Developing Spatial-Making Repertoires Through Sociocritical Data Stories

• In Event: Designing for Dignity Affirming Experiences: Leveraging Embodied Learning Toward Equity in Interaction

Abstract

Objectives
This poster addresses how lived material realities of youth—as captured in their data stories—reveal their spatial-making repertoires (Philoxene, 2021). Specifically, it examines the opportunities and constraints youth experience as they navigate the social spatiality of geographic data that reveal environmental racism and injustice. Drawing on Philoxene (2021) and McKittrick (2006) and the analytical frame of Black Geography, we study how students interpret and narrate instances of environmental racism in their local ecologies and learn to think critically about data and the “geographies of domination” (Philoxene, 2021) that shape the spaces they inhabit.

Theoretical Framework
Geospatial data represent an ideological site where meanings of racism can be explored and contested (Philip et al., 2016). Yet, racism is so complex and deeply rooted in society that it is “not amenable to quantification” (Gillborn et al., 2018, p. 158). Pairing data with narratives of racialized experiences of environmental injustice can make visible the spatialized domination that has devastated Black communities. We therefore adopt a syncretic approach to learning (Author1, 2014) which leverages youths’ repertoires of practice to engage tensions between everyday and scientific practices—challenging decontextualized and dis-embodied conceptions of scientific knowing. Youth draw from experiences of place, locate themselves within larger sociohistorical contexts, and explore how these contexts expose or protect them from environmental hazards. As youth investigate data across communities, they interrogate social and systemic structures to develop a critical stance towards data (Weiland et al., 2017).

Methods
Writing Data Stories, a social design experiment (Author1 & colleague, 2016), takes a syncretic approach integrating data with narrative. During two iterations of a week-long, online summer workshop with students from dominant and nondominant backgrounds, 17 adolescents explored the topic of environmental racism. Leveraging readings and personal stories; analysis of public datasets on social and environmental factors (pollution, health indicators, income, race) using dynamic data visualization tools; and journalistic research (interviews, internet searches), they constructed “data stories” (Author2 and colleagues, 2021) examining how environmental racism affected regions relevant to students’ sociohistorical lives. We analyzed videorecordings and student artifacts for claims about environmental justice, including patterns in data, their explanations, and the sources of evidence employed to make claims about racism specifically.

Results and significance
Preliminary results revealed the value of leveraging young people’s embodied social spatiality when exploring geographic data. Reasoning about explanatory factors for environmental inequities rarely occurred from data alone; instead, deeper claims connected the data to embodied everyday experiences, familial knowledge, and research on sociohistorical factors. Students often identified correlations between poverty or race and environmental harm, but consistent with prior findings (Enyedy & Mukhopadhyay, 2007), quantitative data alone rarely supported students to question or hypothesize the social and political causes of these inequities. Instead, the study of injustice supported by data required attention to embodied experiences of self and others, and to socio-analytic artifacts that mediate deeper historical understandings. These findings echo warnings that quantitative data alone is insufficient to understand racialized phenomena, and risks continued pathologization of racialized communities (Rubel et al., 2016) and hegemonic “geographies of domination.”

Authors

• Meg Elena Escudé, University of California, Berkeley

• Emily V. Reigh, Stanford University

• Michael Bakal, University of California - Berkeley

• Edward Rivero, University of California - Berkeley

• Michelle Hoda Wilkerson, University of California - Berkeley

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley