In recent years, neoliberal government policies relating to higher education have diminished universities as spaces of learning and encounter with difference. This article discusses a teaching project that occurred on social work qualifying programmes in two universities in Britain and Spain. The project aimed to produce new opportunities for students to encounter and critically reflect on how power relations are produced and maintained in social work practice, by engaging students in mapping the atmospheres of stigmatised urban spaces. Students used counter-mapping techniques, which aim to make visible power relations and inequalities, in order to critically reflect on their experiences of and practices in such spaces. The article evaluates data in the form of students’ cartographies and narratives, and educators’ photographs and reflections on teaching, arguing for the benefits of moving teaching outside of the classroom and engaging with the material, sensed realities of places where social workers work. The article builds on recent conceptualisations of atmosphere and space in social work literature, contributes to discussions of critical reflection and critical pedagogy in social work and provides examples of the use of counter-mapping as a pedagogical tool in higher education contexts.

Counter-mapping has become central to a wide array of spatial practices across activist, artistic, and academic spaces. This article reconceptualises counter-mapping for a broad audience interested in understanding what counter-mapping is and what it can achieve in theory and practice. It outlines a relational framework that moves beyond participation, engaging with debates in digital geographies, decolonial mapping, and radical cartographies. While rooted in action research and conservation studies, counter-mapping has developed critical and creative strands that expand its scope and relevance. Drawing on examples from around the world, we identify participation, pedagogy, and creativity as key themes, positioning counter-mapping as a dynamic, ethically grounded practice with increasing applications across geographic research and praxis.

Theoretical knowledge taught in the classroom forms the bulk of lectures in Initial Teacher Training today. Persuaded that knowledge constructed in the community ought to permeate Teacher Training, Zeichner has developed the notion of Hybrid Space – a space for reflection, training and educational improvement where the background of academic/professional knowledge merges to create new learning opportunities, and where the voices of all participants emerge inclusively. Drawing on but also nuancing Zeichner’s Hybrid Space, this paper examines how (1) incorporating working with (in, about, through) contemporary art into our teaching, and (2) putting this pedagogical approach into play by means of situated learning contexts that work with and in the community offers the opportunity to create an innovative teaching approach. This innovation takes the form of transdisciplinary and nomadic learning inputs that operate within an in‐between space and result in unique and unrepeatable learning experiences for all the participants involved.