Affective maps of Hadrut: On methodology

Abstract

The article discusses the use of affective mapping as a method for studying memory, loss, and spatial imagination among displaced residents of the Hadrut district of Nagorno-Karabakh after the 2020 war. Conducted in Yerevan and Stepanakert in 2022, the study focuses not on analyzing interview data but on understanding the act of drawing as a form of remembering.Participants were invited to draw “their own Hadrut” - a subjective and emotionally charged image rather than a geographically precise one. The drawings were accompanied by storytelling, where the past intertwined with the present moment of narration and moving back and forth. This process revealed how bodily and emotional memories re-emerge through action, turning recollection into an embodied event.We conceptualize these maps as idiospaces - personal topographies of memory analogous to idiolects in language. Each map conveys an individual mode of belonging and a way to re-experience and rearticulate connection to a place that no longer exists materially. Affective mapping thus enables the reconstruction of the emotional geography of everyday life before displacement and illuminates how gesture, narration, and shared empathy shape social memory. As a humanistic and anthropological practice, affective cartography becomes a space where personal remembrance is transformed into a collective act of imaginative return and re-inhabitation of home.