‘Getting Deep into Things’: Deep Mapping in a ‘Vacant’ Landscape

Areas in cities typically denoted as ‘Vacant and Derelict Land’ are frequently presented in policy documents as absent of meaning and awaiting development. However, visits to many of these sites offer evidence of abundant citizen activity occurring outside of planning policy. Dog walkers, DIY skatepark builders, pigeon fanciers and reminiscing former factory workers, for example, can all be found inscribing their own narratives, in palimpsest like fashion, upon these landscapes. This spatio-temporally bound and layered mix of contested meanings extend beyond representational capacity offered by traditional cartographic methods as employed in policy decision-making. Such a failure to represent these ecologies of citizen-led practices often results in their erasure at the point of formal redevelopment. In this chapter, we explore how one alternative approach may respond to these challenges of representation through a case study project in Glasgow, Scotland. Deep mapping is an ethnographically informed, arts research practice, drawing Cifford Geertz’s notion of ‘thick description’ into a visual-performative realm and seeking to extend beyond the thin map by creating multifaceted and open-ended descriptions of place. As such, deep maps are not only investigations into place but of equal concern are the processes by which representations of place are generated. Implicit in this are questions about the role of the researcher as initiator, gatherer, archivist or artist and the intertwining between the place and the self. As a methodological approach that embraces multiplicity and favours the ‘politicized, passionate, and partisan’ over the totalizing objectivity of traditional maps, deep mapping offers a potential to give voice to marginalized, micro-narratives existing in tension with one another and within dominant meta-narratives but also triggers new questions over inclusivity. This methodologically focused chapter explores the ways in which an ethnographically informed, arts research practice may offer alternative insight into spaces of non-aligned narratives. The results from this investigation will offer new framings of spaces within the urban landscape conventionally represented as vacant or empty and generate perspectives on how art research methods may provide valuable investigative tools for decision-makers working in such contexts. The deep mapping work is available to view at http://www.govandeepmap.com.

Remembering Late Socialism in Autobiographical Novels and Autofictions form Central and Eastern Europe: Introduction

Since the fall of communism in 1989 and 1990/91 literature has dealt with this epochal societal change, trying to come to terms with the past and assessing its influence on the present. In the last years the focus has turned towards the era of late socialism, that is the 1970s and 1980s. Many writers who attempt to present and reevaluate these decades and their ongoing influence on biographies and societies today grew up or came of age in this era. Our main contention is that different forms of life-writing, especially autofictions and autobiographical novels, have become the dominant narrative device for addressing and narrating the socialist past. Accordingly, the contributions to this cluster explore the era of late socialism, examining its different and often contested meanings not only from the perspective of the past but also from the perspective of today. Thus, we explore the role of autobiographical writing in commemorating the past as well as in demonstrating the demise of socialism, as represented in contemporary literatures in Czech, Polish, Romanian, and Russian.

Narrating Democracy in Myanmar

This book analyses what Myanmar's struggle for democracy has signified to Burmese activists and democratic leaders, and to their international allies. In doing so, it explores how understanding contested meanings of democracy helps make sense of the country's tortuous path since Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won historic elections in 2015. Using Burmese and English language sources, Narrating Democracy in Myanmar reveals how the country's ongoing struggles for democracy exist not only in opposition to Burmese military elites, but also within networks of local activists and democratic leaders, and international aid workers.

Graduating political crisis and violence in the discourse of history: The role of Spanish suffixes

This article offers an analysis of the Spanish derivative morphology potential for graduating attitudinal meanings regarding the expression of political crisis and of contested meanings of human rights violations in the discourse of recent Chilean History. This study is framed in the typological principles of Systemic Functional Linguistics and in the appraisal system, particularly in the sub-system of graduation. The analysis demonstrates on one hand the productive role of the suffixes -ada and -azo when graduating attitudinal meanings regarding the expression of social and political crisis in the discourse of history. These suffixes can graduate at the rank of the morpheme, word and group and also be involved in an inter-stratal tension that is functioning as an experiential grammatical metaphor that works in combination with a lexical metaphor intensifying time and events in an incongruent manner. On the other hand, the analysis shows that when dealing with traumatic and argued meanings of state terror, extreme degree suffixes -ísimo/a/s play a critical role in the intensification of qualities and in the quantification as amount and extent in a congruent manner. Spanish suffixes can graduate by sub-modification in the lower rank of a word structure instead of at the group structure contributing to the building of constellation of patterns of evoked and inscribed interpersonal meanings in the discourse.

Introduction: Thinking Comparison with the Politics of Storytelling

This article highlights the overall aims of the special issue, which reconceptualizes island worlds as situated historical places, that is, islands and their networks as spaces that come to life through the multiple and contested meanings constantly attached to them, formed in the milieu of overlapping and competing European, US, and Southeast Asian empires and diasporas. By investigating the forms and politics of storytelling in the island South and Southeast Asia, along with parallel and intersecting formations in the Caribbean and diasporic Asian America, this article underlines the two scholarly interventions of the special issue in the study of world making: (1) it refashions the notion of comparison to move away from the project of “knowing”—habitually constituted through a top-down gaze aimed at assessment and measuring, which consequently leads to the formation of hierarchies, categories of containment, and reductionism—and to unearth forms of comparison emerging from local environments and local knowledge; and (2) in thinking of storytelling events or inscriptions as situated testimonies (i.e., identifying the politics of location of a telling), it centers affect and emotion as the means for unraveling and connecting different, contesting registers of experience.