Counter-mapping currents from our Learning Huddle

Slide by Megan lifting up the need to critically question representations in maps - full slide deck below

Learning Huddle co-designers and learners

Learning Huddles are co-designed, convened and facilitated by members of the Bioregional Learning Network.

This Learning Huddle was co-designed and facilitated by: Laura Onions, Megan Wakefield and Jo Orchard-Webb.

The Learning Huddle was designed:

To bring network members together as peers, with a generosity for how we gather together and curiosity around the power of counter-mapping.
With an intention to common and cross-pollinate our many different types of knowledges and ways of knowing.
To test out Learning Huddles as catalysts of fields of energy and wisdom sharing for our emerging and collective bioregioning practice.
To run twice in one day - there was an option to take part in an afternoon session, or an evening session.

Network members who engaged in collective learning and knowledge commoning during the two sessions were: Bek, Lorna, Deb, Holly, Helen M, Hayley, Charlotte, Cecelia, Dawood, Helen K, Megan, Laura, Jo, Caz, Hayley, Rachael, Dionne, Odette and Sarah.

The invitation to network members

We will gather together on Wednesday 22nd October (12.30pm-2.30pm or 6.00pm-8.00pm depending on your preference) in our learning huddle group for two hours at the CoLab Dudley space on Dudley High Street. Gathered together we will eat our picnics, drink tea, and explore together as peers this thing called counter-mapping! Laura, Megan and Jo have pulled together lovely examples of counter-maps to explore, curiosity sparking prompts/questions, gathered old maps to play with, and curated some background material to guide our shared learning.

⁠There will be chatting about and looking at lots of examples of counter-maps from all over the world - so do feel free to bring any examples you have found and want to share.
We will be looking at local maps and reflecting together how those maps might be reimagined - if you have local maps that might inspire a counter-map please do bring them along.
Then we will be having a go at making our own counter-maps using gentle guiding prompts to help us navigate getting going - we can do this on our own, or in little groups, so nobody needs to feel nervous about giving this a try.
We will close with a chat about how we might continue to counter-map huddle together, and how we want to share and common our learning.

We want everyone to feel nourished and refuelled 🧺 - so feel free to bring your lunch or dinner picnic and we can eat while we chat and map. The drinks station will be open and full of lovely teas, cordials and coffee.

Keeping each other safe in uncertain times 👐🏻- if you would like to be met from the bus station to walk back to the lab together, or if we can work out any car shares between us please reach out.

Some background reading, if that is your cup of tea 🫖 - For those that like to do some reading beforehand here are a few links about counter-mapping but we will also cover this in the session so you don't need to:

The power of maps: meet the counter cartographers - Stories- Adventure Uncovered: https://adventureuncovered.com/stories/meet-the-counter-cartographers-using-maps-as-a-tool-for-social-change/
Counter-Mapping – Spatial Humanities and Digital Storytelling: Critical Historical Approaches: https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/spatialhumanities/chapter/counter-mapping/

We are really excited to start counter-mapping with you and explore how this might support our bioregioning practices.

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Collective notes recorded during the sessions on paper table cloths

Below are the fruits of a practice of collective note taking on the table cloths - a sharing of sparks, noticings and ideas shared and emerging across the group. This is a commoning of our knowledge from both sessions including responses to our check-in question: “What is it about counter-mapping that you are curious about?”

(With gratitude to Caz and Clare from Ekho Collective for sharing this lovely practice from their work in the micro community commons experiment The Village at Hawbush Gardens.)

“What if we wanted to map to get lost” ”Find a way; Ways to find; Wayfinders over map; The many ways of …” ”I’m fascinated by the idea of perspectives” “I was fascinated by Caz’s counter map and I am thinking about sharing the day to day ephemera of small moments” ”Where is hedgehog? Where is blackbird on this map?” ”What do worms do when they meet a barrier?” ”There are so many curiosity points” “Connecting with deep time” ”From ecological self to archeological self” ”Constant state of becoming” ”Beating the bounds of the common land” - an embodied act, observation, protecting, commoning, healing ”Intuitive map lines”

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”Maps have informed my practice for a very long time” ”Emotional mapping of care - of the past, present and future” ”Making the invisible visible” ”Everyone has a counter-mapping super power we are doing it everyday in the way we navigate the world” ”Counter-mapping as a metaphor for the physical action of daylighting rivers that have been diverted, culverted, canalised under our urban developments - the artist we met in Devon who places copper plaques on the ground drawing attention to where rivers flow beneath the city.” ”The first thing I did was take it out of its flatness”

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”What would a map of diversity look like if we mapped the food eaten/purchased? Would it expose inequalities of nutrition/ wealth/ knowledge?What would this map tell us with cultural demographics of the area? What other social barriers would it reveal?” ”What if we overlayed these historically?” With the rest of nature? international? - Do more-than-human areas of ‘deprivation’ correspond with where humans are not cohesive as a community?” ”maps are so dense.” ”Empathetic maps including from perspectives of kin” ”Psycho-geography and parkour using the city as a playground … this brought to my mind Sarah’s Urban Rooms work on play in place” ”Live the life that chooses you” ”Story maps in books: Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, The Hobbit, The Moomins”

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“Maps of journeys, Song lines, Bruce Chatwin, Malvern Hills influenced Elgar who walked and composed, Maps of rug weaving patterns” ”Mapping wells and water stories” ”If we mapped safety, how often would the maps need updating? What makes somewhere safe or unsafe?” ”My Dad was a huge collector of maps …” ”A lot of ideas came back from speaking to Bek.” ”The woods that back onto the Zoo - where the stone was cut for the Priory and Castle … there is so much in that tiny place” ”Biodynamics- healing element - emotional mapping - beating the bounds - ancient practice, farming calendar, observational practice” ”What is a map for? What does it show?” ”Mapping to subvert/ invert?” ”A catalyst for coming into conversation, or relationship, as a state of becoming”

