produced and power is negotiated in processes of developing and using GIS and spatial data. The last section addresses more recent developments in critical GIS especially considering the growth of user-generated geographic data facilitated by Web 2.0 technologies.
