Call for papers – no.47 « Counter-mapping / Contre-cartographier »

Call for papers

n° 47 (Spring 2026)

Intermediality. History and Theory of the Arts, Literature, and Technologies

Intermédialités. Histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques

Guest editors :

Counter-mapping

Cartography, as a national, institutional, or corporate undertaking, operates a form of violence that imposes dominant values onto territory (Harley, 1989; Rüeck, 2014). As such, cartography has played an important role in stifling and controlling communities, cultures and places.

To counter this geographical hegemony, counter-mapping has emerged as a tool and a language of resistance:“Every cartographic error is a poem resisting for its survival,” wrote the geographer-poet Jean Morisset, who passed away in 2024. Indeed, counter-mapping challenges the dominant narratives and official representations of territory by making visible the claims of marginalized individuals and communities. First theorized in the 1990s, counter-mapping is a branch of critical cartography that emerged within the discipline of geography in the mid-1980s. Critical cartography demonstrates the role of maps as social constructs that reinforce relations of power (Harley, 1989; Pickles, 2004).

In her key text “Whose woods are these…” the sociologist Nancy Peluso argued in 1995 that Indigenous counter-maps “significantly increase the power of people living in a mapped area to control representations of themselves and their claims to resources” (Peluso, 1995). Today, the links between counter-mapping practices and decolonial movements have become inseparable. Counter-mapping plays a key political role in the territorial claims of Indigenous peoples and colonized populations to resist but also to promote political, economic and territorial change.

If the term ‘counter-mapping’ has been well defined within geography (Hirt, 2022; Peluso, 1995), it is also essential to acknowledge the critical and expanding use of counter-mapping within other related disciplinary fields including oral traditions, literature, visual arts, architecture, urbanism, art history and media studies (Besse and Tiberghien, 2017; Bracco and Genay, 2021; Mitchell, 1994; Tiberghien, 2007, 2010)? Indeed, over the past 2 decades, an increasing number of artists, writers, architects, and activists have redefined and implemented their forms of counter-mapping by creating works and stories that alter perceptions and relationships to territory. This special issue has two main objectives. First, it welcomes proposals that identify, document and analyze counter-mapping practices as creative processes that act, dialogue and transform the territory. Then, it also encourages theoretical essays. Several questions could guide the proposals. Possible examples include the following: What are the materialities and media of counter-maps? What is the contribution of intermedial approaches? Is it possible to “turn historical maps against themselves” (Rüeck, 2014)? What is the difference between a survey, a map, and a counter-map? We invite submissions from a wide field of disciplines, including traditional forms of knowledge related to countermapping as it is understood or enacted across different cultures, communities and places.

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Intermédialités/Intermediality is a biannual journal, which publishes original articles in French and English evaluated through a blind peer review process.

Proposals (350–400 words) in English or French should include an abstract, a preliminary bibliography (five books or articles), and a brief biographical note (academic program, fields of interest, 5–10 lines). Proposals will be evaluated by the journal’s Scientific Committee based on the originality of the approach and thematic relevance. They should be sent to the guest editors (contandriopoulos.christina@uqam.ca and valtellezniemeyer@gmail.com) by 1 February 2025.

Completed texts should be sent before 1 August 2025. They should be no longer than 6,000 words (40,000 characters, including spaces) and can incorporate illustrations (audio, visual, still, or animated). Publication rights should be secured by the authors.

Authors are requested to follow the submission guidelines available at:

[EN] http://intermedialites.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Submission-Guidelines-2017-EN-May-2017.pdf

[FR] http://intermedialites.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Protocole-de-redaction-Intermedialites-mai-2017-FR.pdf

For more information on Intermédialités/Intermedialities, please consult the journal issues available through the online portal Érudit: http://www.erudit.org/revue/im/apropos.html  

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