DIFFRACTIVE READING
Diffractive reading is one expression of a diffractive methodology. Diffractive reading is about reading through rather than against: interference rather than opposition, diffraction rather than reflection. "Diffractive readings bring inventive provocations;" says Barad in an interview, "they are good to think with" (van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2012). Drawing from Barad and Haraway, Murris and Bozalek (2019) develop propositions to guide diffractive readings of literature. What I find most admirable is that they do so by putting Barad's diffractive methodology into practice: their article marks the effects of their diffractive reading of, on the one hand, propositions generated through another exercise in diffractive reading and, on the other hand, their article itself. Thus, in the process of formation, their article serves as a diffractive apparatus for generating interferences while what's rendered through publication is a diffraction pattern marking the effects of their interference practice. They write: The challenge in adopting diffraction as a methodology is not to theorise the diffraction pattern (a logic of representation), but to put it into practice, thereby disrupting the theory/practice binary. The idea is to read theory with practice diffractively guided by, for example, key questions that move the experiment forward. (Murris and Bozalek 2019, 1505, emphasis in original) If the overarching diffraction pattern marking the effects of my deep mapping interference practice is my theory of deep mapping, to simply describe my theory would be to fall for the same logic of representation as governs reflection-based maps; substituting trace for practice "exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility" (de Certeau 1984, 97). Instead, as the pages ("chapters") of negative-spaces evidence, I disrupt the theory/practice binary by engaging in theory-informed-practice and enacting practice-informed-theory as praxis. This is what it means to read theory with practice.

THINKING THROUGH DEEP MAPPING
To be diffractively guided by questions in this endeavor means continuously reading your research through your key provocations and allowing space and time for your theory, practice, and research questions to be refigured in response. For example, I encountered Haraway (1991) and then Barad (2003, 2007, 2012, 2014, 2015) a few months after I first began to theorize deep mapping as "constructive interference with the superficial reflection that is place rendered (down from above) by flat maps." Remember, constructive interference occurs when superpositioned waves are in phase with one another, meaning the crests and troughs of overlapping waves align. As I read Barad on diffraction, I realized different orientations to mapping need not be aligned in order for their interference to articulate differences that mattered. This compelled me to refigure my theory of deep mapping from specifically constructive interference to interference in general (both constructive and destructive). Constructing negative-spaces, including organizing content and writing component pages, has also been a practice through which my research questions are diffracted. Writing this page in particular has challenged me to think about the questions that drive my experimentation forward. Guiding my research from the beginning as been the question: What could it mean to think with place? To feel the city?

Responding to this key provocation invites an exploration of what it might mean to think, to think with, to feel, as well as the boundary making practices involved in citing "place" and "the city" as interlocutors — i.e., intellecting others with whom one is in dialogue. Rather than offer any authoritative definitions, I diffract these questions (and by extension my initial question) through some of the physical-conceptual field of my encounter. Note: as stated in negative-spaces/disorientation.html, the goal of my master's was never to definitively answer my initial question but rather to explore and respond to it through deep mapping. Exploration and response are not successive steps, I've learned, but rather impulses driving "iterative loops between action, experience, and knowledge" (Tuin and Verhoeff 2022, 138). My exploration and response to my initial inquiry and its attendant provocations has been, and continues to be, diffracted through the effects of my simultaneous exploration and response to the question, 'What is deep mapping?'

Recall my first theorization of deep mapping, formulated by thinking with the diffraction phenomena of thin film interference: Deep mapping is constructive interference with the superficial reflection that is place rendered (down from above) by flat maps. Mapping deeply requires entering the landscape––putting one’s self into the field––and emerging to render a cartography beyond the monochrome. What I was gesturing towards in my initial theorization was how deep mapping was an engagement within a landscape that went beyond collecting surface-level reflections of the terrain from a distanced position. Deep mapping, as I understood it, was an interference practice rather than an exercise in reflection or opposition. It was in this sense that I became cautious of describing deep mapping as a 'counter cartography' (see Mason-Deese 2020), for, to me, it did not seem to counter cartography so much as describe a practice aimed at articulating alternate possible spatial stories through interfering with those defined by totalizing abstractions. While I recognized deep mapping could not occur from a remove, I did assume a preexisting exterior to "the field" from which one stepped "into" the field and then "emerged". Yet such an initial conceptualization is unsurprising given the literature through which I came upon deep mapping.

