Feminist Map Icons, New Cartographic Vocabularies
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 14701668 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Meghan Kelly (0000-0002-2839-5943, Syracuse University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 61 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 13-37 |
| Publication date | 2026-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cartographica The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0317-7173 • E-ISSN: 1911-9925 |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cart-2025-0006 |
| OpenAlex | W7140130191 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 18 |
Map icons are tiny pixel-based symbols that locate people, places, and events commonly prepackaged into icon libraries. Given their size and ubiquity, map icons are often overlooked and applied universally in maps despite reflecting social injustices. Feminist mapping offers an alternative framework that centres power structures, situated knowledge, and embodiment and can be used to challenge and expand mapping conventions. Recent work in feminist mapping and icon design explores the depiction, abstraction, and erasure of bodies in icon symbolization and provides a framework for redesigning icon sets like the Mapbox Maki library. Building from this work, I facilitate a series of workshops based on this framework for feminist icon design where designers used sketch mapping techniques to redesign the Maki icon set, one icon at a time. I collate the icon sketches across the workshops and semiotically analyse the impacts of feminist principles on their designs. I argue that a feminist framework for icon design disrupts conventional and universal approaches to icon design concluding that feminist perspectives generate alternative graphic vocabularies for icon design and expand possibilities for feminist map design, more broadly
Icon · Perspective (graphical · Semiotics · Situated · Sketch · Symbol (formal · Table (database · Geographic Information Systems Studies · Innovative Human-Technology Interaction · Spatial Cognition and Navigation
Data Feminism
Design Justice
Datasheets for datasets
Visual Methodologies
Spatial Data and (De)colonization
Decolonizing the Map
A Design Challenge for Transforming Justice
Mapping Bodies, Designing Feminist Icons
Introduction
Care of the Subject
Gender and the GeoWeb
From the margins of Geographical Information Systems
Feminist digital geographies
Mapping the Margins
A Queer New York
Where We Go From Here
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |