Affective maps of Hadrut: On methodology
EDN: MUGDVC
Abstract
The article discusses the use of affective mapping as a method for studying memory, loss, and spatial imagination among displaced residents of the Hadrut district of Nagorno-Karabakh after the 2020 war. Conducted in Yerevan and Stepanakert in 2022, the study focuses not on analyzing interview data but on understanding the act of drawing as a form of remembering.
Participants were invited to draw “their own Hadrut” — a subjective and emotionally charged image rather than a geographically precise one. The drawings were accompanied by storytelling, where the past intertwined with the present moment of narration and moving back and forth. This process revealed how bodily and emotional memories re-emerge through action, turning recollection into an embodied event.
We conceptualize these maps as idiospaces — personal topographies of memory analogous to idiolects in language. Each map conveys an individual mode of belonging and a way to re-experience and rearticulate connection to a place that no longer exists materially. Affective mapping thus enables the reconstruction of the emotional geography of everyday life before displacement and illuminates how gesture, narration, and shared empathy shape social memory. As a humanistic and anthropological practice, affective cartography becomes a space where personal remembrance is transformed into a collective act of imaginative return and re-inhabitation of home.
About the Authors
N. R. Shahnazaryan
Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (IAE NAS RA);
Center for Independent Social Research Armenia (CISR Armenia)
Armenia
Armenia
Nonа R. Shahnazaryan
Yerevan
A. Khachaturova
Center for Independent Social Research Armenia (CISR Armenia);
Free University of Brussels
Armenia
Armenia
Anita Khachaturova
Yerevan, Brussels
References
1. Berger, P., Luckmann, T. (1995). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Moscow: Medium. (In Russian).
2. Buhr, F. (2021). Migrants’ mental maps: Unpacking inhabitants’ practical knowledges in Lisbon (Chap. 3). In K. Nikielska-Sekula, A. Desille (Eds.). Visual Methodology in Migration Studies, 51–65. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67608-7_3
3. Campos-Delgado, A. (2017). A picture is worth a thousand words: Irregular transmigrants’ journeys and mental mapping methodology. International Migration, 55(6), 184–199. https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12369
4. Creet, J. (2011). The migration of memory: Intimate cartographies. In J. Creet, A. Kitzmann (Eds.). Memory and migration: Multidisciplinary approaches to memory studie, 3–26. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
5. Derrida, J. (1994). The specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international. New York, London: Routledge.
6. Gieseking, J. J. (2013). Where we go from here: The mental sketch mapping method and its analytic components. Qualitative Inquiry, 19(9), 712–724.
7. Gould, P., White, R. (1986). Mental maps. New York, London: Routledge.
8. James, W. (1912). Essays in radical empiricism. Project Gutenberg. (2010 eBook edition).
9. Jodelet, D., Milgram, S. (1976). Psychological maps of Paris. In H. M. Proshansky, L. V. Rivlin (Eds.). Environmental psychology: People and their physical settings, 104–124. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
10. Jung, H. (2012). Let their voices be seen: Exploring mental mapping as a feminist visual methodology for the study of migrant women. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(3), 985–1002.
11. Kaisto, V., Brednikova, O. (2019). Lakes, presidents and shopping on mental maps: Children’s perceptions of the Finnish–Russian border and the borderland. Fennia, 197(1). https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.73208
12. Karapetyan, E., Amiryan, T. (2021). Shushi: Mental maps. Yerevan: CSN Lab.
13. Khachaturova, A. (2025). An anthropology of loss: Exploring the spectral maps of the displaced Armenians from Hadrut, Nagorno-Karabakh. Ethnopolitics, 2025, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449057.2025.2568282
14. Low, S. (2017). Spatializing culture: The ethnography of space and place. London, New York: Routledge.
15. Lynch, K. (1982). The image of the city. Stroiizdat. (In Russian).
16. Malkki, L. (1995). Refugees and exile: From “refugee studies” to the national order of things. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24(1995), 495–523. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.002431
17. Massey, D. (1994). Space, place and gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
18. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation (Post-Contemporary Interventions). Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smvr
19. Massumi, B. (2015). The politics of affect. Cambridge: Polity Press.
20. Mekdjian, S. (2015). Mapping mobile borders: Critical cartographies of borders based on migration experiences. In A.-L. Amilhat Szary, F. Giraut (Eds.). Borderities and the politics of contemporary mobile borders, 204–224. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
21. Mekdjian, S., Olmedo, E. (2016). Mediating life stories: Experiments in narrative and affective mapping. M@ppemonde. (In French).
22. Pezzoni, N. (2013). The uprooted city. Geographies of contemporary dwelling: Migrant mapping in Milan. Obarrao Edizioni. (In Italian).
23. Pezzoni, N. (2016). The up-rooted city: Migrants mapping Milan. In G. Marconi, E. Ostanel (Eds.). The intercultural city: Migration, minorities and the management of diversity, 89–108. London: I.B. Tauris.
24. Psarras, B. (2025). City as a poetic database through walking, new media and site interventions: Performing and transforming urban otherness. In H. Pires, Z. Pinto-Coelho, L. Magalhães (Eds.). Communicating human and non-human otherness, 145–161. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
25. Reavey, P. (2017). Scenic memory: Experience through time–space. Memory Studies, 10(2), 107–111. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698016683844
26. Shakhnazaryan, N., Khachaturova, A., Nikiforova, E. (2022). Anthropology of lost places: Mental/conceptual maps of Hadrut. Analitikon, August 2022. https://theanalyticon.com/ru/avgust-2022/ (In Russian & Armenian).
27. Silva, A. V., Fonseca, M. L. (2018). Mental maps and lived spaces: Brazilian immigrants in the city of Los Angeles. In S. Siqueira (Ed.). Ligações migratórias contemporâneas: Brasil, Estados Unidos e Portugal, 101–133. Ed. Univale. (In Portuguese).
28. Spinoza, B. (1954). Ethics. New York: Dover Publications.
29. Strelnikova, A. V. (2012). The method of the biographical walk: Interview in the spatial dimension. In A. B. Gofman, G. V. Gradosel’skaja (Eds.). Proceedings of the VI Scientific and Practical Conference “Contemporary Sociology — to Contemporary Russia”, 665–671. Izdatel’skij dom Nacional’nyj issledovatel’skij universitet “Vysshaja shkola jekonomiki”. (In Russian).
30. Till, K. E. (2012). Wounded cities: Memory-work and a place-based ethics of care. Political Geography, 31(1), 3–14.
31. Veselkova, N. V. (2010). Mental maps of the city: Methodological issues and practices of use. Sociology: Methodology, methods, mathematical modeling (Sociology: 4M), 2010(31), 2–29. (In Russian).
32. Veselkova, N. V., Pryamikova, E. V., Vandyshev, M. N. (2022). Research photomapping: Discussion of the method. Monitoring of Public Opinion: Economic and Social Changes, 2002(4), 39–61. https://doi.org/10.14515/monitoring (In Russian)
33. Wood, E. (2003). Insurgent collective action and civil war in El Salvador. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Review
For citations:
Shahnazaryan N.R., Khachaturova A. Affective maps of Hadrut: On methodology. Urban Folklore and Anthropology. 2025;7(4):92-126. (In Russ.) EDN: MUGDVC
Views:
40
Email this article 