Technopolitical cartographies: a proposal for collaborative mapping through participatory action research

| Digital cartographies have become popular in the field of digital activism. For technopolitical communities, mapping constitutes an innovation in the repertoires of confrontation; they allow to visualize communities and reinforce their collective identity, establish networks and links between them, and make visible the issues they intend to denounce. However, cartographic practices are also a research tool to investigate these communities. Collaborative mapping can geolocate and make projects and their possible synergies visible or generate data for comparative research and even the design of public policies. These practices are beneficial for studies on activist political communities through activist research and other engaged perspectives such as participatory action research. This methodology also has limitations, given the hybrid nature of technopolitical communities and their diffuse territorial margins, the diffif iota culty of combining the anonymity required by activists with the visibility of their networks and practices, as well as issues linked to the classic epistemological debates around the duality between the object and the subject of participatory research. In this text, we address these debates and present the phases and techniques for applying the collaborative mapping to the study of digital activism and for the return of results to the participating communities.