When the map shakes up the territory. Researching teachers’ learning through a non-representational cartographic approach

Abstract

In this article, I consider how cartographies have become a onto-methodological approach that seeks to produce, rather than represent, the world that they are enacting. Going beyond Alfred Korzybski’s famous axiom that ‘the map is not the territory,’ my point is that the map can shake up the territory. This shift is discussed in relation to the post-qualitative research project How Teachers Learn: Educational Implications and Challenges for Addressing Social Change, which focuses on mapping places and spheres that function as a source of knowledge and experience for thirty educators. The cartographic objects they composed around their learning trajectories became a space for rethinking and reconnecting domains that schools often keep strictly separate. Thus in this case the maps worked as a flat terrain where different layers met and linked outside of traditional hierarchies, which ignore for example corporeality and affects in favour of cognition or formal knowledge.