Mapping Beyond Boundaries

Mapping Beyond Boundaries: Creative Geographies as Tools for Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching was a panel presentation shared at the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru) annual conference in Madison, Wisconsin on October 24, 2025. Thien-Kim's presentation begins on slide 15.

ABSTRACT

This session explores how creative mapping practices can complement traditional quantitative methods in research, education, and community engagement. Two projects will be introduced to open up conversation. Following Vermont’s floods in 2023, participatory mapping has been a valuable way to understand disaster response in rural Vermont communities. Aletha Spang will discuss how their team has used community mapping to reveal gaps in official communication, local needs, and networks of mutual aid. Flood narratives and visualizations have come to life through collecting spatial data with impacted residents. Creative methods such as quilting and drawing have helped expand the audience of these mapping practices, layering memories, emotions, and sensory elements. Students have engaged enthusiastically with creative mapping methods, gaining experience with community-engaged research and integrating the university with local communities. 

Many students in geography and geography-adjacent fields train extensively in GIS to prepare for careers in natural resource planning or other environmental fields. However, students receive limited training about the social nature and role of maps. Thien-Kim Bui will discuss how to use collage as a method for students to critically engage with maps in the classroom. By cutting up maps into map elements, students learn to see maps as more than objective, descriptive objects; by putting map elements together in new and interesting ways, students learn how maps tell stories and become records of place-as-process that reveal beliefs, values, and priorities about place that may be difficult to collect using a traditional GIS. The collaborative and conversational nature of group artmaking may also introduce additional, valuable nuance about the role of relationships and social learning in environmental planning.

Presentation