For many people in many contexts, maps have long been tools of oppression. Maps are powerful, and never truly neutral.

Every map is an ontological assertion, staking a representational claim to and authority over some level of reality.
Every map privileges some things and excludes many things. This privileging and exclusion shapes perception and controls narratives.
A preponderance of maps have historically been intended and used for domination, exploitation, extraction.
A preponderance of maps have historically justified and empowered all manner of horror.

Related Topics

Social System Mapping aims to redress that abusive use of maps. What gives maps their power is their ability to reflect, amplify, and impose the beliefs of the human-created systems they emerged within. Which means that if we want to make maps that support transformation, we have to transform the beliefs that drive our making of them. And that requires a radical disruption of this seemingly innocent activity. Starting with ourselves.

As Social System Mappers we recognize that impact starts with us.

Knowing that who we are and how we show up impacts everything around us, including the maps we create, we strive to practice - to the best of our ability in any given moment - living into the shift that Social System Mapping was developed to support.

Thus we're never mapping in isolation from any/many of these interconnected practices:

Re-connecting humanity with our Mother Earth and all beings
Decolonization (both literal and metaphorical)
Network weaving and community building
Ecological healing and regeneration.
Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Justice and Belonging.
Trauma-informed convening and relational healing.
Liberatory/participatory convening processes.
Advancing our understanding of systems and our capacity for dealing with complexity - such as Adaptive Action, Pattern Spotting and SenseMaking.
Evolving consciousness.
More equitable and generative economic models and practices.
Working to resolve intentional and/or unconscious patterns related to dominance, colonization, all forms of supremacy, extraction, exploitation - fractal-ly - from the intimate scale of one-on-one interactions, zoomed all the way out to global systems.
Supporting, exploring, and helping to develop wiser forms of governance, deep democracy, power-sharing, and subsidiarity.

These practices necessarily inform our mapping intentions, processes, communications, implementation, embedding/engagement, and ongoing sense-making.Weaving them together strengthens the relationship between social/environmental movement approaches and systems-thinking/complexity approaches that we believe is so crucial to transformation.