Mapmaking as visual storytelling: the movement and emotion of managing sex work in the urban landscape

AbstractThis paper explores an interdisciplinary approach that researchers can use to understand how people feel about their movement in the cityscape and their risk-taking activities by visualizing it. Author 1, a visual artist, and Author 2, a criminologist, used a psychogeography method where participants hand-drew maps of their everyday operations in the sex marketplace. Researchers, artists, and activists have used mapmaking to elucidate how individuals conceptualize physical space and place or their subjective, emotional relationship to the city's geography. Psychogeographers Lynch and Debord have used it to understand how participantsfeel about moving, inhabiting, navigating risk, and subverting space in the metropolis. We use this method as a vehicle to show how sex market facilitators ’ imagine the physical geographic space where they work in the nighttime economy, their embodiment in managing a business in the urban landscape, their emotions in this risk-taking activity, and how they feel rerouting city blocks and subverting formal capitalism. In addition, this technique enabl ed participants to feel and recall emotions of this lived experience, such as excitement, control, authenticity, shame, and freedom. Sixty participants who worked in New York City hand drew mental maps or visual depictions of where they worked within the city. This visual storytelling method provide s an avenue for what O'Neill terms an ethno-mimetic process where images/performances make li...

Source: Crime, Law and Social Change - November 19, 2022 Category: Criminology Source Type: research