Murky mapping – charting research territory

Maps are frequently associated with ambitions to create precision and documentation of the ‘real’. Yet maps are always partial and necessarily involve distortion. They also create forms of ambiguity that can be provocative and generative. This workshop draws (literally!) on techniques from urban mapping and explores spatial and material ideas through making drawings. These techniques can also be used in other disciplines to tease out relationships between aspects of a research topic and provoke new perspectives. Anyone interested in visualising and speculating on current and possible future configurations of research ideas is welcome to join this workshop for participants in the June Practice Research Symposium (PRS) 2024.

Facilitators

Associate Professor Katrina Simon has research interests in cities, maps and cemeteries, how memory is embedded in urban landscapes and what happens when those landscapes are changed or lost through abandonment, development or disaster. This is carried out in part by developing techniques for generating and interpreting ambiguous images. Katrina is currently the Associate Dean of Landscape Architecture at RMIT.

Chris Speed FRSE, FRSA is Professor of Design for Regenerative Futures at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia, where he collaborates with a wide variety of communities and partners to explore how design provides methods to adapt toward becoming a regenerative society. Chris has an established track record in directing large complex grants and educational programmes with academic, industry and third sector partners, that apply design and data methods to social, environmental and economic challenges.

Grounded in contemporary social theory and creative practice, Andrea Eckersley’s research practice emphasises the construction and exhibition of garments and paintings, as a means of interrogating the affective and embodied experience of place, identity, subjectivity and community as each is mediated in art, fashion and design. Andrea is the HDR coordinator in the School of Fashion and Textiles and the PRS Australia chair.


The DSC Doctoral Research Conference brings together the College's three existing symposia – Practice Research Symposium (PRS), Urban Futures Symposium and Social Change Symposium – to create a shared space for innovation, sustainability and resilience aligned with the theme of regenerative futures.