Sarah A Elwood

University of Washington | UW · Department of Geography

My chapter makes a case for “emergence” as an epistemological reorientation in scholarship on digital urbanism that offers generative openings in our theoretical and analytic imaginaries, beyond deficit- and damage-centered frames. I explore the epistemological and political possibilities of emergence through a close reading of insurgent improvisat...

The generous responses to our intervention, Glitch epistemologies for computational cities, open onto knowing cities via glitches through an expanded attention to temporalities, subject/ivities, and power and politics in addition to our initial concern with urban spatialities. We respond to our interlocutors by engaging their responses as engenderi...

We analyze viewers' experiences and understandings of an installation of portraits featuring vendors who sell Seattle’s Real Change street newspaper. In doing so, we argue that Real Change is enacting a complex politics of refusal and explore this in relation to future political lives of Real Change activism. We explore political possibilities for...

This intervention advances glitches as epistemological vectors for apprehending and engaging the significance of digitally-mediated spatialities that appear nonperformative against normative scripts of urban computational paradigms. Drawing on two strands of contemporary thinking about glitches as systemic design features of digital systems and as...

Digitality is deeply implicated in sociospatial processes of exclusion, adverse incorporation, impoverishment and enrichment. Theorizing digital practices of life and thriving is politically and epistemologically urgent, and more robustly intersectional theory in digital geographies scholarship offers crucial pathways. I argue for theorizing digita...

This collection of essays extends cross‐disciplinary conversations between co‐authors that began as part of a podcast series by the Relational Poverty Network, “New Poverty Politics for Changing Times”. The authors engage impoverishment as a relation, as an outcome of intersecting political projects of racialised oppression, political‐economic inju...

This paper explores disruptive poverty politics arising from creative activisms that challenge homelessness/impoverishment. We analyze forms and potentials of creative activisms that challenge hegemonic meanings and practices around impoverishment. Bringing together geographers’ work on creative activisms, geographies of art, and the dialectics of...

At a moment when disciplinary attentions are turning to the digital as a subject and object of geographic inquiry, we consider enduring contours and new directions in feminist digital geographies scholarship. We revisit the centrality of feminist critiques of Science to critical digital geographies and their predecessors, identifying axes of schola...

In the context of geography's heterogeneous engagements with the visual, we present an experiment in doing radical intradisciplinarity in which we make a case for the possibilities of visual politics. Conducting cross-readings of maps and artwork, we explore how radical intradisciplinarity might enable us to explore a visual politics committed to s...

Relationality is a persistent concern of socio-spatial theory, increasingly invoked in geographical scholarship. We bring geographical scholarship on relationality to bear on relational poverty studies, an emergent body of work that challenges mainstream approaches to conceptualizing, explaining, researching and acting upon poverty. We argue that r...

This forum examines a range of grounded struggles over efforts to materialize elements of a ‘postneoliberal’ agenda by social and political movements of the 2000s. Drawing from their research in Latin America and South Africa, the contributors ask when, where and why these experiments in realizing postneoliberalisms have prompted durable transforma...

As digital technologies become ubiquitous in many places, scholars of civic engagement, youth and political life, and geographic education have explored the potential of teaching critical and spatial thinking through digital technologies. This paper examines interactive digital mapping as a technology environment for teaching and practicing critica...

This study underscores the importance of place in the political formation of young people. In the research project, students from a middle school in Seattle were asked to map significant historical sites associated with women or an ethnic group in the city. The 29 seventh graders worked in teams and collaborated extensively on each of the mapping p...

We investigate middle-class poverty politics in Seattle and Buenos Aires in a period of recovery from deep neoliberal economic crisis. Reading these cases in relation to one another allows us to examine what sorts of class subjects emerge in the US, which is theorized as remaining deeply entrenched in neoliberal governance and Argentina, conceptual...

New social and spatial media and other modes of pervasive computing are altering ways of knowing, remembering, and engaging across time and space. This collection explores how the digital, interactive, and collaborative nature of these technologies contributes to transformations in the nature of knowledge and memory. In particular, the contribution...

In a context of rising inequality and economic vulnerability in the United States, we explore links between class identities, urban place-making, and poverty politics. We ask how class difference and poverty politics are made and remade in neighborhood-level place-making and with what implications for boundaries and alliances between middle-class a...

Critical GIS emphasized the ways in which social, political, and economic inequalities are (re)produced through spatial information technologies and attendant practices. In the mid-1990s through the early 2000s, feminist interventions challenged the presumed gender neutrality and universality of GIS and brought gender to the fore of Critical GIS co...

Our paper focuses on moments and spaces of encounter in which middle class people come into contact with “poor others”. Much critical poverty work focuses on the re-inscription of difference across class, race and gender lines. We explore where, when and how middle class actors engage with “poor others” in ways that (sometimes) lead to shifts in ne...

Neogeography - the use of interactive online mapping technologies, often by laypersons or grassroots groups - continues its rapid growth, as do debates about its implications for spatial data and map quality, public spatial literacy, and the digital divide. Ongoing efforts to understand whether and how neogeography might enable the participation, i...

