The Embodied Ecologies project
Table of Contents

All about the Embodied Ecologies projects

... All you have to know about the project: definitions, intentions, approches, processes and spirit.

Sensorial mapping: definitions, approach, methods

... Everything you need to know about sensorial cartography: its historical background, the diversity of its practices, the methods and protocols used to produce themps, which reflect not only factual elements but also the emotions and feelings that human beings experience in the places where they live and move around.
 

Stories from the Philippines

... Telling about the toxicity of domestic or working environments, and how bodies adapt. or not.

Stories from France

... Telling how communities and residents organize to escape the toxic environment or to fight against it.

Sensorial mapping experiments

... Or how to better perceive and understand living environment through maps imagined and produced on the basis of sensorial and emotional experiences of events directly collected in the field research. The main idea is to visualize the presence of toxic chemicals — both in the living environment and in human bodies — and how political, economic, social, and regulatory forces shape uneven exposure. Five cities were selected to conduct research in: Manila and Baguio (Philippines), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Paris and Grenoble (France).

2025 Symposium on sensorial and experimental mapping: Proceedings

29. September — 1. October 2025 :

A symposium on practices and concepts in experimental cartography was held at Wageningen University from September 29 to October 1, 2025. These pages gather the proceedings of the event, trace the main exchanges, and offer readers the written and edited versions of the presentations, along with detailed accounts of the four workshops carried out with participants.

Over the course of three days, we “sensed the space,” drew, mapped, listened, and engaged in dialogue within a friendly, informal atmosphere, navigating multiple languages at once (English, French, Spanish, German, and Dutch)—including one we shared, each spoken with its own accent, all blending into the cartography of our collective experience.

Sensorial mapping: Foundational concepts

... Everything you need to know about sensorial cartography: its historical background, the diversity of its practices, the methods and protocols used to produce them.

Mapping workshops

These workshops took place over periods of two to three hours (so very short sessions), during which participants were invited to produce sensorial maps following specific instructions provided at the very beginning of each session, and based primarily on data and information gathered from the space around where we were meeting, or by exploring our own memory. The aim was to explore a variety of practices in which participants could experiment with creating their own sensorial and emotional maps, using tools that combine scientific and artistic approaches. These exercises were simple and accessible to everyone. No prior artistic or cartographic skills were required—only the willingness to listen to oneself and others, to explore, to play, and to share.

Communications

For two and a half days, most participants were invited to present their research, ongoing or completed, in the form of short talks (15 to 20 minutes) to allow time for discussion with the audience. The main idea was primarily to share methodological approaches in cartography and to present the results.

Dialogues on experimental mapping:
overview, compilation, Synthesis

Everything you need to know about sensorial cartography: its historical background, the diversity of its practices, the methods and protocols used to produce them, which reflect not only factual elements but also the emotions and feelings that human beings experience in the places where they live and move around.
 
This are the result/summary of the collective discussions/reflections we have shared around key themes and questions related to the epistemology and definition and experimental, emotional, sensorial mapping practices and its relevance for the humanities/social sciences, and perhaps for understanding the world and space differently, from other perspective (people fighting to preserve their daily life environment, militant acting to protect human right and insur social and spatial justice, etc). Also to share your own experiences as practitioners—whether in the field with informants, for example, or in class with students.

These collective discussion sessions will also provide an opportunity for participants to share specific mapping experiences

Theme 1: In search of an identity

Experimental mapping: a young discipline in search of its identity: what we generically refer to as ‘experimental cartography’ and which we all practise in a wide variety of forms is also found under a wide variety of names: radical, critical, sensorial, sensory, emotional, participative, creative, collective… We also often meet the expression “counter-cartography”, today challenged by the community of critical cartographers.

Theme 2: Name it
What, then, would be the most appropriate ways to name the discipline we practise?

Theme 3: Relevance and usefullness
Why would we choose the sensorial approach?
What do we expect this practice to bring us for our research ? How relevant is it for research in the social and human sciences to illustrate and map the data and information we gather from our (or others) experiences of space, landscape, and territory, as well as from our memories throughout our personal history and experience (or others)?"

Theme 4: Implementation and methods
How do we implement this “other way” to map the world”? what are the protocoles, the modus operandi and how to we challenge/test them?

Theme 5 : is mapping producing knowledge ?
By reflecting on our experiences with sensory mapping as one of the methods employed in social science research, we may ask whether this approach can be regarded as a genuine producer of knowledge, comparable to other established tools and techniques in the human sciences.