Over the past decade there has been a move amongst critical cartographers to rethink maps
from a post-representational perspective – that is, a vantage point that does not privilege
representational modes of thinking (wherein maps are assumed to be mirrors of the world)
and automatically presumes the ontological security of a map as a map, but rather rethinks
and destabilises such notions1. This new theorisation extends beyond the earlier critiques
of Brian Harley (1989) that argued maps were social constructions. For Harley a map still
conveyed the truth of a landscape, albeit its message was bound within the ideological
frame of its creator. He thus advocated a strategy of identifying the politics of representation
within maps in order to circumnavigate them (to reveal the truth lurking underneath), with
the ontology of cartographic practice remaining unquestioned. As Jeremy Crampton (2003:
90) has argued, Harley’s approach ‘provided an epistemological avenue into the map, but
still left open the question of the ontology of the map.’ Recent work has started to probe cartography’s
ontology and in this short paper, I detail in brief five such attempts to rethink the
ontology of maps to provide a new perspective on how they are conceived, made and used