New spatial media – the informational artefacts and mediating technologies of the geoweb – represent new opportunities for activist, civic, grassroots, indigenous and other groups to leverage web‐based geographic information technologies in their efforts to effect social change. Drawing upon evidence from an inductive analysis of five online initia...

A key objective of the paper is to rejuvenate our understanding of time. The focus is on how the knowledge and memories of times past are transmitted collectively and intergenerationally, and why this is important for children's political formation. The objective is pursued through a short philosophical discussion of time, memory and forgetting, dr...

The phenomenon of volunteered geographic information is part of a profound transformation on how geographic data, information, and Knowledge are produced and circulated. This chapter begins by situating this transition within the broader context of an exaflood of digital data growth. It considers the implications of VGI and the exaflood for further...

The phenomenon of volunteered geographic information is part of a profound transformation in how geographic data, information, and knowledge are produced and circulated. By situating volunteered geographic information (VGI) in the context of big-data deluge and the data-intensive inquiry, the 20 chapters in this book explore both the theories and a...

Reflecting wider debates in the discipline, recent scholarship in children's geographies has focused attention on the meanings of the political. While supportive of work that opens up new avenues for conceptualizing politics beyond the liberal rational subject, we provide a critique of research methods which delink politics from historical context...

This article argues that the integration of local history and geography through collaborative digital mapping can lead to greater interest in civic participation by early adolescent learners. In the study, twenty-nine middle school students were asked to research, represent, and discuss local urban sites of historical significance on an interactive...

The convergence of newly interactive Web-based technologies with growing practices of user-generated content disseminated on the Internet is generating a remarkable new form of geographic information. Citizens are using handheld devices to collect geographic information and contribute it to crowd-sourced data sets, using Web-based mapping interface...

This study highlights the power of place, and reconceptualizes geography education as integral to the larger project of teaching for democratic citizenship. Using an interactive web platform, the researchers asked 29 seventh grade girls to research and map significant cultural and historical places associated with an ethnic group, or women, in the...

This article confronts a persistent challenge in research on children's geographies and politics: the difficulty of recognizing forms of political agency and practice that by definition fall outside of existing political theory. Children are effectively "always already" positioned outside most of the structures and ideals of modernist democratic th...

This concluding chapter reflects on some of the core themes that crosscut the contributed chapters, and further outlines some of the stimulating and significant relationships between volunteered geographic information (VGI) and the discipline of geography. We argue that future progress in VGI research depends in large part on building strong linkag...

This articles examines the local variability of public participation GIS (PPGIS) by urban community revitalization organizations, arguing that this variability is in part shaped by a variety of organizational factors. Existing research has shown PPGIS production to be highly context dependent, identifying an ever-growing set of key elements of this...

Blogging, social networking, and other Web 2.0 practices have sparked widespread debate about the status and future of privacy. This paper examines an explicitly geographical aspect of Web 2.0 with respect to these debates: the geospatial web, or ‘geoweb’. As part of fundamental shifts in the kinds of geographic information available, its circulati...

This review examines emerging research on the geoweb, particularly recent efforts to assess the social, political and disciplinary shifts associated with it. The rise of the geoweb is associated with shifts in the processes and power relations of spatial data creation and use, reconfigurations in previously bounded disciplinary knowledge sets, and...

This review considers two recent trajectories of research on the geospatial web: efforts to develop appropriate methodologies for working with the new forms of geographic information that are part of it, and studies of its cultural, social, and political significance. In both arenas, visualization and visual methods are central. I show how methodol...

Abstract A number of approaches for integrating GIS and qualitative research have emerged in recent years, as part of a resurgence of interest in mixed methods research in geography. These efforts to integrate qualitative data and qualitative analysis techniques complement a longstanding focus in GIScience upon ways of handling qualitative forms of...

Public participation geographic information system (PPGIS) is an approach to GIS application that emphasizes grassroots participation in spatial data development, analysis, and application; empowerment of traditionally marginalized social groups through self-directed use of spatial data and technologies, and adaptation of existing GIS software and...

Over the past decade or more, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been re-imagined and reconfigured through critical GIS research and practice, as scholars and activist have sought new ways of engaging GIS beyond its characterization in the 1990s as a rationalist and rationalizing tool. Where many existing discussions of the contributions of...

This paper explores some of the unique opportunities and challenges of integrating participatory action research into undergraduate GIS courses, drawing evidence from two undergraduate courses that contributed to a long-term participatory action research project. The author shows that incorporating participatory action research in undergraduate GIS...

This paper provides an introduction to this symposium issue on participatory action research in geographic teaching, learning and research. It introduces the themes of the symposium and contributions from the participating authors, and also offers additional discussion of the attendant benefits and challenges of using participatory action research...

The title of this volume may, for some readers, suggest contradiction, incongruity, or juxtaposition. From its inception, this project has been met with some measure of all three, and with several persistent questions. Why qualitative GIS? Why a mixed methods approach? Why not just ‘mixed methods GIS’? What is ‘qualitative’ in the context of a digi...

