Increasing attention is being given to how educators might incorporate digital story-mapping into undergraduate geography teaching and assessment, with a particular focus evident on the quantitative and GIS-based values of these technologies. However, we argue that the visual elements of digital story-mapping technologies also raise questions about how students understand, organise and represent the experiences of doing qualitative research. Utilising the concept of 'digital visuality' (Fors, 2015), we argue that the broader sociopolitical and cultural contexts that inform qualitative methods teaching (particularly epistemological debates about narrating embodied, 'messy' research encounters) shape how students represent qualitative research in a visual form. Using empirical vignettes derived from a ArcGIS Story Map assessment at a UK tertiary institution, this paper frames story-mapping technologies as a more-than-visual form of research representation. We argue that the decisions faced by students about how to present ('can I show ethics in a picture?'), order ('I can't show that video here'), and reflect on methodological rigour ('Is it still valid data if I type-up my journal?'), stimulates important learning opportunities. Subsequently, the article is not just intended to 'make-a-case' for such technology, but also to raise important questions about the digital visualities of qualitative research representation for geographical education.

This study provides a commentary of the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 as a theoretical (as well as empirical) event. Drawing on the ideas of Alain Badiou, it represents the earthquakes and their aftershocks as a rupturing of the established order of things; a distinctive space in which fidelity to the event has the potential to unleash new beginnings and imaginations. Qualitative research by the authors with older people and third sector organisations in Christchurch provides initial evidence of the mundane encounters with the truth of the event, and of the fostering of alternative subjectivities and creative participatory practices that arise in fidelity to the event.

This article explores emergent spaces of social and political experimentation after the Canterbury, New Zealand, earthquakes of 2010–2011. Acknowledging that disasters generate distinctive spaces which reveal and provoke potentially disruptive imaginations and actions, I explore how the earthquakes gave rise to political experiments through which uncertainties were sensed, ordered and negotiated in the hopeful enactment of both conservative and radically alternative futures. Namely, I argue that the ruptures afforded by the earthquakes opened up the possibility for the dominant practices of a complex political conservatism in Christchurch to be challenged through the emergence of new and previously restrained claims to the city that have manifested, in part, through an emergent community organisation – the Canterbury Communities' Earthquake Recovery Network (CanCERN). Despite the earthquakes fuelling these repressed claims, this article explores the ways that these visions, claims and disquiets were shaped by evolving understandings of the nature and potential of the earthquake event. Analysis of CanCERN's activity reveals a kind of agile social entrepreneurship that remained alert to the opening and closing spaces of possibility within the disaster recovery landscape. Subsequently, this account works to not only draw attention to the discordant temporalities of possibility post-disaster, but also opens up discussion about the ways in which post-disaster experiments are shaped by unfolding senses of geological agency and indeterminacy.

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