Mapping Queer Histories, Designing Queer Community: A sociological study of Queering the Map

Queering the Map is an innovative online story-mapping platform and cartographic archive. Visitors anonymously pin their experiences, memories and histories to an online global map, and each pin contains a unique micro-story of queerness: the meaningful and mundane experiences of LGBTQIA+ life. These pins form a living archive, collectively building, mapping and creating space for a form of queer community across the globe.

This study explored peoples’ experiences with the site and what lies beneath some of these stories, extending discussions on how queerness is understood and lived. In late 2019 we analysed nearly two thousand stories from the site — all those pinned at the time to so-called Australia. Then, throughout 2020 we interviewed people from across Australia who had used the site, either reading stories or posting themselves. Thank you so much to everyone who participated.

Team
Our research team: Dr Ash Watson from UNSW Sydney; Professor Emma Kirby from UNSW Sydney; Dr Brendan Churchill from the University of Melbourne; Dr Brady Robards from Monash University; and QTM designer Lucas LaRochelle.


Research Publications

Watson A and Kirby E (2024) Affective routes in interviews: Participants exploring a digital map as a live elicitation method. Qualitative Research. OnlineFirst. This methodological article reflects on a project involving the online archival platform Queering the Map; it shows how techniques of elicitation can open reflective dialogic spaces between participants and researchers, bridging memory and meaning.

Watson A, Kirby E, Churchill B, Robards B and LaRochelle L (2024). What matters in the queer archive? Technologies of memory and Queering the Map. The Sociological Review 72(1): 99-117. This article considers how and why (digital/counter) archives make the act of archiving meaningful to queer people, and what moves people to contribute stories from their own life.

Kirby E, Watson A, Churchill B, Robards B and LaRochelle L (2021) Queering the map: stories of love, loss and (be)longing within a digital cartographic archive. Media, Culture and Society 43(6): 1043-1060. This article explores stories posted to queeringthemap.com that, rather than being for a general audience, seem to have someone specific in mind — like notes left in a special book in the library, in the hope that someone will find it because they were thinking about you too.

Robards B, Watson A, Kirby E, Churchill B and LaRochelle L (2020) Queering the Map: Physical traces and digital places of queer lives. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11319.

Zines
To read some of our findings and ideas in a creative format, check out our project zines here.

Contact
If you’d like more information about the project or have questions about accessing our publications, you can contact the project lead at ashleigh.watson@unsw.edu.au.