Dr. Valentina Carraro is Assistant Professor at the Department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development. She's part of the Political and Economic Geographies programme group of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR). Broadly, her research sits at the intersection of digital, political and urban geography, and revolves around three main themes:
Her first book, ‘Jerusalem Online: Critical Cartography for the Digital Age’, has been published by Palgrave-MacMillan in 2021. This work examines the politics of web-maps in/of Jerusalem, drawing on ontological social theory and feminist technoscience. It considers three case studies, each related to a different map provider and a recent mapping development: Google Maps and the distributed authorship of web-maps; Waze and algorithmic navigation; OpenStreetMap and crowdsourcing. Overall, the research argues for the need to develop new theoretical and methodological approaches to critical cartography, while holding on to the discipline’s critical sensibilities.
Prior to joining UvA, Valentina was a postdoc fellow at CIGIDEN / Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, in Santiago. Funded by Fondecyt, her project built on political ecology, intersectional theory and critical GIS to study the production of disaster vulnerability in Chile.