Using Critical Race Spatial Analysis to Examine the Role of Space, Place, and Belonging with Asian and Asian American Youth

• In Event: Centralizing Asian and Asian American Youth in AsianCrit

Abstract

Objectives
While race is often considered a social construct, scholars have highlighted its spatial nature and how people are racialized and racial hierarchies reinforced through the manipulation of space (e.g., Du Bois, 1903). The intersection of spatial and racial justice is particularly crucial for Asian Americans, whose racialization is heavily influenced by transnational contexts, immigration dynamics, and processes of inclusion/exclusion (Museus & Iftikar, 2013). This paper shares the process and outcomes of youth participatory mapping as a vehicle to examine the relation between space, place, and Asianization, using spatial methods to explore racialized outcomes and resistance, emphasizing Asian American student voices and perspectives.

Theoretical Framework
This study draws on AsianCrit (Museus & Iftikar, 2013) and Critical Race Spatial Analysis (CRSA; Vélez & Solórzano, 2017). The study utilizes three AsianCrit tenets to guide its design: Asianization, transnational contexts, and strategic (anti)essentialism (Museus & Iftikar, 2013). Building on Critical Race Theory’s (CRT) analysis of race as endemic, CRSA applies the analysis of race and racism to the “socio-spatial dialectic” (Soja, 2010), seeking to uncover the ways in which space constructs race and is implicated in the workings of other systems of oppression.

Methods
The study adapts the identity-mapping technique of education journey mapping (EJM, Annamma 2018) to create a multi-media education journey mapping via ArcGIS. ArcGIS is a GIS software that integrates spatial and nonspatial data to produce maps, allowing students to combine video, images, or text tagged to a geospatial location. Students were asked the following question: Map your education journey. Include people, places, discoveries, wonders, obstacles, and opportunities on your way. What place supports your sense of belonging? Where do you feel most at home? Use different color, videos, gifs, images and the map to show different feelings and to share your story. We will later share our maps with each other and get to add to it throughout the week. The four EJMs described here are part of a larger mixed methods study using youth mapping methodologies in four elementary and middle school classrooms. Mapping took place across four sessions, Collaboration analysis through grounded visualization (Knigge & Cope, 2006) merges grounded theory with GIS. Through iterative cycles in which participants share their cartographic narratives and identify and contrast sociospatial characteristics across narratives, a system of distribution of community sites of significance emerges.

Results and Significance
Preliminary findings highlight how spatial racialization is particularly central to the Asian and Asian American youth experience. All the students highlighted moments of spatial othering within curricular representation or limited stereotypical representation as well as often a sense of liminal belonging in spaces of school, community, and even within the Asian community. Findings also highlight affordances via GIS mapping, including: (1) allowing mappers to visualize their community spatially, contextually, and historically, (2) providing a sense of belonging and ownership as students decide what to include and share on their maps, and (3) enriched data by allowing AsAm students to map and identify what matters to them to inform education, research, and school transformation.

Author

• Cathery Yeh, University of Texas at Austin