My first introduction to deep mapping was the work of Les Roberts, which I encountered in 2020 during my undergraduate research into critical and creative cartographies. This was at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic had recently shuttered my university campus, forcing me into isolation in rural Maine. Roberts' editorials (2016b, 2018b) for his two Humanities special issues (2016a, 2018a) were the first creative scholarly publications I ever read after Eric Magrane's Climate Geopoetics (2020). Immersed as I was in physical geography and geographic information science, deep mapping and the concept of spatial bricolage seemed to offer a more open-ended orientation to what might count as fieldwork. When the world as mediated through my phone and computer screens became increasingly cacophonous, wandering the woods became a necessary part of my everyday. I began leaving familiar pathways, cultivating spatial awareness through landmarks such as uprooted trees, wetlands, and boulders. I attended to alternate perceptual scales by kneeling to observe trumpet lichen pushing up from rotting trees and listen for water gurgling underground in spring. Roberts (2016b) calls deep mapping "an embodied and reflexive immersion in a life that is lived and performed spatially. A cartography of depth. A diving within" (XIV, emphasis in original). Deep mapping, he elaborates in a subsequent publication, "presupposes the embodied presence of the researcher 'within' the space under investigation" (Roberts 2018a, 11). Roberts writes of 'sounding' as a mode of inquiry akin to intuitive engagement, of feeling one's way into a space of representational flux, ambiguity and becoming. The presence of the researcher in the field of practice is taken to be a constitutive part of that field and, as such, it is recognised that her or his task is not so much to pin down or capture the representational form of any given space, but to respond to its fluid, mutable and mercurial properties in ways that conjure an impressionistic sense of that space (and its manifold spacings). (2018a, 61, emphasis in original) Reflexivity is central to Roberts' formulation of deep mapping. Embodiment, by virtue of being in reference to the researcher, at once presupposes the differentiation of bodies human and nonhuman and enacts that distinction. David Crouch (2003) compares notions of embodied practice with those of performance and performativity to explore how identity is constituted through encounters with space. Crouch develops 'spacing' as a term which "identifies subjective and practical ways in which the individual handles his or her material surroundings. Spacing is positioned in terms of action, making sense (including the refiguring of 'given' space), and mechanisms of opening up possibilities" (Crouch 2003, 1945). "There is a particular sensuousness and a tactile way of knowing that is central to everydayness," he writes in a later publication (Crouch 2010, 64), though thinking and feeling remain human pursuits engaged relationally with "materiality and non-human life" (63). For Crouch (2003, 2010) as for Roberts (2016b, 2018a, 2018b), the human body is already differentiated from their nonhuman, material surroundings which are sensed and made sense of through an embodied positionality. For both, space is left intentionally nebulous, constituted at once as something an individual can be "'within'" or that which is "'given'", and also something lived, performed, and open to reconfigurations. Discussing vitalist geographies, Beth Greenhough (2011) writes, "space and time are brought into being simultaneously with the actualisation of a given phenomenon" (41). This seems to echo Barad (2007), for whom space, time, and matter are phenomena (316) "mutually constituted through the dynamics of iterative intra-activity" (181). However, reading agential realism through Greenhough's (2011) account and a handful of related literature on sensory methodologies for engaging the world, I mark some vital similarities and differences in how agency and the human|nonhuman boundary are figured. I am particularly invested in how the apparatuses through which differential embodiment is constituted effect different possibilities for knowing. Though I begin a discussion with what follows, this is again something I intend to explore further during my PhD.

