Kate Carruthers Thomas, Birmingham City University
kate.thomas@bcu.ac.uk

Dr Kate Carruthers Thomas is a research fellow and project manager at Birmingham City University, UK. Her research builds on two decades of professional experience in the higher education sector. She specialises in interdisciplinary enquiry into the fields of higher education and gender with a particular interest in critical mobilities and mobile/spatial methods.

1. Starting points

This article discusses the development of a methodological practice I name organisational cartographies, a way of making sense of co-existing stories within organisational space using mapping in its broadest sense - as process, product and powerful metaphorical tool. The sense of plurality in the naming of this practice is deliberate; it is underpinned by Massey's plural and fluid understanding of space "as social relations shaped by power ... the product of interrelations on multiple scales" (2005, p11). As the article will show, there are multiple ways of representing and experiencing an organisation but as researchers, too often we search for a final reckoning, mapping and preserving a bounded territory, reducing complexity to an abstraction. MacFarlane 2010 writes "maps seek to mark the world and fix its flux, but in doing so they also loosen it from its moorings" yet "you can explore territory in any number of ways. It continues to change and you can continue to explore it - space is open to discussion and infinite" (Solnit 2010, p.2).

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