Visualizing   “geographical   common   sense”:   a   visual   survey   to   examine   imagined  national  geographies

CARLA LOIS

Nueva York

Congreso; Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers; 2012

Association of American Geographers

Geographical imagination has predominately been analyzed using a corpus of images (text books, advertisements, brochures for tourists, and material produced by governmental offices) and their venues (exhibitions, television, etc.). Most of those studies seem to assume that the power of images can be inferred from the scale of those venues and the frequency of the repetition of those images. In particular, scholars examining national identity have much preferred to scrutinize materials produced by official institutions in order to define the kind of “logotype-map” that has been built up. Less frequently, attention has been focused on the people exposed to those images and the ways they re-elaborate the geographical imagery. While mental maps seemed to have been confined to express subjective places sketched at large scale, some few and isolated papers started to use mental maps as a device to explore new dimensions of national identity. For this study, six hundred people from ten different cities across Argentina participated in a visual survey by sketching a map of the country. This paper analyzes those designs and aims to explore some expressions of a sort of “geographical common sense”: simple premises regarding the forms of the territory, the geopolitical situation, and geographical imagination connected to the people’s imagined community. Interpretation of these maps can show the impact of formal geographical education, governmental territorial policies and the public agenda, and the way that all those “official inputs” are combined with the cohort’s filters, relational geographic points of view, and other circumstantial factors. This paper also discusses the uses of visualizing devices in geographical research.