This paper intends to entangle the concepts of life line and immersive cartography from a performative research paradigm with the aim to create new knowledge in a research project about how university students learn  [anonymised].  

Life lines, also called life maps (Worth, 2011), graphic life map (Kesby 2000; Kesby et al. 2005), life-line (Brott, 2001) or timeline (Adriansen, 2012) are considered a methodological strategy to generate biographical evidence through visual representations. Focusing on their formal sense, Frank Guerra Reyes (2019) defines them as "a diagram that shows events that have occurred throughout the biographical history of a human being" (p. 24). This implies that lifelines collect events, occurrences, situations, experiences or feelings of a person in chronological order, and may include, subsequently or simultaneously, interpretations of the events described (Gramling and Carr, 2004). In this sense, lifelines are considered a suitable tool to strengthen the analysis of subjective experiences (Guzmán-Benavente et al. 2022). All of the above links the lifelines to the social sciences' aim of "understanding social phenomena from the actors' own perspective" (Guzmán-Benavente et al., 2022, p. 2), for which it is necessary to inquire into the ways in which they experience the world. The lifelines strategy contributes to this by favouring the narration and analysis of subjective experiences. 

This reporting takes place through the graphic re-enactment and accompanying conversations carried out by university students in the context of the research project  [anonymised]. [anonymised]’s onto-epistemological approach is grounded on a relational and performative ethic (Geerts and Carstens, 2019). This position implies considering the "Other" as a 'being in becoming' who is a bearer of knowledge and experiences. In the research, participants can show themselves as becoming subjects in their relationships with learning and knowledge.

In some moments of the research, lifelines connected us with cartography. In recent decades, there has been an increasing interest to work with cartographies in research (e.g. Ruitenberg, 2007; Semetsky, 2013; Ulmer and Koro-Ljungberg, 2015). We understand cartography as research spaces (Hernández-Hernández et al., 2018), a place in which ‘cartographers’ take decisions (Onsès, 2014), a non-neutral territory that creates reality in the same act of cartographing. Cartography challenges us, invites us to think differently about learning and allows us to investigate the multiplicity of worlds intra-acting in a certain encounter to create new knowledge (Onsès-Segarra et al., 2020). In this line, Rousell (2021) introduces the concept of immersive cartography, in which “the qualitative is associated with transversal and transindividual movements of experience within an ecology of immanent forces and felt relations, rather than with any bounded entity” (p. xxviii). 

This way to understand cartography in research has many points in common with the performative research paradigm. Trying to entangle post qualitative inquiry and artistic research, according to Ostern et al. (2021), this paradigm includes the following perspectives: “Research is understood as creation . . . The researcher is de-centered and in-becoming throughout the research process . . . The research can be produced, analysed and presented in and through several different modes and materialities for creation” (p.2). In a way that in this paradigm research is understood as “an entangled relation between researcher, researcher phenomenon and the world” (Ostern et al., 2021, p. 7), reality is not represented in research, but created (Ostern et al., 2021). Taking into account all this, we look for different ways to approach the lifelines students produced during the  [anonymised] project. For this paper, we focus on an experimental analysis based on creating an immersive cartography of lifelines and sharing which ‘new knowledge’ was created.

In the [anonymised] research on how young university students learn, we conducted four individual meetings with 50 young university students using a collaborative approach (Hernández-Hernández, 2017). In these encounters we invited them to: 1) dialogue with what the research says about young people's attitudes and make an approach to how and where they learn; 2) make a visual narrative of their learning trajectory in which they give an account of their learning movements (Jornet & Estard, 2018) over time and in different scenarios; 3) make a learning diary that allows them to situate their learning experiences and meanings; and, 4) collaboratively construct the narrative of their learning life trajectory. In the second meeting, we talked about what they brought to account for their learning trajectory. This account has both a sense of trigger and onto-epistemological value and acts as a relational space that allows for multiple perspectives, conceptions, experiences and ways of understanding young people's learning, including dissonant and conflicting movements. As Jornet and Erstad (2018) point out, this methodological approach allows us to appreciate their conceptions, strategies, use of technologies and contexts associated with learning scenes. For the analysis of the learning lifelines, the intra-action (Barad, 2007, p. 141) of the narrative interview and the visual referent must be taken into account. This implies that different strategies can be adopted to analyse this relationship. In this paper,we take the perspective of immersive cartography (Rousell, 2021), which emphasises the transformations and movements of the students and researchers, taking into account that the encounters promoted by Tray-ap are 'situated conversations'. Thus, we create a map that doesn't “really have an image or a form, but more of a sense or feeling of elements in motion” (Rousell, 2021, p. 1). A cartography that allows us to connect and entangle students’ learning life lines and move-with- and-through the dynamic milieus of their and ours life-living (Rousell, 2021). To carry out this cartographical analysis, we use not only students’ learning life lines, but also the transcriptions of the conversations that accompanied those encounters. In addition, the immersive cartography maps the researchers’ sensations and thoughts in the moment to produce the cartography, as well as the movements, milieus and intensities with the aim to explore which knowledge is created differently than using other types of analysis.