SENSE AND SENSE MAKING
For Greenhough (2011), the vitalism of vitalist geographies extends "agency (the power to sense the world)...to all living beings" (41). What constitutes living beings is never articulated, however. The boundary drawing practices by which living is differentiated from nonliving, and human bodies from those nonhuman, remain unaccounted for. If "the power to sense the world" is the capacity of living beings (Greenhough 2011, 41), then the promiscuous self-touching of physical and virtual subatomic particles and the yearning with which they reach out towards one another before a lightning strike (Barad 2012, 2015) can be adduced to illustrate how all matter is vital. Indeed, all that matters is vital. "There is a vitality to the liveliness of intra-activity," writes Barad, "not in the sense of a new form of vitalism, but rather in terms of a new sense of aliveness" (2007, 177). Agency in agential realism is not ascribed based on 'sense', 'living', and 'being', for such properties are understood to be constituted through intra-activity, and therefore are not intrinsic to some already individuated/differentiated part of the world. Explains Barad, "human bodies, like all other bodies, are not entities with inherent boundaries and properties but phenomena that acquire specific boundaries and properties through the open-ended dynamics of intra-activity" (2007, 172). Thus, "Embodiment is a matter not of being specifically situated in the world, but rather of being of the world in its dynamic specificity" (Barad 2007, 377, emphasis in original).

This is reminiscent of Haraway's argument for situated and embodied knowledges, in which she clarifies, Feminist accountability requires a knowledge tuned to resonance, not to dichotomy. Gender is a field of structured and structuring difference, in which the tones of extreme localization, of the intimately personal and individualized body, vibrate in the same field with global high-tension emissions. Feminist embodiment, then, is not about fixed location in a reified body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning. Embodiment is significant prosthesis…. (Haraway 1988, 588) Whereas "being specifically situated in the world" (Barad 2007, 172) insinuates "fixed location in a reified body", "significant prosthesis" (Haraway 1988, 588) accounts for "being of the world in its dynamic specificity" (Barad 2007, 172). Barad's posthuman performativity (2003, 2007) extends Foucault and Butler's analyses on the materialization of bodies by attending to how matter itself comes to matter, and to the apparatuses through which human and nonhuman bodies are differentially articulated. Writes Barad, "In an agential realist account, performativity is understood not as iterative citationality (Butler) but as iterative intra-activity" (2007, 184, emphasis in original). So, while vitalist geographies regard agency as the capacity to sense (Greenhough 2011), within agential realism's posthuman performativity, "agency is the space of possibilities opened up by the indeterminacies entailed in exclusions" (Barad 2007, 182). The Baradian apparatuses, or boundary making practices, responsible for drawing exclusions are therefore "mechanisms of opening up possibilities" (Crouch 2003, 1945).

When I first began my master's I checked out A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies (Elliott and Culhane 2017) from the library. This collection of thoughtful everyday interventions afforded a more open-ended engagement with the world than did Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011), a dense edition purchased for my required methods course (which happened to be in the anthropology department). I admit I did not make it very far in the latter text. Perhaps I will revisit it during my PhD in which I will engage more 'human subjects', reading it diffractively through other approaches to 'data collection'. Dara Culhane (2017) contributes a chapter to A Different Kind of Ethnography on sensing. She writes, "Sensory ethnography not only privileges lived, embodied, and affective knowledge, but also focuses on intersubjectivity and the co-creation of such knowledge" (Culhane 2017, 60). Culhane defines affect as "feelings generated by—and, like embodiment, circulating through—relationships among people" (2017, 54). Moreover, "Intersubjectivity is the space of thinking/feeling/doing/being created by people interacting with each other in and through social relationships" (Culhane 2017, 56, emphasis in original). Exercises for the reader to take out into the field are reflexive, privileging human reader's sensory apparatus. For Culhane (2017), knowledge produced through sensing and sensory ethnography is that which is felt from an already constituted human body in interactive relation to other presupposed humans whose differentiation from their material surround is taken for granted. Place is relegated to a material backdrop against which humans think and feel together with one another in the co-creation of embodied and affective knowledge.

