During a six-month, cross-continental study I examined how adolescents used popular culture to renegotiate identity for themselves while they were simultaneously categorized with particular age-defined identities according to their uses of popular culture. Using rhizomatic cartography, a form of spatial analysis, I attended to the ways that adolescents use popular culture to accept identities and to push against being categorized with these very same identities they attempt to take on.
Built off the concept of a rhizome, rhizomatic cartography works as a figuration of a rhizome, which differs from using a rhizome as a metaphor. Rhizomatic cartography is an analysis perhaps best described as one of coming and going, offshoots and new directions. By definition, rhizomes constantly shift ande change, growing simultaneously in all directions.
Learning Change 