All-terrain experts : land surveyors, remote mapping and land alienation in Mendoza, Argentina

There has been recent growing interest in the role of expert knowledge around land politics. One area that has often been overlooked is how land-related expert knowledge has fostered the transformation of the regime of land control, access and ownership. This paper aims to capture the distinctiveness of contemporary mapping politics in relation to the commodification of land by corporate and state actors. I analyse how remote mapping practices influence the transformation of land regimes. The main research question is how and to what extent land surveyors and their cadastral mapping practices facilitate and legitimate market-led land commodification, and at the same time contribute to de jure and de facto peasant land alienation.