Transport mapping : emotional cartography, mobility and the body politics of place

This paper outlines an approach to researching transport mobilities through the visualisation of social data by mapping of movement and experiences in place. Drawing on Creswell’s (2006; 2010) framework for a “politics of mobility”, Sheller and Urry’s notion of the “new mobilities paradigm” (2006), and Harding and Pribram’s (2002) approach to historicizing emotions through their contextualization, digital mapping is used to draw out social and emotional aspects of transport mobility in a local place context. This reworking of geographic spaces highlights social motivations and individual experiences as influences within a broader understanding about the generation of a range of movement for transport mobility studies. Following from Nold’s (2009) work in emotional cartography, and Del Casino and Hanna’s (2006) theory of “map spaces”, the paper describes a pilot research case study titled the “Transport Mapping” project where a mapping event is used to capture a range of place details and emotional responses linked to a specific place context. The project is a conducted at a university community based in Western Sydney, a fast growing urban region with sprawling urban infrastructures. As a result of the mapping process, a unique geographic space is rendered and represented with reference to a range of human subjectivities and body politics. Opportunities for dialogues between researchers and respondents at such an event are shown as an important catalyst for capturing emotional and social mapping data. Creswell’s (2006; 2010) work on the centrality of transport mobility and the need to further investigate the space it occupies is succinctly expressed in his six points for a “politics of mobility” (2010). These points provide a useful framework for evaluating the emotional mapping responses from this pilot study towards a body politics of place, as an affective geography. As a result of this evaluation, some additional points are proposed to add to Creswell’s mobility framework. These highlight the immediacy of personal experience and emotional responses to local contexts of transport mobility for research into alternative and affective body politics of place.