Abstract
This article highlights part of my work with ten 16 and 17-year-olds at two Canadian secondary schools. My multiple case study sought to make visible my participants’ stories of place: how did they construe the role of place within their own lives? How did they record their journeys within, through, and between places? I share how my participants articulated their place-identities as dynamic encounters rather than fixed surfaces (Massey, 2005; Ingold, 2016). Employing story-mapping as a research method encouraged my participants to articulate their lives in their own terms, affording me the opportunity to understand how they negotiated their identities.
Highlights
In The Wild Places (2007), literary critic Robert Macfarlane distinguishes between grid maps and story maps, suggesting that grid maps reduce the world to data and “record space independent of being” (p. 141)
In a society that privileges data, and largely perceives youth development as a linear process (Farrugia & Wood, 2017), what can be learned from attuning to the story-maps of young people? What might their representations reveal about the ways in which they understand themselves and the complex worlds they live in? This article highlights part of my work with ten 16 and 17-year-olds at two Canadian secondary schools
This study adds to the growing body of qualitative research invested in the spatial identities of young people (Haukanes, 2013; Farrugia et al, 2015; Farrugia, 2016; Cuervo & Wyn, 2017; Rönnlund, 2020)
Summary
In The Wild Places (2007), literary critic Robert Macfarlane distinguishes between grid maps (or road maps) and story maps, suggesting that grid maps reduce the world to data and “record space independent of being” (p. 141). In The Wild Places (2007), literary critic Robert Macfarlane distinguishes between grid maps (or road maps) and story maps, suggesting that grid maps reduce the world to data and “record space independent of being” In a society that privileges data, and largely perceives youth development as a linear process (Farrugia & Wood, 2017), what can be learned from attuning to the story-maps of young people? The purpose of my multiple case study was to make visible my participants’ stories of place: how did they construe place within their own lives? Employing story-mapping as a research method encouraged my participants to “construct accounts of their lives in their own terms” Mapping became a kind of literacy that provided these youth the agency to represent their multiple place-relationships. While this article has an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, I draw on spatial approaches to literacy research, a turn which has illuminated
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