Drawing (on) Cartographic Intimacies

This chapter provides both a conceptual and practice-based perspective on the ways in which emotions can be grasped, and spatially interpreted, through creative and critical map-centred activities. It also highlights the potential of the cartographic humanities to access inner worlds differently, by enhancing understanding of the psychic, somatic and social dimensions of one’s being through body mapping experiences. Drawing on examples from the HuMaps Lab (Laboratory of Cartographic Humanities) in which undergraduates mapped out both personal and larger public stories by drawing and assembling pieces of literary, visual, lyric and video narratives, the emotional force of mapping is unfolded in the terms of ‘cartographic intimacies’; here, maps are addressed as infrastructures of feelings, deep surfaces that emerge out of visceral emotions but conceived to be shareable with the outside, driving dis-orientations toward—as well as agitation and care for—humans, non-humans, memories, bodies and places.