Bringing this mode of 'analysis' to 3 of the learning lines has allowed us to consider that: a) the lifelines are not evidence for the research but constitute the research itself. b) they do not represent a path that has been taken or something that has already happened but are a strategy that makes it possible to continue along the path. c) they do not represent connections but create connections. d) that it does not recapitulate moments of the past, but outlines scenes of the present, which will be different tomorrow. e) that they are not objects drawn by a subject but a proposal of human and non-human agencies that generate joint materiality and that questions the representational function of the lines of learning. Approaching learning lines as immersive cartography enables us to focus on the lines, textures and layers that are generated in the encounters. It is not a matter of deciphering representations, but of accounting for what learning lines 'do', and what the action of the learning lifeline 'does'. This involves activating a new-materialist approach.

Adriansen, H.K. (2012). Timeline interviews: A tool for conducting life history research. Qualitative Studies, 3(1), 40-55. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Geerts, E., Carstens, D. (2019). Ethico-onto-epistemology. Philosophy Today, 63(4), 915-925. Gramling, L. F., & Carr, R. L. (2004). Lifelines. A Life History Methodology. Nursing Research, 53(3), 207-210. Guerra Reyes, F. (2019). La línea de vida: una técnica de recolección de datos cualitativa. Ecos de la Academia, 10(5), 21-29. Guzmán Benavente, M. del R., Reynoso Vargas, K. M., Gurrola Domínguez, P. B., Maldonado Rivera, C. F. y Linares Olivas, O. L. (2022). La línea de vida como recurso metodológico. Dos ejemplos en el contexto universitario. Revista Latinoamericana de Metodología de las Ciencias Sociales, 12(1), e105. Hernández-Hernández, F. (Coord.). (2017). ¡Y luego dicen que la escuela pública no funciona! Investigar con los jóvenes sobre cómo transitan y aprenden dentro y fuera de los centros de Secundaria. Editorial Octaedro. Hernández-Hernández, F.; Sancho-Gil, J. M.; Domingo-Coscollola, M. (2018). Cartographies as spaces of inquiry to explore of teacher’s nomadic learning trajectories. Digital Education Review, 33, 105–119. Jornet, A., y Erstad, O. (2018). From learning contexts to learning lives: Studying learning (dis)continuities from the perspective of the learners. Digital Education Review, 33, 1-25. Onsès, J. (2014). La cartografia com a eina pedagògica i sistema de representació ». In: Selvas, S.; Carrasco, M. (eds.). Inter-Accions. Pràctiques col·lectives per a intervencions a l’espai urbà Reflexions d’artistes i arquitectes en un context pedagògic col·lectiu (pp. 43-50). Iniciativa Digital Politècnica. Oficina de Publicacions Acadèmiques Digitals de la UPC. Onsès-Segarra, J., Castro-Varela, A., and Domingo-Coscollola, M. (2020). Sentidos de las cartografías. In: Hernández-Hernández, F., Aberasturi, E., Sancho-Gil, J.M., and Correa-Gorospe, J.M. (Eds.), ¿Cómo aprenden los docentes? Tránsitos entre cartografías, experiencias, corporeidades y afectos (pp. 61-70). Octaedro, S. L. Rousell, D. (2021). Immersive Cartography and Post-Qualitative Inquiry. A Speculative Adventure in Research-Creation. Routledge. Semetsky, I. (2013). Learning with Bodymind. Constructing the Cartographies of the Unthought. In: Masny, D. (ed.). Cartographies of Becoming in Education: A Deleuze-Guattari Perspective (pp. 77-92). Sense Publisher. Ulmer, J. B.; Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2015). Writing Visually Through (Methodological) Events and Cartography. Qualitative Inquiry, 21( 2), 138-152. doi: 10.1177/1077800414542706 Worth, N. (2011) Evaluating life maps as a versatile method for life course geographies’ Area 43(4), 405-412.