GIScience II: Newness and imminence

Abstract

In this second report, I discuss the role of newness in GIScience, drawing distinctions between ‘the new’, as a state of emergent technology and technical situation, and imminence, a state of happenings and becomings. I suggest that GIScience often reduces the two to each other – what is imminent is that which is new – with specific implications for the use of geospatial techniques and technologies in explicitly radical, critical, and anti-racist projects. To engage in this work means often to make do with what is available and accessible, with no less need for experimentation and innovation.