Revisiting Critical GIS

In the spirit of a meeting held at Friday Harbor on October 17-20, 2014

Curating the AAG – Critical takes on technology, cartography, and spatial information

The AAG is a big conference and, with nearly 10,000 attendees, it’s easy to get lost. It’s also easy to find a specific track and stick to it, not realizing the wealth of alternative voices, visions, and research going on around you.

At the same time, coming out of our meeting at Friday Harbor Labs last October, we were left wanting to continue the conversation, to engage critically with geospatial technologies, and with spatial media/information in a variety of ways and with a variety of voices.

What follows is a guide to the AAG that points to sessions speaking to these ideas. Some sessions were directly organized out of our meeting (they bear the #CritGIS tag in their title), others volunteered to be included over listservs and public calls, still others we’re pointing out because they sound interesting. This isn’t a definitive list, nor a proscriptive one, it’s just one list of many, a map through a series of interesting conversations around the role of technology in our world.

So here goes…

Tuesday April 21, is the first day of the official meeting and features two sessions that come directly out of the Friday Harbor meeting.

Bright and early at 8:00 a.m. in the Bleacher Center (303 Classroom), is session 1187, #CritGIS: Pedagogies of Critical GIS. Organized by Alexander Tarr and LaDona Knigge, and featuring Matt Wilson, Ellen Kersten, Francis Harvey, and Clinton Davis, this session recognizes that “[w]hile there has never been one “right” way to teach GIS, with the recent proliferation of geospatial technologies, open source platforms, and web mapping tools, the question of how best to instruct students has become increasingly complicated, especially if our intention is to simultaneously engage students in critical questioning and practice.”

Later, at 2:40 p.m. also in the same place is session 1587, #CritGIS: Social Justice and GIS: Past, Present, and Future organized by Ellen Kersten with Jon Cinnamon as chair. It aims to “stimulate discussion about how social justice has been conceptualized, addressed, and enacted in this sub-field, and to explore the diverse ways that GIS influences, both positively and negatively, and is influenced by social justice movements.”

Between those two sessions, not directly associated with the Friday Harbor meeting, but highly relevant, Jeremy Crampton and Agnieszka Leszczynski have organized a panel discussion that asks, “Where’s the Value? Emerging Digital Economies of Geolocation.” It starts at 12:40 p.m. (in the same room again!) as our sessions and will feature Jeremy, Agnieszka, Rob Kitchin, Elvin Wyly, David Murakami Wood, Julie Cupples, and Sam Kinsley.

Wednesday April 22 similarly begins bright and early at 8:00 a.m. with a series of sessions organized by Craig Dalton, Ryan Burns, and Jim Thatcher on Critical Data and Critical Technology Studies. The first session, in Grand Suite 2 AB of the Hyatt East Tower, focuses on these ideas in praxis. At 10:00 a.m., the first of two sessions on Critical Data and Technology Studies in theory begins in the same room. The third in the series starts at 1:20 p.m.

Meanwhile, if Critical Data and Technology isn’t your cup of tea, Bandana Kar and Rina Ghose have organized a series of sessions called “Looking Backwards and Forwards in Participatory GIS” in the Stetson D room of the Hyatt West Tower at 8:00 a.m. These sessions similarly continue at 10:00 a.m. and wrap up in the 1:20 p.m. time slot.

By Thursday April 23, the conference is in full swing, and there continue to be multiple tracks of possible interest. First, Jeremy Crampton and Agnieszka Leszczynski have organized two on Spatial Big Data and Everyday Life (3150, 3250). Held back to back, they start at 8:00 a.m. in Crystal C of the Hyatt West Tower. Also at 8:00 a.m., in Stetson D of Hyatt West, Bandana Kar and Rina Ghose have organized a session called “Big Data - Perils and Promises.”

Stepping away from data (big or otherwise) for a moment, at 3:20 p.m. in Regency D of Hyatt West, there is the #CritGIS session On the Political Economy of Geospatial Technologies. Organized by Craig Dalton, Ryan Burns, and Jim Thatcher, this panel grows out of conversations held at Friday Harbor and considers “the degree to which political economies have shifted in the development of GIS since its proliferation in the mid- to late-1990s and thus borrows from debates in critical GIS. Further, the panel considers a political-economic framework to account for new forms of geographic technologies, including the geoweb.” Panelists include Jim, Craig, Laura Beltz Imaoka, Francis Harvey. The chair will be Eric Sheppard.

On Friday April 24, another full slate of sessions start bright and early at 8:00 a.m. Muki Haklay and Hilary Geoghegan have organized “Beyond motivation? Understanding enthusiasm in citizen science and volunteered geographic information” in the Lucerne 1 of the Swissotel.

Starting at 1:20 p.m., Alan McConchie and Muki Haklay have put together a pair of sessions on OpenStreetMap Studies held in Regency C of the Hyatt West Tower.

There are many, many other sessions of interest at the AAG. We’ve barely scratched the surface. To make our coverage a little more complete, below we’ve compiled a handy list including the sessions called out above, and others that look promising for one reason or another. In the spirit of Friday Harbor, we look forward to an exciting and varied meeting and hope that this document provides some orientation to the chaos of Chicago! See you there!

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY