We invite researchers, artists, and practitioners interested in visual and cartographic approaches to join us in experimenting with ways of drawing and visualizing the often mundane, yet invisible, barriers and boundaries that shape everyday coexistence—particularly as they relate to migratory experiences, (re)settlement, and homemaking. The aim of the panel is to explore how methods such as deep mapping, narrative mapping and other types of visualizations may serve as analytical tools to better understand the complex tension between inclusion and exclusion shaping everyday existence. Moreover, we are interested in probing their effectiveness as creative means to communicate research findings to various audiences. In doing so, we draw our inspiration from the growing use of visual layering techniques that enable the portrayal in one image (or set of images) of different elements - such as temporalities, places, emotions, movements, relations between actors or scales, and personal or collective trajectories.
What are the potentialities of creatively combining our research data into visual representations to better understand and communicate the complexity of everyday coexistence and the invisible barriers it produces? What possible epistemological and ethical drawbacks, including the questions of representation and technical skills required to produce these visualizations, could these techniques carry? To engage these questions, we invite abstracts that can take the form of texts but also sketches, maps or other types of visual representations. The sketches can be based on, e.g., a narrative or a walking interview; a focus group, participant observation in a specific locality, or other types of relevant data. We kindly ask the contributors opting for a visual abstract to accompany it with a brief description of their data and a short reflection on the epistemological and ethical aspects of the map-making process they would like to discuss.
Language of session: Finnish, English, Swedish, French, Arabic.