ABSTRACT
This chapter considers auto-cartography as a prolific encounter between autoethnography, fictional writing and narrative approaches to maps as research methods. It echoes the increasing number of creative experimentations with the narrativisation of map lives while exploring the role of maps in ethnographic research practices. Auto-cartography is an autoethnographic and ethnofictional method for writing research which places the self and its relationship with the map at the centre. It considers both the researcher and the map as subjects of research and, through carto-fiction, it is a means to promote the use of fiction as a research method in the field of cartographic humanities. The first part of this chapter introduces the relationship between narrative cartography and autobiography, theorising auto-cartography as a method to explore the role of maps in ethnographic research processes as well as to promote a reflexive approach. In the second part, this chapter brings auto-cartography and fiction together, providing two short examples of creative, carto-centred research writing. Auto-cartography provides researchers in map studies with a creative practice for both mapping the self and writing (with) maps, letting the emotional and subjective cartographies that influence our research emerge.
