How mappable are some key concepts in GCE, like empathy, solidarity, agency, justice, or responsibility?

What does it mean to put them on a map?

Not: Where is this concept located?

but rather: What does the map invite us to do to concepts?

We use the map not becuase GCE concepts are naturally geographic. We are using it because the word global easily pushes us toward territorial and geographical imaginaries, often without us noticing. We use a map because it helps us notice how we imagine the world when we think about GCE.

Your task is not only to place concepts, but also to think about how the map organizes our meaning on concepts in GCE.

A: Legend
After experimenting with placing the words on the map, create a legend. Decide how you will classify the concepts visually, by looking at our list. For example, you might distinguish between values, problems, relations, actors, or responsibilities. Then use your legend to organize the map. Use the connection option.

While working, keep these questions in mind:

• Why am I placing this concept here?

• What does the map make visible?

• What does this way of mapping hide, simplify, or leave out?

• What kind of world does this map suggest?

Mapping Global Citizenship Education

In this activity, we use cartographic formatting not only as a visual support, but as a structuring device. Maps, continents, borders, legends, and territories do not simply display ideas. They organize them through location, classification, separation, and scale. In this sense, mapping helps us explore the different ways in which the world can be formatted when we think about Global Citizenship Education (GCE).

We use the map not simply to locate concepts, but to reflect on what happens when ideas in Global Citizenship Education are organized geographically. Because the term “global” often invites us to think in terms of territories, continents, borders, and world regions, the map becomes a useful device for examining and questioning these assumptions. It allows us to explore how spatial formats shape the way we understand global issues, connections, responsibilities, and differences.

What can a map do?

A map requires location
A map asks us to decide where something is. With GCE concepts, this is immediately interpretive. It shows us that concepts are not only definitions; they become attached to places, issues, and relations through acts of judgment.

A map creates boundaries
Even when they are not discussed directly, maps divide space into units: countries, regions, centres, margins, inside, outside. This allows us to ask what happens when GCE concepts are imagined through bounded territories. Does this reinforce national thinking? Does it hide flows, entanglements, and dependencies?

A map distributes visibility
Some places become marked, while others remain empty. Empty space on a map is never simply empty; it can suggest neglect, irrelevance, ignorance, or invisibility. This can open a conversation about whose suffering, agency, or responsibility becomes visible in GCE, and whose does not.

A map suggests scale
A map makes us move between the local, national, regional, and global. This is especially important in GCE, because many issues travel across scales. A map allows us to ask whether a concept appears as a local experience, a global structure, or both.

A map implies relation
Even if we only pin isolated words, the visual field invites connections, proximities, clusters, routes, and distances. A map is never just a container. It tends to become relational. This helps us think about interdependence, unevenness, and connection.

A map stabilizes
A map gives temporary form to something fluid. It does not simply represent thinking; it organizes it. It turns dispersed ideas into a readable surface. This means that, when we map, we are not only expressing ideas but also formatting them.

A map can naturalize
Once something is placed on a map, it can begin to look obvious, as if it naturally belongs there. For this reason, we need to remember that maps are always constructed, selective, and political.

Nu e suficient să ai un pașaport în buzunar; trebuie să te implici. 

Economic Citizenship

Ideea că suntem cetățeni în primul rând pentru că muncim, cumpărăm și mișcăm banii. 

Social Cohesion

Să ne înțelegem unii cu alții chiar dacă suntem super diferiți. 

European Higher Education Area

Facultatea nu mai e doar despre țara ta; e despre diplome recunoscute peste tot și schimburi de experiență (ca Erasmus). 

Individualism

Tendința de a pune totul pe umerii tăi: "Tu trebuie să fii responsabil, tu trebuie să reciclezi, tu trebuie să ajuți". 

1. Belonging, identity, recognition

• Feeling out of place — in a new country, city, or school

• Being the "only one" in a room — language, ethnicity, religion, class

• Navigating multiple cultural identities

• Code-switching — changing how you speak depending on who is listening

• Losing or reclaiming a mother tongue

• Names that get mispronounced, shortened, or changed

2. Inequality and access

• First in your family to go to university

• Hidden costs of "free" education — books, transport, internet, time

• Urban vs. rural opportunities growing up

• Health care your family could or couldn't afford

• Knowing someone who didn't get the help they needed

3. Gender, body, expectations

• Expectations about what girls or boys "should" do

• Carrying family responsibilities at a young age

• Being looked at, judged, or silenced

• Mental health — what gets named and what stays hidden

• Body, illness, or disability as part of identity

4. Migration, mobility, displacement

• Family members who left for work abroad

• Growing up between two places

• Being a guest, a newcomer, a returnee

• Documents, borders, paperwork that shape life choices

• Languages learned out of necessity

5. Environment and the everyday

• A place from childhood that no longer exists or has changed

• Water, heat, food — things you only notice when they're missing

• Climate anxiety, or its absence

• What your community throws away, and what it keeps

6. Voice, participation, power

• A moment when you were not listened to

• A moment when you spoke up — or chose not to

• Trust (or distrust) in institutions — school, police, hospital, city hall

• Knowing your rights vs. being able to use them

• Working without being seen as a worker

7. Generations and inheritance

• Stories your grandparents told (or didn't tell)

• Silences in family history

• What you want to pass on, what you want to leave behind

• Conflict, war, or crisis as part of family memory