'Place dialogue' (Adams and Kotus 2022) and 'lyric geography' (Acker 2019) gesture towards more 'situated knowledges' of place in that their "object of knowledge is engaged as actor and agent" (Haraway 1988, 592). Place dialogue assumes places as interlocutors and more-than-human agents; "Place dialogue is about the meaningfulness of embodiment in a place, and the way in which bodily responses to a place are acts of interpretation positioning place as an actor among actors" (Adams and Kotus 2022, 3). In this sense, place dialogue is sensory ethnography where places, rather than humans, are positioned as subjects. Recollecting her fieldwork for a PhD in geopoetics, Maleea Acker writes: "Place impels me; it is the actor. Place also unfurls around me; it becomes the subject" (2019, 132). Acker's lyric geography takes shape as a literary commonplace, her own writing on the left-hand pages in dialogue with human interlocutors on the right. Referencing her time in Ajijic, Mexico, she writes: "My geographical practice, similarly, acknowledges walking through places and charting my feelings and the ways in which I interact with people as both a creative practice and a turn toward dwelling at home, toward choosing to engage with place rather than to distance myself from it" (Acker 2019, 154, emphasis in original). This was the mentality with which I arrived to Vancouver in July of 2021. I first encountered Acker's work in Geopoetics in Practice (2019), an edited collection I read for my undergraduate thesis research. The ideas/stories/people therein swayed me towards pursuing a Master of Arts (as opposed to a Master of Science), and set the tone for my journey to Vancouver and subsequent journey getting to know the city of my inhabitation. Intentional engagement with place is cultivated as deep mapping by Laura Bissell and David Overend (2015), who turn to their daily commutes as sites for 'performative counterpractice'. Their attention is guided by four considerations: "first, convergences and divergences of paths and routes and their relationship to the boundaries and barriers that contain and define them; second, notions of becoming, changing and transferring; third, patterns and rhythms of commuting and ways of documenting and analysing these processes; and fourth, the corporeality of commuting as an embodied practice" (Bissell and Overend 2015, 484). Invoking deep mapping as "theory-informed story-telling" (Bissell and Overend 2015, 476), their evocative account demonstrates the capacity of academics to redefine what counts as fieldwork by leaning into their everyday spatial practices as sites of knowledge production. For Bissell and Overend (2015), as for Adams and Kotus (2022) and Acker (2019), the intersubjectivity which assumes place as a subject also assumes place "as an entity" (Adams and Kotus 2022, 3), with preexisting boundaries and determinate properties which, with more concerted attention on the part of the human researcher, will reveal themselves. Intersubjectivity where place is positioned as a subject is still about discreet bodies/entities/individuals interacting.

As shared in negative-spaces/disorientation.html#33-bus, it was while commuting to campus with the 33 bus, an irregular route for me, that I realized the city is not a site with fixed boundaries and determinate properties which preexist encounter and which I, as inhabitant-geographer-cartographer, may irresponsibly separate myself from in order to map from a distanced, exterior position. Rather, the city is performatively constituted as a physical-conceptual field whose emergent topology is iteratively drawn through everyday navigations and encounters. As such, the city of my inhabitation and I are entangled, figured and continuously reconfiguring in dynamic relation. This is where I see a vital difference between reflexive approaches to engaging the world and the application of a diffractive mode of inquiry. Purely reflexive orientations to embodiment thus serve to reify taken for granted boundaries, where thinking and feeling are intersubjective practices of relating to an already constituted human self and/or other. Yet "bodies as objects of knowledge" are not preexisting entities but "boundary projects" whose "boundaries are drawn by mapping practices" (Haraway 1988, 595). It is with this in mind that an agential realist approach does not assume place — or any object of observation, for that matter — as determined prior to encounter: The "knower" cannot be assumed to be a self-contained rational human subject, nor even its prosthetically enhanced variant…Rather, subjects are differentially constituted through specific intra-actions. The subjects so constituted may range across some of the presumed boundaries (such as those between human and nonhuman and self and other) that get taken for granted. Knowing is a distributed practice that includes the larger material arrangement. To the extent that humans participate in scientific or other practices of knowing, they do so as part of the larger material config­uration of the world and its ongoing open-ended articulation.

