Service-learning has been mobilised in higher education in response to needs for deeper civic engagement and social responsibility, including concerns about democratic participation, social exclusion, and environmental challenges (Bringle & Hatcher, 1996; Mitchell, 2008). While valued, initiatives often start after key epistemic and ethical decisions are already settled: community needs are predefined, agendas externally framed, and participation oriented toward action rather than inquiry (Mitchell, 2015; Gordon, Elwood & Mitchell, 2016). Despite growing critical attention, service-learning has been critiqued for limited engagement with how voices, silences, and exclusions are epistemically and ethically configured (Fine & Torre, 2019).

Participatory mapping, where community members contribute experiences, relationships, and ideas about place to a map (Gordon, Elwood & Mitchell, 2016; Cochrane & Corbett, 2018), has been adopted in service-learning, community geography, and participatory research to address these limitations. Yet it is often used instrumentally as a technical or evaluative tool, assuming participation automatically yields visibility, empowerment, or voice (Mann & Casebeer, 2016). Critical community geography instead frames mapping as a relational, political practice through which knowledge, space, and power are negotiated. Even so, the epistemic and ethical labour that configures voice, silence, and authority remains undertheorised. We approach participatory mapping as a social justice practice that surfaces and negotiates power asymmetries in who gets to speak, be heard, and be represented

This study argues that participatory mapping, when used as the initial moment of service-learning, can function not as a representational tool but as an epistemic and ethical infrastructure through which what can be said, known, withheld, and acted upon is actively negotiated. Drawing on critical participatory mapping scholarship and affective, posthuman approaches to citizenship and education ( Zembylas, 2022), the study starts from the premise that voices do not simply pre-exist participation, and that silence, absence, and refusal are not methodological failures but meaningful outcomes of engagement. While critical service-learning has productively foregrounded power, positionality, and voice (Mitchell, 2015; Fine & Torre, 2019), it has paid less attention to the early epistemic infrastructures through which participation itself becomes structured, before relationships, agendas, and actions are co-formed.

Situated within an UNITA Alliance-funded transnational collaboration, the project brings together six partner universities in Romania, Italy, Portugal, and Spain to examine how service-learning can foster inclusive communities and democratic education under conditions of social and environmental injustice. Framed by ethics of care, critical pedagogy and restorative approaches, the collaboration treats community-engaged learning as an epistemologically inclusive practice that can enable the emergence of historically silenced narratives and contested memories. This study reports on participatory mapping as one initial practice through which listening is negotiated across diverse European sites  (Stake, 2006; Flyvbjerg, 2011).

The central research question guiding the study is: How does participatory mapping, when it structures the initial conditions of service-learning, function as an epistemic and ethical practice through which voices and silences are configured, agenda-setting is negotiated, and responsibility and action are prefigured?

Empirically, we examine how early mapping practices shape what becomes representable and how silences or refusals are interpreted. Analytically, we examine how epistemic authority is enacted across participants and how these initial configurations prefigure later engagement and responsibility (Fricker, 2007; Butin, 2010; Zembylas, 2022).

Conceptually, the project focuses on how participation and knowledge are configured, rather than on mapped content or measurable outcomes (Saija et al., 2017). This enables comparative analysis across European contexts while resisting instrumental, outcome-driven accounts of service-learning (Mitchell, 2015; Fine & Torre, 2019). By foregrounding how participatory mapping configures voice, silence, and epistemic authority before action begins, the project repositions service-learning from a pedagogy of action to a practice of collective sense-making, ethical judgement, and epistemic restraint.

This study adopts a comparative qualitative design to examine uses of participatory mapping in service-learning across contexts. We analyse how the same analytical and ethical framework travels across settings, shaping configurations of participation, voice, silence, and epistemic authority in culturally and linguistically situated environments, where norms of “appropriate” participation and credibility differ. In line with comparative case study approaches that prioritise context-dependence over generalisation (Stake, 2006; Flyvbjerg, 2006), we attend to how these configurations become patterned by power differentials and diverse identities, including language and nationality. Participants include students, academic staff, and established community partners, reflecting common institutional arrangements in service-learning (Bringle & Hatcher, 1996). Community members, however, are not predefined as participants; participation is treated as emergent and situational, arising through the mapping process itself. Engagement may take multiple forms—conversation, storytelling, walking, observation, or refusal—with absence and silence recognised as analytically and ethically meaningful rather than methodological limitations. This aligns with critical scholarship on voice and participation, which cautions against equating participation with speaking and underscores the ethical significance of silence and partial presence (Mazzei & Jackson, 2012; Spyrou, 2011; Zembylas, 2022). Participatory mapping workshops are embedded within service-learning as inquiry-oriented, ethically reflexive practices (Gordon, Elwood, & Mitchell, 2016). They begin with preparatory discussions and a collective framing phase in which participants identify what is meaningful to explore, what should not be mapped, and how such decisions are made, foregrounding epistemic responsibility and restraint from the outset (McHugh et al., 2024). Mapping formats are jointly selected and enacted as dialogic practices, producing visual, narrative, and relational materials for collective interpretation and documentation (Saija et al., 2017; Mann & Casebeer, 2016). While topics and local interests vary across sites, each workshop follows the same design, enabling comparative analysis of how socio-institutional settings shape the epistemic and ethical configuration of participation. The research draws on qualitative data generated through participatory mapping processes, including mapping activities, focus group,photos, and facilitators’ field notes. A Participatory Mapping Reporting Template supports documentation across contexts without prescribing mapping content or outcomes. Analysis uses a reflexive thematic approach attentive to expressed meanings as well as silences, absences, and ethical limits (Braun & Clarke, 2021), examining how voice find places for expressions in different contexts (Mazzei, 2013; Zembylas, 2022).

The project is expected to clarify how participatory mapping, when used as the initial practice of service-learning, functions as an epistemic and ethical infrastructure that shapes the conditions under which participation, responsibility, and action become possible. By examining how epistemic negotiations and ethical boundaries take shape during early mapping activities, the study will show how decisions about what is made representable, what remains silent, and what is withheld orient subsequent service-learning processes. In this sense, silence, refusal, and non-representation are expected to emerge as integral to the configuration of epistemic authority and ethical responsibility. The study offers design principles for service-learning that support more just forms of listening, representation and responsibility (Mazzei & Jackson, 2012; Zembylas, 2022). The project further seeks to refine understandings of voice in participatory service-learning by moving beyond notions of voice as individual expression or verbal contribution. By attending to how voice emerges relationally through mapping practices, material arrangements, and negotiated limits of representation, the study aims to contribute to more ethically attuned approaches to listening in community-engaged learning (Spyrou, 2011; Mazzei, 2013). Through comparative analysis across national and institutional contexts, the project is expected to identify recurring tensions in how participation, knowledge, and responsibility are configured when participatory mapping initiates service-learning, without presuming equivalence between settings (Flyvbjerg, 2006; Stake, 2006). At the European level, the project will contribute to UNITA Alliance dialogue by offering a shared analytical vocabulary for examining power relations, language/culture, and silenced voices in service-learning and participatory mapping across contexts, informing the design of a BIP on socially just and ethically reflexive community-engaged learning.

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