Associate Professor of Geography
My
work intersects critical GIS, and urban and political geography.
I study the social and political impacts of spatial technologies such
as GIS, and the changing practices and politics of local activism,
community organizing, and other modes of civic engagement.
My current research focuses on emerging ‘not quite GIS’
technologies – an ever-expanding range of interactive web-based
technologies that enabling collection, compilation, mapping, and
dissemination of spatial data by vast numbers of people. With
colleagues at UC-Santa Barbara and Ohio State University, I am working
on an NSF-funded project studying these new forms of ‘volunteered
geographic information’, examining their content and
characteristics, methodologies for working with these data, and the
social and political practices in which they are implicated.
Katharyne Mitchell and I, with support from the National Geographic
Education Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, are examining the role
that interactive geovisualization technologies might play in fostering
collaborative learning, critical thinking and civic engagement among
young teens.