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”Like the idea of looking at counter-maps without starting with an actual map” ”I likes it’s subversive power - to provide alternative narratives” ”Deb has reminded us of the work of the late Joanna Macy and in her Spiral there is the phase of “Seeing with new or ancient eyes” which feels like counter-mapping to me” ”I like the playful element of counter-mapping” ”The multi-disciplinary nature of it, the imagination, the openness, maps are dense to me but these feel open” ”A way of telling the history of the land, the soil, plants that heal” ”It invites so many perspectives I am interested in how it affects our decision-making.”

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”What would a map of our ecological selves not our social roles look like? as an important way of remembering?” ”I’m interested in how people will expess their maps as they have differnt knowledges” ”I’m curious not to be in host mode and instead be in creative mode” ”What is a map? What is it for?” ”Stitching the map as a way of observing” ”Counter maps are organic - maps composting worms!” ”Mapping of place according to time - eg where is busy, noisy, smelly at differnt times of day, week; where is calm? at what time? what time do the birds start singing? what time is the bakery making and you can smell bread?”

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”Who is at the centre of the map?” “What time are the foxes out” “What months are blackberries in the hedges here?” ”Travel by the sensory experience and by who you might meet along the way/ when you get there; beyond when the roads are busy; when are the trees busy? when is the sea crashing? what times are best for listening to water on the shingle” ”Beat the boundaries - deepening the roots - land logi - therapy poetry groups - where are we occupied - social prescribers - ecologies of care” ”Illustrating our journey through life” ”An Autumn abundance map” ”A map can be anything and anything can be a map” ”The act of mapping is a becoming” ”A map of light - artificial light “pools of street lights”

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”A spoken word guided walk; sounds, time of year, time of day, directions, plants, trees, birds, terrain, sit spots, view spots, history” ”Maps built with tourists’ information- places they found, places they enjoyed, biased?” ”Start here … what is the scale?” ”The car is the overlord, the car is king” ”Interegnum, … intertidal, daylighting, ‘There are rivers in the sky’ by Elif Shafak” ”How do we inhabit and navigate space?” ”Embodied/ waling practice” ”De-centering and scale - different centre of gravity, distortion, desire lines, gendered spaces, sensing my place, oral story-telling” ”Stumbling maps - maps to help us stumble” ”Expansion - maps are dense” ”Strategies - shift orientation, change scale, decentre, interdisciplinary, tactile materials” ”How might we undulate? Come out of the flatness?” ”Challenge worldviews, What is perceived as neutral, internalised borders”

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An introduction to counter-mapping

For this brief introduction to counter-mapping, Jo borrowed from and paraphrased ’**Not An Atlas’** and Adventure Uncovered to help locate where counter-mapping came from and how it is used to support change. She started with a reminder that maps are neither neutral nor objective, and instead reproduce particular ways of seeing the world (Harley, 1989).

Maps and their power over Maps have been part of shaping our relationship with place and the rest of nature for centuries. They can determine how we are connected with land by creating what are perceived as authoritative versions of our recorded story of place according to who is in charge of the mapping. Maps have often been used for harm by reifying hierarchies, separation of beings, operationalising the enclosure of commons, erasure of Indigenous territorial claims, enforcing exclusion and displacement, as well as being a tool for enabling extraction across the globe and here in our bioregion.

Counter-mapping practice origins Sometimes also called, or linked with, ****radical cartography, speculative cartography, or counter cartography, counter-mapping is involves questioning of formalised cartographic norms. Countermapping is a mapmaking practice used as part of a critical re-reading of existing maps to re-imagine and re-create new maps, or an act of mapping back or forward, that offers an alternative spatial lens or ways of thinking about space. Counter-maps show knowledges, relationships, representations of reality, imaginings and stories in/with place that are missing from existing maps. It emerged in academic debate in the 1980s as a critique of cartography as a discipline and the reductionist quality of traditional mapping practices. It was a way to critically interact with maps given they are never neutral and often a powerful tool of state, capital and so have been complicit in the history of colonialism, extractive capitalism and nationalism. Counter-mapping is often understood as a democratising and activism practice used as part of community action. It has been powerfully used as a post-colonial practice of mapping back by First Nations peoples to advocate for Indigenous community land stewardship and territorial claims across the world.

Counter-maps and their potential power in change While they can be an instrument of power over people, they can also be re-imaginined for social and environmental justice purposes. Through counter-mapping we can disrupt dominant narratives and the behaviours they encourage. Counter-mapping is performative with the potential to inspire different behaviour that emerges through knowledge production co-created through the process of the mapping together process. It is this link between counter-mapping alternative narratives of our connection with land, and pro social and environmental behaviours these spark, that makes us think these maps and the practice of counter-mapping may hold many possibilities in our bioregioning. They can be a bioregionning navigation tool that offers us a way of telling untold stories of land, expressing kinship rather than ownership, a way of reweaving connections to land and kin, making bioregionning practices and ways of being and knowing visible and interlinked across our bioregion. Counter-maps can illustrate gaps in our bioregion knowledges in ways we can relate to and reimagine spatial futures, that in turn disrupt existing mapped spatial relations. They can also tell the story of local ecological loss on a more intimate and relatable level that cultivates compassion, empathy and inspires action for change.