‘Heat Maps’ Give Michigan State a New View of Campus Climate
from Chronicle of Higher Education
Mapping students’ perception of spaces at Michigan state university to identify (non)inclusive spaces.
“Campus-climate surveys are becoming more common in higher education…But a Michigan State survey went beyond the typical multiple-choice and open-ended questions as part of an effort to evaluate the campus climate more broadly.”
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.”
Where We Go From Here: The Mental Sketch Mapping Method and Its Analytic Components
J.J. Gieseking, (2013)
Mental mapping has a vaguely defined methodological history. Proponents contend that the method “affords a lens into the way people produce and experience space, forms of spatial intelligence, and dynamics of human-environment relations” and can be used as a “tool for examining the roles and meanings of space and place in everyday lives.” Through the discussion of original research, Gieseking provides an analysis and critique of the mental mapping methods devised by Lynch (Image of the City, 1960) and used Milgram and Jodelet (1970) and others in variety of ways. The article resulted from Geiseking’s frustration with and desire to understand the best practices for utilizing the mental mapping method and the ambiguous guidelines for analyzing mental maps.
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