Living with hazard: a participatory and critical GIS approach to integrating local knowledge with scientific data to visualise spatial narratives of Panabaj, Guatemala

Abstract

Visuals elicit powerful emotional responses, influence decision-making, and communicate stories and narratives. However, there is a paucity of cartographic narratives that explore the geographic nature of stories from the voices of underprivileged and marginalised stakeholders. Therefore, this project employed GIS visualisation techniques with respectful participatory and critical GIS walking-based exercises to capture a sample of geospatial narratives from four local participant groups. It sought to enhance the perspective of Panabaj, an Indigenous town in Guatemala, beyond the primarily external portrayal of the town as a dangerous, uninhabitable area following a devastating landslide in 2005. The resulting StoryMap leveraged visual storytelling and cartographic principles such as colour, symbology, scale, interaction, 3D perspectives, accompanying text, and media to immerse users and visualise Panabaj’s community histories, feelings, experiences, mobility, dreams, and relationships in the same space as conventional scientific (hazard) data. Fieldwork was conducted in collaboration with Ixchel, an ongoing research project led out of The University of Edinburgh and Universidad del Valle de Guatemala. This project contributed to the objectives of their Territorio-Landscape work package.