A qualitative enquiry into OpenStreetMap making

Based on a case study on the OpenStreetMap community, this paper provides a contextual and embodied understanding of the user-led, user-participatory and user-generated produsage phenomenon. It employs Grounded Theory, Social Worlds Theory, and qualitative methods to illuminate and explores the produsage processes of OpenStreetMap making, and how knowledge artefacts such as maps can be collectively and collaboratively produced by a community of people, who are situated in different places around the world but engaged with the same repertoire of mapping practices. The empirical data illustrate that OpenStreetMap itself acts as a boundary object that enables actors from different social worlds to co-produce the Map through interacting with each other and negotiating the meanings of mapping, the mapping data and the Map itself. The discourses also show that unlike traditional maps that black-box cartographic knowledge and offer a single dominant perspective of cities or places, OpenStreetMap is an embodied epistemic object that embraces different world views. The paper also explores how contributors build their identities as an OpenStreetMaper alongside some other identities they have. Understanding the identity-building process helps to understand mapping as an embodied activity with emotional, cognitive and social repertoires

Digital mapping interfaces : from immutable mobiles to mutable images

In this article, I discuss how digital mapping interfaces ask users to engage with images on screens in far more performative and active ways and how this changes the immutable status of the map image. Digital mapping interfaces invite us to touch, talk and move with them, actions that have a reciprocal effect on the look of the image of the map. Images change constantly through absorbing our mobile and physical actions. I approach digital mapping interfaces as mediators: They do not so much collect information as create spatial transformations for the user of the interface, thus instigating new moves on his or her part that are fed once again into the interface. I argue that it is therefore short-sighted to view digital mapping interfaces as mere points of passage. They are better understood as mediators that create spatial meanings by translating between and inviting movements of users, vehicles, programs and so on

Destabilizing Playgrounds: Cartographical Interfaces, Mutability, Risk and Play

Modern and Contemporary Studie

Vernacular Mapping: Site-Dance and Embodied Urban Cartographies

In this article I explore the potential of site-based dance and performance to influence and inform subjective, cartographic processes of connecting and situating oneself in urban locations. ‘Vernacular Mapping’ is explored as a process by which subjective urban experiences, trajectories and associations are mapped by individuals and retained and developed as cartographic tools through which we navigate and negotiate lived environments. The concept stems from critical geography and non-representational theory and proposes a progressive, contemporary approach in which individual routes, trajectories and vectors of mobility challenge the ‘representational certitude of cartography’ (Gerlach 2013:1). From this perspective I consider how encounters with site-based dance and performance might inform vernacular mapping processes and impact subjective-site relations

Flowing Power in the Community: How decisions are made and their consequences for water accessibility in Western Kenya

Water resources management has been reconfigured over time and space; as power over decision-making processes has increasingly been vested from the state and distributed among networks of private and non-governmental actors. Geographical scholarships of environmental governance seek to critically analyse this transformation in order to grasp how decisions are made, and the consequences that entail in the structure and delimitation of how different groups access natural resources. The present study will depart from this framework to analyse an empirical study of a community water resources management project in Kenya. Furthermore, the framework is supported by critical scholarships of community and participation, gendered discourses on spatial subjectivities, along with the notion of nature’s role in projects of water resources management, to ensure a holistic approach to the case at hand. The data was collected during two months of fieldwork applying both qualitative and quantitative methods, used in a narrative analysis of decision making processes regarding the distribution of water, and the consequences of these decisions in terms of accessibility to water analysed through GIS. The findings of the study show how interests of particular actors drive and shape decision-making processes regarding distribution, where benefits from access to clean water is not equal for all social groups

Failurists: When Things Go Awry

Failure is a popular topic of research. It has long been a source of study in fields such as sociology and anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), privacy and surveillance, cultural, feminist and media studies, art, theatre, film, and political science. When things go awry, breakdown, or rupture they can lead to valuable insights into the mundane mechanisms of social worlds. Yet, while failure is a familiar topic of research, failure in and as a tactic of research is far less visible, valued, and explored within academia. In this book the authors reflect upon the role of creative interventions as a critical mode for methods, research techniques, fieldwork, and knowledge transmission or impact. Here, failure is considered a productive part of engaging with and in the field. It is about acknowledging the ‘mess’ of the social and how we need methods, modes of attunement, and knowledge translation that address this complexity in nuanced ways. In this collection, interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners share their practices, insights, and challenges around rethinking failure beyond normalized tropes. Across four sections — Section I: Digitality, Archives, and Design; Section II: Care/Activism; Section III: Creative Critical Interventions; and Section IV: Play and the Senses — the contributors bring different subjectivities, relationalities, and positionalities — rhythms reflecting the numerous material, social, and digital encounters. Each subtheme is an invitation to probe certain areas of failure in all its complexity; an invitation to sit with someone’s own lived experience of failure and how it manifests in research practice and theory. What does failure mean? What does it do? What does putting failure under the microscope do to our assumptions around ontology and epistemologies? How can it be deployed to challenge norms in a time of great uncertainty, crisis, and anxiety? And what are some of the ways resilience and failure are interrelated