Editorial

Issue 19

In Issue 19 of Livingmaps Review, we somewhat belatedly present our intended Spring 2026 edition under the Summer 2026 banner. This slight scheduling adjustment allows us to publish a slim but diverse collection of work by a range of mapmakers before the Conference Special Edition of the journal arrives in Autumn 2026. We felt it was important to share these contributions with readers before we head into the summer break.

Together, the articles featured in this issue illustrate the powerful and dynamic links between map-making practices, across a wide spectrum of participatory, creative, and counter-mapping methodologies, and the visualisation of people and place. Participatory mapping invites communities to actively co-produce spatial representations of their lived experiences, often challenging top-down cartographic authority. Creative mapping draws on artistic and expressive techniques to capture dimensions of place that conventional maps miss: emotion, memory, sensory experience, and cultural meaning. Counter-mapping, meanwhile, serves as a form of geographic resistance, allowing marginalised groups to assert alternative territorial claims, document dispossession, and reimagine spatial narratives on their own terms.

Across these varied approaches, what emerges is a shared commitment to making visible the relationships between people and the landscapes they inhabit, navigate, and transform. This edition celebrates that intersection and points toward the continued evolution of mapping as both a methodological toolkit and a deeply political, aesthetic, and ethical practice

In Waypoints, Merrydith Russell presents her research working with displacees in refugee communities in Plymouth, Devon. This research forms part of a wider inquiry: The Making of Home: a feminist approach to the curatorial practice of object archaeology in the context of forced displacement and domesticity. Central to this study is the use of mapping as a method, not just as a tool for spatial analysis, but as a critical, feminist practice of uncovering hidden infrastructures, power relations, and lived experiences. By adopting a locally grounded, practice-led approach, the mapping process becomes a means of illuminating how displaced individuals navigate and negotiate homemaking within oppressive systems, situating personal geographies within broader structures of exclusion and control.

Next in Waypoints, Jayse Heer-Matonovich, W.F. Garrett-Petts, and Jonathan Brady present a detailed account of a mapping project undertaken at Thompson Rivers University (TRU) in Kamloops, British Columbia. The work develops research opportunities that foreground community engagement and student participation, introducing undergraduate researchers to both qualitative and quantitative methods rooted in inquiry-based learning. Cultural mapping has proven especially effective in this context, offering an accessible, multimodal framework for investigating place, identity, and experience in collaboration with local partners. The article highlights the EDI Project, a cultural mapping initiative led by Jayse Heer-Matonovich. Originally developed as a capstone project at Sa-Hali Secondary School, it has since expanded into a community-engaged research collaboration. The project explores how students, teachers, staff, and administrators experience equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) within a shared school setting.

Finally, in Waypoints, Drew Mackie provides an accessible introduction to network mapping as a tool for social systems analysis. His contribution walks readers through the basic principles of network mapping methodologies, offering practical guidance that includes suggestions for mapping software, step-by-step considerations for getting started, and a curated set of questions to guide any network mapping exercise. Network mapping and social network analysis (SNA) serve as powerful tools for visualising, understanding, and harnessing the dynamics of networks and relationships. By rendering social connections visible, these approaches allow practitioners to identify key actors, map flows of information and resources, and uncover structural patterns that might otherwise remain hidden. Mackie emphasises that network mapping is not merely a technical exercise but a strategic one — enabling organisations and communities to track collaborative ecosystems, diagnose gaps or bottlenecks in partnerships, and strengthen systems change initiatives. Whether applied to grassroots community organising, cross-sector coalitions, or organisational development, network mapping offers a versatile lens for making sense of how relationships shape outcomes and how intentional relationship-building can drive transformative change.

In Mapworks we go with Clare Qualman to visit the studio of artist and map-maker Leyla Curtis to explore her acquisition of maps from a publishing company’s recently dissolved map archive/library. Layla describes how she got ‘stuck’ in the discard pile; the heap of papers that were stacked outside of the library, ready for disposal. Here she found an extraordinary collection of map ‘amends’, the overlays for all kinds of maps that were being updated. They show the working methods of the people checking and logging; new road junctions and new housing developments, name changes, and newly classified streets. Many of these come from the A-Z archive, the famous map publisher, which was taken over by this group in 2019 and along with a selection of other maps that make up the artist’s new archive, continues to inspire new work.

Also in Mapworks, Arianna Lindberg’s beautifully illustrated mapping takes us on a journey into Community Supported Agriculture farming practises in New Jersey; here we discover the planting of garlic as an act of cuerpo-territorio, body-as-territory. Each clove pushed deep into the earth is not merely agricultural labour but an embodied negotiation between the migrant workers and the land that sustains it. Here members share risk and harvest alongside farmers. Garlic, slow-growing, requiring ten months underground, teaches a temporality of care that resists industrial efficiency. The tactile engagement with soil, bodily harms accumulated across hours of labour, becomes not merely agricultural activities but epistemic acts that refuse the capitalist abstraction of labour from land, insisting that the body working the land and the land working the body are not separate processes but a single, living relationality.

In Lines of Desire, Athanasia Tziona takes readers on a fascinating cartographic study of Koresteia, an abandoned Greek village seen through the lens of ground-level and drone photography. At the intersects of art and cartography, Anthanasia’s practice allows for the representation of what she describes as the ‘invisible layers of place’, such as emotions, personal relationships, and memories, creating mnemonic monuments; final fragments of memory in a timeless landscape as an attempt to structure a lasting tribute to a fading memory, in which the history of the place is anchored and preserved. Work that attempts to demonstrate that creative mapping can be a vital tool for understanding and actively remembering place, and for ensuring that the voices of the "villages of oblivion" continue to be heard.

Signing off for the summer after an incredible year for Livingmaps. We will be back in the Autumn with our Conference Special edition of the Review, a new Seminar Series and details of our 2027 Conference - so stay tuned for details.
Have a great summer, enjoy Livingmaps Review Issue 19 and as always, a big thank you from the Livingmaps team for your support.

Barbara Brayshay
Editor
17th June 2026