Mapping emotions in place: a critical visual proposal for data collection
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Keywords: feminist mapping, emotions, visual methodologies, topology, intersectionality
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Nuria Font-Casaseca, Department of Political and Social Sciences, Pompeu Fabra University
Maria Rodó-Zárate, Department of Political and Social Sciences
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Abstract
The technological and conceptual changes experienced by cartography and geographic information systems (GIS) in recent decades have redefined the role and potential of maps as research tools, opening up new opportunities for critical research. Although maps help us to identify spatial patterns and relationships, feminist approaches challenge the way visual technologies and mapping practices reproduce and reinforce power relations. At the same time, the commitment and appropriation of these cartographic technologies from critical positions have managed to transform these tools into research technologies compatible with feminist principles. However, a crucial and persistent problem critical spatial visualizations need to handle is how to use GIS and maps to represent the messy complexity of lived experience and spatialities. Mapping the relationship and contradictions between lived experiences and places and how space is actively involved in producing and reproducing inequalities requires us to rethink our cartographic language and also expand our geographical imaginations beyond the rigid Euclidean structure of the conventional GIS software. Here we present a visual proposal to collect data about emotions, intersectionality and space based on a redefinition of the Relief Maps model. The new visual tool is designed to collect meaningful meanings of places by combining spatial entities with exact coordinates with other spatial references more related with emotional, relational and topological dimensions of how place is experienced.
Mapping emotions in place: a critical visual proposal for data collection
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Paper Abstract