Knowing is a specific engagement of the world where part of the world becomes differentially intelligible to another part of the world in its differen­tial accountability to and for that of which it is a part. In traditional humanist accounts, intelligibility requires an intellective agent (that to which some­ thing is intelligible), and intellection is framed as a specifically human capac­ity. But in my agential realist account, intelligibility is an ontological perfor­mance of the world in its ongoing articulation. It is not a human-dependent characteristic but a feature of the world in its differential becoming. (Barad 2007, 379-380) There is a resonance between spacing and agential realism's knowing as re/configuring the world through specific material engagements, i.e., intra-actions. Read through agential realism, 'spacing' as "making sense" through the "refiguring of 'given' space" (Crouch 2003) is another way of describing "knowing [a]s a matter of intra-acting" (Barad 2007, 149). If 'spacing' (Crouch 2003) is taken as a mode of embodied inquiry, there emerges an additional resonance with vitalist geography's recognition of how "geographical research is itself a form of performative material intervention" (Greenhough 2011, 50). The same can be said of deep mapping, though diffractions mark the effects of interferences rather than interventions. Deep mapping disorients representationalist dualisms inherent to Cartesian cartography by assuming the physical-conceptual field as an interlocutor. The field is not a site with fixed boundaries and determinate properties which preexist encounter and which I, as inhabitant-geographer-cartographer, may irresponsibly separate myself from in order to map from a distanced, exterior position. Rather, the field is performatively constituted as an intellecting other through everyday spatial practices. Writes Greenhough (2011): "fieldwork is more than a process of data collection; it is an event through which the researcher and the researched are resituated or repositioned in the world, and thereby are engaged in remaking the world through the process of their encounters" (48). Field and researcher, equipped as they are with tactics of investigation, are provisional configurations intra-actively constituting one and other within the phenomena of encounter.

NEGOTIATING DIFFERENCE
DIFFERENT INTELLIGIBILITIES
It is through the practices by which we acknowledge interlocutors in knowledge production that intellecting others are constituted as such. Conventional literature reviews employ in-text citations to reference other scholars and their contributions. This is an intersubjective approach wherein citations cite already differentiated (human) subjects as interlocutors. A diffractive reading, on the other hand, does not presume the boundaries between self and other but rather attends to how such boundaries are acquired through intra-actions. Murris and Bozalek (2019) continue: As a researcher is one part of the world, hence a diffractive reading is unlike a literature review as the latter assumes that you are at a distance of the literature, having a bird's eye point of view — creating an overview by comparing, contrasting, juxtaposing or looking for similarities and themes. A diffractive reading, on the other hand, does not foreground any texts as foundational, but through reading texts through one another, comes to new insights. (1505-1506) Though not foregrounding any one text, diffractive reading is "rigorously attentive to important details of specialized arguments within a given field without uncritically endorsing or uncondi­tionally prioritizing one (inter)disciplinary approach over another" (Barad 2007, 93). A diffractive methodology attends to the relational ontology of agential realism (Barad 2007, 389) rather than a flat ontology, in which "Components are leveled. Nothing is subordinated" (Cresswell 2019, 6).

Drawing from deep mapping literatures and practices, Selina Springett (2015) offers the spatiotemporal descriptor of 'deep' rather than 'flat' to gesture towards the democratization of knowledge through enactments that retain an ethical and political bent by attending to social and ecological hierarchies. This attention is important as "the power to flatten can appear to largely come,[sic] from a position of privilege" (Springett 2015, 631-632). For Springett, deep mapping emerges as a performative practice for decolonizing the way people engage with place (2015, 634). Writing of Indigenous sound art, Sara Nicole England (2019) draws on Candice Hopkins' interpretation of 'deep listening' to explore attentiveness to noise "as a productive medium and gesture toward spatial decolonization" (20). In a colloquium presentation given at Simon Fraser University in 2019, Carcross/Tagish First Nation citizen Candice Hopkins describes a practice of decolonial listening: Decolonization as we know it is an active practice. It's a verb it's not a metaphor. It's a present process that echoes into the future. And I think that the way to begin with this, the way to bring people to this place, is to first listen to those who are here. So freeing some of the voices wedged beneath dominant history has the possibility, I think, to redress some of the violence that's reduced Indigenous people, Indigenous lives, to numbers and ciphers and fragments of discourse. And perhaps by dwelling in these fragments, by spending time in the discomfort of the incomplete, of listening to the shards that often now stand in for history, it's possible to tune our ears to hear something of these stifled voices. The politics of colonial entanglement offer the possibility not only to hear what is sounding but also to listen to the silences as well. (Towards a Practice of Decolonial Listening: Sounding the Margins | Candice Hopkins 2019, 19:33-20:32, punctuation added) England (2019) considers how the unconscious differentiation of 'sound' from 'noise' reveals a value judgment whereby the listener marginalizes sounds they find unintelligible. Rejecting harmony, England asks, "Might listening to noise suggest an attentiveness to difference?" (2019, 16). Citing Hopkins' description of "noise as a cacophony" and Jack Halberstam's contextualization of cacophony within colonial structures (see Halberstam 2013), England (2019) states: "Attending to cacophony, then, is at once a recognition of intelligible structures and a transgression of them" (16). What does this mean? It means intelligibility — as that which makes sense — is relationally figured. Listening for sounds/voices/stories deemed cacophonous by hegemonic structures of intelligibility recognizes this — how, even, hegemony's intelligibility is constituted and maintained by that which it deems cacophonous remaining unintelligible — and transgresses these structures by attending to cacophony as intelligible sound. (See rendering.html#negative-spaces for more on transgression.)

