Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach

“Qualitative GIS – isn’t that kind of an oxymoron?” This comment from a colleague with years of experience working with GIS echoes the title of an editorial from an edition of Environment and Planning dedicated to the topic (Kwan and Knigge: 2006), and voices lingering concerns about the limitations of GIS. Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach serves as an invitation to scholars in fields like cultural anthropology and human geography to take seriously how GIS can serve as a productive and genuinely qualitative research framework, unshackled from the rigid, Cartesian understandings of space that contemporary scholarship with a qualitative orientation tends to reject. From the very first sentence, the editors, both with longstanding and extensive academic engagements with GIS, anticipate the resistance that scholars might have to the idea of qualitative GIS. Indeed, the text very much reads as a response to the understanding that GIS is an inherently quantitative research framework. A significant part of this rebuttal targets the wellknown critiques of GIS from the mid-1990s, which depicted GIS as being rooted in positivism and therefore mostly, if not exclusively, suited for quantitative spatial techniques which lend themselves to such a perspective. Each author aims to move beyond these critical polemics of the 1990s. They do so by thinking through the creative possibilities of a ‘post-positivistic’ GIS, capable of visualizing multiple (or partial) representations unhinged from any particular spatial epistemology.