Deep mapping cartography's limits: the artfulness of rendering spatial practice

Cartesian cartographies, writes Michel de Certeau (1984), make action legible by substituting trace for practice; alas, the "gnostic drive" (92) to capture everyday navigations "causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten" (97).Deep mapping (see McLucas 2000;Biggs 2010;Bissell and Overend 2015;Roberts 2016;Modeen and Biggs 2020) resists preemptive definition for it is through its practice that deep mapping becomes articulated as an apparatus of investigation.For me, deep mapping is situated, embodied inhabitation as a practice of ongoing and open-ended dialogue with the world.Deep mapping does not render down to a map in the sense of a Cartesian cartography, yet neither does it "counter cartography".Deep mapping is not defined through opposition so much as marked by iterative acts of interference with hegemonic forms of representing place, producing geographic knowledge, and rendering spatial research public.How might we render situated spatial practices like deep mapping without flattening, georeferencing, and vectorizing experiential knowledge?If mapping itself is taken to be a mode of immanent inquiry (Knight 2021), how might theorizations developed through spatial practice be recorded while centering the generativity of cartographic process?