This article discusses Deep Mapping in Geography teaching and learning by drawing on a case study of a summer school organised during the COVID-19 pandemic. Deep Mapping was used to foster deep learning among the students and teach them about a distant place and people. The exercise tasked the students to work on the creation of layered maps representing the fieldwork site, the city of Vancouver, Canada. Critical student reflections about the Deep Mapping process are used to address some of the benefits and challenges. The Deep Mapping exercise stimulated the students to critically engage with the diverse summer school materials, move beyond a superficial view of the city, maps and mapping, and reflect on their positionality. The method is promising in light of making deep engagement with other places more accessible to those who might not have or be inclined to access such international educational experience and also offers another opportunity for blended learning. In conclusion, we argue that Deep Mapping offers a timely and highly engaging approach to learn about a place and people from another part of the world – be it on location or at a distance.
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Playful Mapping is the result of many years of joint enterprise in which we, as authors, devel-oped a close intellectual collaboration. As a book, it emerged towards the end of the ERC project Charting the Digital that ran from 2011-2016, and during a still-ongoing Erasmus+ project; Go Go Gozo. Over this five year period, members of the Playful Mapping Collective got to know each other as colleagues and friends, participating regularly in diverse academic and social activities, such as conference panels and workshops.1 The authorship of this book therefore reflects an interesting collaborative experiment, enrolling researchers who have been working together in an active way over the past half-decade. This preface explains the genealogy of the emerging and open collaboration through which we developed ideas
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Societal actors across scales and geographies increasingly demand visual applications of systems thinking – the process of understanding and changing the reality of a system by considering its whole set of interdependencies – to address complex problems affecting food and agriculture. Yet, despite the wide offer of systems mapping tools, there is still little guidance for managers, policy-makers, civil society and changemakers in food and agriculture on how to choose, combine and use these tools on the basis of a sufficiently deep understanding of socio-ecological systems. Unfortunately, actors seeking to address complex problems with inadequate understandings of systems often have limited influence on the socio-ecological systems they inhabit, and sometimes even generate unintended negative consequences. Hence, we first review, discuss and exemplify seven key features of systems that should be – but rarely have been – incorporated in strategic decisions in the agri-food sector: interdependency, level-multiplicity, dynamism, path dependency, self-organization, non-linearity and complex causality. Second, on the basis of these features, we propose a collective process to systems mapping that grounds on the notion that the configuration of problems (i.e., how multiple issues entangle with each other) and the configuration of actors (i.e., how multiple actors relate to each other and share resources) represent two sides of the same coin. Third, we provide implications for societal actors - including decision-makers, trainers and facilitators - using systems mapping to trigger or accelerate systems change in five purposive ways: targeting multiple goals; generating ripple effects; mitigating unintended consequences; tackling systemic constraints, and collaborating with unconventional partners.
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