What Does it Take to Map the World from the Brown Body?: Axiological Questions about the Use of GIS and other Computational Methodologies in Educational Research

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Abstract

While geo-spatial technologies have experienced a surge in educational scholarship, we must be wary of the pizzazz of digital map-making (GIS) that leans on high-spectacle displays of data at the expense of theoretical rigor. Critical applications of GIS must wrestle with the seduction of “new digital frontiers, big data, new forms of GIS for social transformation spatial information, and practices for its creation [that] lead us to treat technological possibilities as an end in itself” (Pavlovskaya, 2018, p. 43-44). GIS is an attractive instrument that masks the historical role of maps in settler colonialism (Steinauer-Scudder, 2018), contemporary uses of geo-spatial technologies in military surveillance and warfare (Crampton et al., 2014; Gregory, 2010, Kitchin, 2014; Pavlovskaya, 2018; Pickles, 1995; Sheppard, 2005), and an overreliance on quantitative approaches. How do we wrestle with the ways in which digital geo-spatial technologies are fundamentally entangled with the infrastructures of state power that reproduce injustice? How can we use GIS to develop alternative visions of the future that challenge dominant systems of power?

To address these axiological questions, this paper posits that we must first reconsider the relationship between the “social” and the “spatial.” Drawing from critical feminist approaches in education and geography (Delgado Bernal, 1998; Cruz, 2001; Pendleton Jiménez, 2006, McKittrick 2006), I argue that maps are not disembodied nor transparent windows into pre-existing space; they are always political, filled with contestations and contradictions. Given the masculinist subjectivity that guides most of GIS mapmaking (Kwan, 2002, 2007), we reimagine its practice when subaltern social imaginations are centered that requires “alternative methods of conceptualizing space not only by noting how social change must be spatialized but also by seeing and feeling space as performative and participatory” (Brady, 2002, p. 6). Axiological questions about the use of GIS in educational research look to the relational, emergent, and embodied aspects of space, not just demographic densities by neighborhood or the spatial distribution of fixed educational outcomes.

As an example, I consider what it means to center the Brown body in GIS as a site of and source for geographic and cartographic inquiry. As a technical process, GIS projections set the “frame” to which data and corresponding spatial analyses must conform. This reifies a notion of space as absolute and inflexible, even though “the coordinate systems used to represent and understand a phenome­non are themselves constructed out of data; they are not absolute pre-ordained spaces into which data are rendered” (Bergmann & O’Sullivan, 2017, p. 32). Centering the Brown body refuses the expectation in GIS projections that we need to locate cultural life within absolute space. It amplifies “the wrinkles” that result from projective distortions as essential sites for understanding space and spatiality more broadly. When the Brown Body is centered, aligning data to a two-dimensional geographic plane is deprioritized. Instead, we consider how data reflects “particular grammars of relations with one another” that “recognizes that other geograph­ical imaginaries often matter even more, and may, in fact, be, in their appropriate analytical con­texts, more accurate” (Bergmann & O’Sullivan, 2017, p. 33).

Author

• Veronica Velez, Western Washington University