Abstract
This 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 participants feel 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 enabled 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 provides an avenue for what O'Neill terms an ethno-mimetic process where images/performances make lived experiences palpable to viewers. In this case, we see a glimpse of the sensations of this high-risk activity in the sex marketplace, allowing us to understand participants' social relations, lived experiences, and motivations.
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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.
Change history
12 December 2022
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-022-10069-4
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Jordenö, S., Horning, A. Mapmaking as visual storytelling: the movement and emotion of managing sex work in the urban landscape. Crime Law Soc Change (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-022-10066-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-022-10066-7