This paper identifies how comparative educators have chosen to visually represent the field of development education since about 1963. This is an attempt to historicize the vision as scholars struggle with the representational dilemmas and opportunities of late modernity/postmodernity. The paper is organized in three parts. Part 1 illustrates how the three scopic regimes of modernity (the technical rationalist; the critical rationalist; the hermeneutical constructivist) each have their own favored rhetoric and forms of representation. Part 2 presents a personal narrative of how the social cartography project has sought to elaborate and implement a new social mapping rationale and methodology. Part 3 notes the possible implications of this study and the social cartography project for current theoretical debates, representational practice, and new opportunities to reposition development studies vis-a-vis the human sciences in the coming millennium. Examples of how social cartography might help to construct new ways representing and seeing are assessed. (EH)