ROUNDTABLE (in-person)
Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference 2026
This roundtable addresses the need for mixed methods to expand our understanding of mapping practices across disciplines. Moving beyond conventional cartographic approaches, it brings together perspectives that integrate visual techniques (such as GIS and critical cartography) with non-cartographic forms of mapping, including ethnographic and narrative practices, recognising that maps are never neutral but actively shape what—and whose—realities become visible. Our discussion will examine how these various approaches to mapping can and cannot be combined to produce rich spatial knowledge that represents everyday spatialities. How can these distinct approaches to mapping be combined to represent the positionalities of different stakeholders, hiding, revealing, and confronting what are, in fact, dynamic social and ecological relations? In what ways does mixing methods have the capacity to resolve the issue of particular communities, features, and territorialities being excluded? The roundtable will query how mixing methods can both enable and challenge researchers to combine quantitative and qualitative data to capture lived, embodied, and relational dimensions of space that are typically neglected in traditional cartography, yet are essential to just representations of everyday spatialities. Building on the collaborative work of the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus PortCityFutures Thematic Research Group “Mixed Methods and Design Strategies", the roundtable aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue among human geographers, anthropologists, and spatial scientists on innovative ways of multi-dimensional mapping, foregrounding questions of representation, power, ethics and responsibility in how spatial knowledge is produced.
Please join us in conversation!
Please write to us at: c.franceschini@fsw.leidenuniv.nl
Engaging Everyday Spatialities Roundtable Event RGS Annual International Conference 2026
Image Credit line: Recursos2D, Graphic Resources