Herself a settler on unceded Indigenous lands, England understands participating in Indigenous-led projects as a way to situate her academic research (England 2018). I am a settler on stolen xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) lands, carrying out my research practice within and as part of a settler colonial city and institution of higher education. Producing situated knowledges thus necessitates attention to the ways in which my spatial research and geographic knowledge production is entangled with the settler colonial history of Vancouver and the University Endowment (Lands), as well as ongoing dispossession. I recognize that this remains a conspicuous silence in my current work. As I continue to think and practice deep mapping over the next four years of my PhD, I am committed to reading, citing, and thinking with more decolonial geography and Indigenous scholarship related to place making, spatial navigation, and this landscape within which I am geographically situated. Additionally, since much of my focus surrounds everyday navigation and encounters with urban infrastructure, future research will include a more thorough examination of the ways in which First Nations are also actors and agents in the urbanization of Vancouver's landscape. For example, near where I live, construction has begun on an eleven-tower apartment development on Squamish owned land spearheaded by the Squamish First Nation in partnership with Westbank (Cyca 2024; "History of the Sen̓áḵw Lands" 2024). Many stories are superpositioned in the landscape. Diffractive reading offers a way of negotiating different intelligibilities without resorting to oppositional framings. Ian Biggs describes deep mapping as an 'essaying' of place that is about "interweaving many disparate, tensioned strands of experience, genres of writing, knowledge positions and narrative perspectives so as to produce a richer, more resonant patterning of meaning while retaining the pleasures of discrete threads within the larger whole" (Biggs 2010, emphasis in original). Like a diffractive reading, such an interweaving remains cognizant of differences while feeling for resonances.

ELUDING OPERATIONALIZATION
In negative-spaces/disorientation.html, I wrote that deep mapping eluded operationalization in its interpretive capaciousness (Roberts 2016; Modeen and Biggs 2020). This was not to say that theories and practices of deep mapping are never dissonant. Contrasting two publications on deep mapping, Modeen and Biggs (2020) mark a distinction between approaches which are "literalist and instrumentalist" and those which are "scholarly and creative" (Modeen and Biggs 2020, 52). Interestingly, both publications share many of the same citations. It comes as no surprise that the authors of the "literalist and instrumentalist" approach who wrote that "A deep map is . . . an environment embedded with tools to bring data into an explicit and direct relationship with space and time" (Bodenhamer, Corrigan, and Harris 2015, quoted in Modeen and Biggs 2020, 53) went on to publish an edited volume concerned with articulating methods of making deep maps (Bodenhamer, Corrigan, and Harris 2021). As their "scholarly and creative" exemplar, Modeen and Biggs (2020) choose Deep Mapping (2016), a Humanities special issue edited by Les Roberts. As discussed in the preceding section, my thinking and practice are deeply diffracted through Roberts' work. However, reading my understanding of deep mapping as influenced by Roberts through Barad's agential realism, I now think more carefully about boundaries and how they are drawn. Given my hesitation to identify with either capacious approach to deep mapping as laid out by Modeen and Biggs (2020), I wonder if my interest in posthuman embodiment may be indicative of a third strand of deep mapping practice, one which remains scholarly and creative while not presupposing the existence or intelligibility of formations such as human, space, time, data, or the field. That is, perhaps such formations can only be objectively referenced as phenomena.

