ABSTRACT
Invoking Doreen Massey’s (2005) work on reconceptualizing space as relations-between and stories-so-far, Joseph Palis reflects on five mapping workshops to reveal the way diverse participants adopt geonarratives and countermapping to visibilize untold stories, vernacular vocabularies and lived-in experiences across place and time. Challenging the way standard maps mirror hegemonic practices and perform spatial fixities often benefitting powerful entities, Palis demonstrates that geonarrative mapping is a vigorous practice of ‘unmapping’ where subjectivities and cartographic stories that do not fit the development model are mobilized. Geonarrative mapping serves as a gateway to tell stories about participant’s environment, particularized domestic, familial and social lives, and encounters with human, institutional, and more-than-human elements and entities. Describing the particularities of workshop design and implementation, Palis guides how this form of storytelling can be deployed by teachers, community-based groups, activists, grassroots and peoples’ organizations to generate grounded data and information as basis to carry out specific participatory action research and development work for social justice.
