Mapping the Contact Zone

How to contribute

If you wish to share a story, please follow the following steps:

Click on the map to select a location connected to your experience.
Fill in the short form with your nickname, story, and (optionally) an image and email address.
The email will not be made public. It will be kept securely in our system so that the TCZ team can contact you if we’d like to learn more about your contribution.
Submit your entry. Your pin will be reviewed by our admin before becoming public.
You can add names of places, cities, or streets directly on the map. (A search bar for specific places or coordinates may be added in future updates.)

In addition to sharing a story with our community, you can also explore and read the stories and through that give visibility to others’ voices; you could find a moment of reflection for your own experiences; or you could write them down privately for yourself.

A Contact Zone is a social and cultural space where diverse and often conflicting perspectives, experiences, and histories come into contact, co-exist, and are negotiated.

The “Mapping the Contact Zone” interactive map invites you to reflect on moments in your own life where you have experienced such encounters – times of dialogue, difference, or transformation through meeting others. By sharing your story, you help visualize how contact zones appear in everyday life, across cultures, and within communities.

This map is part of the Training for the Contact Zone (TCZ) project, an Erasmus+ initiative co-funded by the European Union. TCZ develops training programs that help cultural practitioners, educators, and activists learn to facilitate Contact Zones.

Your contribution adds to this shared learning process, showing how Contact Zones can emerge anywhere – in families, classrooms, workplaces, or public life – wherever people meet across lines of difference and create new understandings together.

Contributing Ethically and Safely

With the Mapping the Contact Zone map, we are committed to creating an ethical and safe digital environment where everyone can share their experiences with confidence. The following principles guide how we collect, display, and protect your stories:

You may choose to contribute anonymously, without sharing your real name or contact details. Providing an email address is optional and is used only if we need to contact you regarding your contribution (for example, if you request its removal).
All submissions are reviewed before publication to ensure they respect others and do not contain harmful or discriminatory content. This moderation protects openness and care within our shared digital space.
By submitting a story, you confirm that you understand how it will appear on the map and agree for it to be displayed publicly. You can withdraw this consent at any time by contacting us.
If, at any point, you wish to retract or remove your contribution, please contact us at training@contactzone.eu using the subject line Story Removal Request. Your story will be removed promptly from both the website and our internal storage.
All stories remain the property of their authors. The project team will never reuse or publish contributions outside the Mapping the Contact Zone platform without explicit consent.
As part of an Erasmus+ project co-funded by the European Union, we are required to keep this website online for at least five years after the project’s completion. After that period, we may decide whether to continue, archive, or remove the site. Contributors who provided an email address will be notified of any such decision.

We are committed to treating all contributions with care, respect, and confidentiality, and to ensuring transparency and accessibility in how stories are collected, moderated, and stored. If you encounter any accessibility issues or need support, please contact us.