What I meant by 'deep mapping eludes operationalization', and where I am resonant with Modeen and Biggs' (2020) scholarly and creative approach, is that deep mapping practice cannot be reduced to a sequence of ordered steps (method). To do so would be to foreclose the "poetics of paradox and ambiguity essential to open deep mapping" (Modeen and Biggs 2020, 53). If anything, the interference of contrasting views illuminates how deep mapping cannot be captured by any one methodological strategy, even as self-proclaimed cognoscenti cl/aim to define one.

POSTQUALITATIVE INQUIRY
Post qualitative inquiry refuses the 'capture of method' (see Manning 2016) entirely; it "must be invented, created differently each time… The goal of post qualitative inquiry is not to systematically repeat a preexisting research reprocess[sic] to produce[sic] a recognizable result but to experiment and create something new and different that might not be recognizable in existing structures of intelligibility" (St. Pierre 2021a, 6, emphasis in original). It was through writing her dissertation that Elizabeth St. Pierre first encountered the incommensurabilities between qualitative methodology and poststructural theories of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari (St. Pierre 2018, 603). St. Pierre (2018) describes how normalized it was in (her experience of) graduate school to first pick a set of (qualitative) methods with which to collect data, then apply the theory one was reading to the data collected. Upon reflection and the thinking immanent to writing, St. Pierre realized her methodological choice to conduct in-person interviews valorized a speaking subject, presence, and the primacy of language in a manner antithetical to the theory she sought to apply. In short, St. Pierre discovered "conventional humanist qualitative methodological concepts like interview, the field, and data" (2018, 606, emphasis in original) to be unintelligible within her theoretical framework.

I have encountered a similar conundrum in the ways spatial data are made legible by technoscientific and affective orientations to engaging place, producing geographic knowledge, and rendering spatial research public through maps and textual publications. The technoscientific and affective orientations I am specifically thinking about are Cartesian cartography and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) on the one hand, and sensory and embodied spatial methodologies/practices broadly construed on the other. This is not to say there is a clear demarcation between the two, that there are only these two orientations, or that either camp is homogenous. I have been a practitioner of both long enough to know this is not the case. Rather, I am interested in patterns of presuppositions — required postulates even — that differentially correspond to what's hailed as "top-down" or "bottom-up" mapping practices. My thinking was sparked by a panel concerned with 'infrastructures and affective orientations of data' which invited "interventions at the intersection of space and data, exploring critical geographies and the city to offer critique, alternatives, and grounds for resistance to top-down practices for imagining and managing today's cities" ("177. Infrastructures and Affective Orientations of Data" 2023). Reading the panel's call, I realized the objectivity of data as an empirical formation was taken for granted, as were the bounds of 'the city'. In response, I began wondering, What is 'data'? And, how are 'the field', as a research site, and interlocutors as participants of a dialogue, figured through the same boundary making practices by which data is constituted as an empirical formation/observation? I mulled these questions over throughout the summer of 2023 and into the fall. By winter, I had no answers but a more succinct set of questions: How are empirics made legible as data by the apparatuses that produce them? How are technoscientific and affective orientations to ‘what counts as data’ co-constitutive of an empirical account of the city?

site 4 I began drafting my response to the panel's call overlooking the mudflats beside the Tsleil-Waututh Nation reservation. Today, the Maplewood Flats provincial conservation area and wild bird sanctuary occupies the traditional and unceded territory of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation (“Visit Maplewood Flats” 2024). On a log bench overlooking Parkland's fuel refinery (“The Burnaby Refinery” 2023).

Thinking with my ongoing work in Cartesian cartography, GIS, and deep mapping, I have grown wary of academic framings that render so-called 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' mapping practices in opposition to one another. Both are boundary making practices for configuring worlds. What matters is the effect of their differential articulations of what counts as an intelligible structure/form. 'Top down' and 'bottom up' mapping practices simply perform different agential cuts, the effects of which do not oppose one another but overlap in the everyday, their interference constituting the entangled viscera of urban bodies as they are rendered differentially intelligible. Cacophony is a diffraction pattern marking the interference of incommensurable intelligibilities. A perhaps more generative way of relating incommensurable orientations to making sense of the world — different "structures of intelligibility" (St. Pierre 2021a, 6) — could be to perform a diffractive reading.