Mapping entangled mobilities: Using participatory historical geography to explore the migration of objects and people across (neo)colonial spatialities

Abstract This paper examines how creative counter‐maps can be a valuable participatory historical geography tool in their capacity to render visible multiple pasts, presents, and futures, and offer new possibilities for representation and belonging through visual and creative aesthetics. Emerging from the Ancient History, Contemporary Belonging project, the paper explores the co‐creation of a participatory counter‐map, Unprovenanced Map , displayed in Manchester Museum (2023–2025), which represents the entangled mobilities of ancient objects and contemporary migrants. Co‐designed by a creative map‐making artist in dialogue with Ancient History, Contemporary Belonging project researchers and youth researchers from Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Palestinian, and Kurdish backgrounds, the map integrates young people's personal ‘journey maps’ with archival research on ancient objects from their region of origin, drawn from collections in Manchester Museum. Reflecting the complexities and ambiguities of migration, the map represents places, borders, and movements as fractured, partial, and mutable, and embedded with the messiness of embodied and material migratory realities. In doing so, it confronts the (neo)colonial forces that shape maps and mobilities, engaging museum audiences with contextualised complexities of global movement through a migratory aesthetic. Simultaneously, this creative representation serves the practical‐political purpose of safeguarding youth researchers from the risks of challenging fixed imaginaries of spatial–temporal borders within a heritage institution – and city – grappling with their own colonial legacies, while also imagining new futures and possibilities of representation.