How is community done? Understanding civic learning through psychogeographic mapping

Abstract

In this article we explore the potential of psychogeographic mapping for developing an understanding of community-as-enacted and discuss how this can help us to get a more nuanced sense of the dynamics of civic learning within communities of plurality and difference. We argue that civic learning has to do with the transformation of private interests into common concerns and show that such transformations can both be understood in a way that strives for a single-voice consensus and in a way in which such learning processes remain tied to a democratic commitment to plurality and difference. Against this background we introduce psychogeographic mapping and argue how it can assist in documenting how community is ‘done’ in a way that is sensitive to plurality and difference, to multiple perspectives, experiences and histories. We demonstrate this through a discussion of findings from a community education project—the community walking project—conducted in a sub-urban setting in Scotland. We conclude that psychogeographic mapping is not only an important research tool for understanding community-as-enacted, but can also contribute to the promotion of forms of civic learning that are guided by a democratic commitment to plurality and difference.

Acknowledgement

With grateful thanks to the residents of Greenhill for participating in this project.

Notes

1. Psychogeography as a research methodology has only been utilised in a limited capacity within research (see Ulmer et al., 2003, Pittard 2009, Trubshaw 2009, Lawrence 2006, Trudgill 2001). Most studies have taken place within gender, geography, race, art, culture and psychology research. With the exception of Bassett (2004), there has been limited research to date within education which explicitly utilises psychogeographic mapping, although there is recent work that articulates a similar interest in the intersection of the spatial, the experiential and the temporal in research on informal learning (see particularly De Visscher and Bouverne-De Bie 2008a, 2008b, Ellsworth 2005, Savage 2008, Desforges and Maddern 2004, McKenzie 2008, Gruenewald 2003, Theobold and Curtiss 2000, Carpiano 2009. See also Blondeel 2005).