Map Cards: Creative Mapping for Place Dialogue

Creative mapping is a type of critical observational drawing that uses cartographic art to negotiate personal visions, social constructions, and objective representations of the world. Geographers have been experimenting with this method to produce their own creative maps and in the process have begun to explore the effects and implications of these works for engaging with the places and relationships of research in professional and personal life. This essay puts theoretical work on researcher vulnerability into conversation with scholarship on place dialogue to explore how creative mapping facilitates relationship accountability in research. The transformation in the author's creative-mapping practice illustrates the agency of place to communicate the realities and responsibilities of relationship through art, and suggests how creative mapping enhances our capacity for place dialogue through artistic methods that negotiate the more-than-human entanglements of research.