BCS Conference 2023 - The Cartography of the cost-of-living crisis and other worries

By the spring of 2022, the Ipsos Survey of Global Opinions had identified the cost-of-living crisis as the most pressing issue facing people across the globe. It carried on trumping their next highest concerns throughout 2022 and presumably 2023 as well (in January 2023 it remained the main global concern). Within the UK it was also an issue of high concern, but different social groups and areas were affected in different ways. This talk considers how newspapers and magazines, academics and policymakers depicted that crisis in map and other graphical forms in late 2022 through to the summer of 2023. It also considers the other issues that concerned people the most in the world at this time. After cost-of living, the top issues of worry worldwide were in January 2023: poverty and social inequality; unemployment; crime and violence; and financial/political corruption. Interestingly, climate change only ranked eighth, but often appears graphed and mapped.
How does modern popular cartography deal with an issue that is not easy to map, but where the effects differ between areas within a country and between countries as well? What were the main messages being conveyed and how well was this done? Finally, what does this most recent episode tell us about the state of contemporary popular cartography in the popular press? Can we map wars and droughts, but not the less visible?
Bio: Danny Dorling is a professor in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. He was previously a professor for a decade at the University of Sheffield, and before then a professor at the University of Leeds. In 2020 he published Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration - and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives and in 2021, jointly with Annika Koljonen: Finntopia: what we can learn from the world’s happiest country. In September 2023 his book Shattered Nation: Inequality, and the geography of a failing state is published, and he is working on a new book which this talk is partly about.Danny is a patron of the road crash charity RoadPeace, and in his spare time he makes sandcastles. He was a former Honorary President of the Society of Cartographers, and has published several social atlases.