Evolving From Analysis to Axiology: Critical Race Spatial Axiology

• In Event: Critical Racial Topographies: Methodological Tools and Key Concepts for Research and Practice in Education

Abstract

As we reflect on Critical Race Spatial Analysis (CRSA), the authors of this paper have been thinking deeply about how this work has grown and evolved. CRSA was conceptualized to explore, analyze, contextualize, and visualize the socio-spatial relationship between race and educational opportunity, or lack thereof. Du Bois’ theorization of the “color-line”—a cartographic, geographic, social, and historical project that shapes and is shaped by white supremacy at multiple scales from the local to the global (Battle-Baptiste & Rusert, 2018; Du Bois, 1903)—was instrumental to the development of CRSA. CRSA reflects Du Bois’ insistence that our theoretical and methodological efforts must also operate as a standpoint from which to enact social change. Thus, CRSA demands reflexivity, requiring that we embrace the tensions and contradictions that accompany retooling geographic methods for liberatory ends.

Toward that end, we insist that any critical race analysis of space is not solely about the production or analysis of maps. Maps are important tools but the goal and power of the map depends on the axiology of the mapmakers. An axiology must be articulated, examined, and evolved based on the collaborative research partnerships we engage, capturing the complexity of our racialized identities as temporally and spatially produced social locations. For example, author 2 collaborated with migrant mothers to map the historical link between racial integration efforts and access to gifted and talented education for Latinx students. These mothers demonstrated the potential of digital map-making for visualizing the geographic footprint of long-standing investments in racist ideologies and practices in public schools by grounding the creation of maps in their relationship to the communities and schools (Author 2, 2022). Author 1 has partnered with formerly incarcerated youth to learn data analysis and ARCGIS Storymapping to create maps of youth prisons. These young people have been engaging with data and their own lived experiences to ummap (Goffe, 2020) carceral facilities, including interview, audio, and visual data to turn prisons inside-out, so others can witness what happens inside. What is important across both projects is not the technical tool of the map, it is the deep commitment to multiscalar abolition across individuals, communities, and society, wherein we aim to tear down prison walls, the systems that hold them up, and the oppressions that created those walls in the first place. That is, the formerly incarcerated young people and migrant mothers the authors collaborated with have deep cartographic expertise that can result in changing the world–if we dare to listen to them. If engaging spatial analysis without an explicitly named axiology flattens the world and reproduces power relations, an explicit axiology allows for a widening of the world, allowing for vision that is more robust. Our axiological commitment recognizes cartographic and spatial expertise, beyond the map. That is, cartographic and spatial expertise is about making a model of the world that extends beyond one way of representation and endeavors to produce new cartographies that center subaltern social imaginations to create more humanizing and liberatory educational spaces.

Authors

• Subini Ancy Annamma, Stanford University

• Verónica Nelly Vélez, Western Washington University