Mapping as a Method: History and Theoretical Commitments
Valerie Futch & Michelle Fine (2014)
The article highlights three mapping studies conducted by the authors to demonstrate the utility of mapping as a useful method for social inquiry and gathering information about subjectivities and identities. The authors historically situate the mapping method as stemming from Milgram and Joledet, Winnicott, and critical feminist geographers, but note that the method has been overlooked by much of social psychology as a discipline. Interested in investigating “life-space” (from Lewin) the authors contend that mapping “can be rediscovered and revitalized as a highly useful qualitative method for researching our increasingly complex and ‘hyphenated’ lives” (44).
Mapping can provide insight into how people narrate and represent their own lives, life spaces, self, and others and “enables researchers to work with visual material that is highly interpretive, across conceptual landscapes (from the individual to the social), and in between various contexts and shifting structural conditions” (44). Mapping can highlight and revive the focus (historically from Dewey, James, DuBois and others) on the spheres that individuals inhabit daily and help researchers understand how, quoting Joledet, the “link between space and identity, space and experience, is linked to personal history.”
