Participatory Mapping and GIS

8. Nick Rattray (Indiana University): Counter-Mapping as Situated Knowledge: Integrating Lay Expertise in Participatory Geographic Research

Abstract: This chapter explores issues of situated knowledge, lay expertise, and spatial literacy in participatory research. Drawing on case studies that marry participatory methods and geographic information systems (PGIS), I show how counter-mapping projects around accessibility for people with disabilities and housing disinvestment enable lay experts to destabilize dominant representations of their community and map local assets. I conclude by linking the politics and of PGIS projects to the growth in “volunteered geographic information.” The rising importance of visualization in geospatial research raises renewed questions about the limits of participation, data stewardship, and the “utopian” potential of participatory mapping.  

9. Simona Perry (Dickinson College): Beyond Words: The Transformative Practice (and Politics) of Digital Spatial and Visual Ethnography in a Rural Shale Gas Boomtown

10. Edward González-Tennant (Monmouth University): Resurrecting Rosewood: New Heritage as Applied Visual Anthropology

Abstract: This chapter examines a mixed methods approach to difficult heritage of the recent and contemporary past. The author’s approach combines qualitative GIS, online worlds, and digital storytelling to support social justice in Rosewood, Florida; a once prosperous African American community destroyed during a weeklong episode of violence in 1923. This event ended with the systematic burning of every black-owned building and the complete expulsion of the area’s African American population. The history of this town and its descendant community is systematically being explored and reconstructed, in close consultation with various stakeholder communities (e.g., Black descendants, local white landowners). This chapter explores the various methodologies utilized for this work, and concludes with a discussion of how these methodologies avoid depoliticizing histories of disenfranchisement while eliciting poignant and critical reflection from visitors.

Photo Credit: Nicholas Rattray