Would You Like a Map?

Abstract

Parents of seriously ill children struggle to traverse both the physical and emotional spaces of hospitals. Off the Map, a performance born out of an ethnographic research project and personal experience, employs a digital map to explore the institutional guidance offered to parents of hospitalized children. In this article, the script from Off the Map is integrated with text from a classroom discussion about the performance, ethnographic interviews with parents of seriously ill children, and a theoretically-grounded discussion of cartography as a performance metaphor. Implications for practice include a call for parents and practitioners to consider multiple ways of mapping healthcare spaces and experiences.