This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature Killian Quigley’s review of Plotting the Oceans: Stories of powerful maps and their makers by Sarah Hamylton. Hamylton’s sharp insights emerge from her deeply embodied knowledge of her environment, Quigley asserts. In an era where ‘drones, algorithms, and artificial intelligence are transforming how maps are made’, such ‘situated knowledge’ is increasingly valuable. While technological advancement is inevitable, Quigley urges a renewed ‘attention to the bodies that map – that sweat, are sunburnt and shark-nibbled’. ‘To be physically present in a place – and physically vulnerable to that place – is to know it in a way’ that remote technologies cannot.

Killian Quigley is a teacher and senior researcher at the Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. He is the co-editor, with Margaret Cohen, of The Aesthetics of the Undersea, published in 2019. Here is Killian Quigley with ‘Vulnerable to place: Navigating deep blue history’, published in the June issue of ABR.