Mapping – Insights from Experts

Mapping Worlds

How a UBC researcher uses maps to redefine boundaries

A picture of Maya Daurio's face against an outdoor background showing out-of-focus trees. Maya is wearing a pair of glasses.

Maya Daurio

There is a critical need for language mapping in urban areas with large migrant and immigrant communities, whether Kathmandu, New York City, or Vancouver. It is important to put marginalized language communities on the map, both literally and figuratively, using collaborative and representative approaches in ways that make their presence visible and so that they can be included in social programs and policies from which they have been excluded. From a methodological perspective, mapping is underutilized in illustrating local imaginings of space and the complexities of language practices. Language mapping is a tool that can be harnessed by marginalized communities to render themselves visible, to highlight injustices, and to create their own stories.

– Maya Daurio; In a UBC Public Scholars Initiative interview

UBC graduate student Maya Daurio cuts disciplinary boundaries, conveying linguistic, cultural, and scientific data through interactive maps. Given their power and fixity, maps have historically been used as an imperial tool but as Daurio’s work exemplifies, they can also be used to subvert established boundaries and colonial projects, unearthing and illustrating other social realities. Daurio uses mapping both as a methodology to raise new questions and inspire collaborative engagement among her informants, as well as a way of expressing her findings. Daurio’s research involvement ranges from geospatial mapping of wildfires and cultural mapping of socio-ecological knowledge among agricultural systems in Nepal to tracing linguistic diversity in New York City in collaboration with ‘The Endangered Language Alliance’. As Daurio’s work highlights, maps represent worldviews; they reflect how different people move through and understand spaces and “how mobility impacts their frame of reference.” Mapping techniques in anthropology are, as Daurio remarks, also compatible with walking and walking interviews, as movements across and relationships to place shape work to inspire different thoughts and conversations. Both the methodological techniques and final representations that mapping affords offer the potential for increased public engagement. First, in providing visual presentations that pertain to public life, and as a way of inviting and sharing individuals’ layered lived experiences in places. As a public scholar, Daurio’s research facilitates wider access to data and dialogue between fields, enabling a distribution of information that helps to address the power asymmetries inherent in conducting research. In their presentation of cultural knowledge and individuals’ experiences, maps can also serve to display existing frailties and inequalities as they graph onto material realities, whether it be through language, ecological vulnerability, or migration, mobility, and settlement. These attributes position Daurio’s interdisciplinary and multimodal anthropology as a form of translation, representation, and empowerment.

For further reading, please click on the links to other projects and papers by Maya Daurio:

Discussion question

Mapping Marginalized Voices: Mapping and Inclusion

How can Maya Daurio’s approach to mapping languages in urban areas contribute to the visibility and inclusion of marginalized communities, and what implications may this have for social programs and policies?