New interactive web services are dramatically altering the way in which ordinary citizens can create digital spatial data and maps, individually and collectively, to produce new forms of digital spatial data that some term ‘volunteered geographic information’ (VGI). This article examines the early literature on this phenomenon, illustrating its sha...

This paper investigates the unique challenges of an expanding group of stakeholders making demands upon shared geospatial data resources: non governmental organisations participating in local governance. In spite of efforts to improve local data integration in spatial data infrastructures and development of strategies from public participation GIS...

This paper proposes participatory ethics as a framework from which we might begin to proactively engage some of the contradictions and gaps inherent in institutional ethical frameworks. A growing number of researchers negotiate ethical dilemmas encountered in research or expectations for what constitutes ethical research practice in collaborative d...

In the mid-1990s, several critical texts raised concerns about the social, political, and epistemological implications of GIS. Subsequent responses to these critiques have fundamentally altered the technological, political, and intellectual practices of GIScience. Participatory GIS, for instance, has intervened in multiple ways to try to ameliorate...

The roles, relationships, and strategies of state and civil society institutions in urban planning, problem solving, and service delivery are in flux. In trying to understand how these changes affect community organizations, grassroots groups, and local-level institutions of civil society, existing research has tended to conceptualize these roles t...

Although participatory approaches to geographic information system (GIS) use have significantly altered the technological and social practices of GIS-based research and decision making, they have received relatively little attention within discussions of participatory research. This paper examines how participation and representation are negotiated...

This chapter examines participatory approaches to GIS (PPGIS) in community planning. The discussion examines current and emerging trends in PPGIS practices, issues of access and participation that have shaped PPGIS development in the past decade, and new developments in technologies and participatory planning processes that will shape its future tr...

This paper compares the discourse and practices of purportedly collaborative or "partnership" approaches to urban governance in the United States and United Kingdom, as enacted through nationally-directed planning and revitalization programs. The language and underlying principles used to justify and advance such participation initiatives are simil...

Experiential learning pedagogies are being adopted across undergraduate education and touted as an effective strategy for enhancing student learning. This paper develops an explanation for how and why such pedagogies can foster students critical thinking and learning. Drawing on data collected from first-year students in "field based" urban geograp...

 In this article, we examine the role of geographic information systems used by neighborhood organizations in their planning and revitalization efforts in US inner cities. The use of GIS is related to marked changes in the roles and responsibilities of neighborhood organizations as part of a neoliberal policy agenda that expects them to play an inc...

Recent discussions in Public Participation Geographic Information Science (PPGIS) research highlight the importance of examining the local contextual factors that shape the PPGIS process. Through ongoing comparative case-study research, we are specifying the local contextual factors that influence PPGIS production and neighborhood planning activiti...

A growing body of research examining the social and political implications of geographic information systems (GIS) considers the extent to which the use of this technology may empower or disempower different actors and institutions. However, these studies have tended not to articulate a clear conceptualization of empowerment. Thus, in this paper, I...

With the increasing involvement of local citizens and community organizations in carrying out urban planning and service delivery functions formerly handled by state institutions, questions have emerged about their implications for the urban political role and influence of community level actors. Some scholars identify these purportedly collaborati...

Through recent changes in urban governance practices, citizens and community organizations assume ever-greater responsibility for local-level planning and service delivery. Scholars have debated whether this shift disempowers community organizations by subsuming their plans and priorities into state planning imperatives or empowers them through inc...

For qualitative researchers, selecting appropriate sites in which to conduct interviews may seem to be a relatively simple research design issue. In fact it is a complicated decision with wide-reaching implications. In this paper, we argue that the interview site itself embodies and constitutes multiple scales of spatial relations and meaning, whic...

This paper is an exploration of lesbian living spaces, focusing on the diverse experiences and meanings of home and neighborhood in lesbian communities. These issues are developed from interviews conducted with lesbians in the metropolitan area of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Lesbian communities are heterogeneous, made up of individuals who...

this paper is within the former tradition. We seek to investigate the appropriateness of current GIS technologies for neighborhood and grassroots organizations (henceforth `community organizations'), in their tasks of articulating and pursuing the interests of those whom they are supposed to represent. The work reported on here is based on a variet...

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, using a participatory research design, it attempts to contribute to a better understanding of the problems neighborhood groups face in accessing and using GIS-based data sources and technology, including their specific geographic information needs, their perceptions of the usefulness of GIS-technology...

far, we seek to abstract to some degree from them, and to position our experiences within a conceptual,framework.,The paper,is organized as follows. We discuss in general terms

VOLUME XXIX NUMBER 3 S EPTEMBER 1999 O ver the last decade, there has been increasing concern about the risks to human welfare posed by releases of toxic chemicals into the environment. Catastrophic emissions receive much public attention, such as the death of Santos Fernandez on August 24, 1997 from methyl bromide poisoning in downtown Minneapolis...

Critical geographers and others have documented the presence of citizen cartographies for decades, in mapping efforts undertaken by ordinary people, often within political activism, citizen science, and community improvement efforts. Most recently, researchers studying citizen cartographies have raised questions about the disciplinary and societal...