Critical GIS .com

This semester I've helped to facilitate nine university-community partnerships in my upper-division GIS classroom (GEO509), drawing on previous instantiations of this program in 2011 and in 2010 .  The students will be presenting their work on these projects on May 2nd, and have composed abstracts and provided snapshots of work-in-progress to help describe their projects. Lawrence County, Kentucky Vaccination Campaign Pilar Desha, UK Geography Alli Sehon, UK Anthropology Ron Enders, Lawrence County Health Department With a grant from CancerFreeKY, the Lawrence County Health Department launched a vaccine campaign in 2011 to combat the growing HPV infection rate in Eastern Kentucky.  The HPV vaccine is administered in three separate doses spread over a period of several months and can be extremely costly to patients even with insurance coverage.  The Lawrence County HPV Vaccine Campaign is offering the full shot series for free to all county residents betwe...

Last week, at the Imagining America conference in Seattle, WA, Sarah Elwood and I co-organized a workshop titled, "Participatory Mapping: Engaging Sites, Mobilizing Knowledges".  With the help of Jin-Kyu Jung , Ryan Burns , and Josef Eckert (and greatly informed by the work of Jentery Sayers ), 22 workshop attendees collaborated in six small groups to map the university, using documenting practices like sketching, filming, and photographing.  The workshop packet is below. Each group was given a theme which was to be expressed through their mapping process.  Themes included: collaboration, movement, culture, politics, and the social.  After a brief, 30-minute field mapping session, each group was able to upload a few items to the collaborative map (see below).  The map is by no means complete (are they ever?), but it gives you a sense of the kinds of practices afforded by visual, mobile technologies. Session description: Building on the organizers’ experi...

The folks over at the Center for Media Design (thanks, Ben, Tommy, and Erin!) have pieced together this snazzy YouTube video documenting the 2010 GIS Workshop .  It contains brief interviews with community partners and my own summary comments on the conclusion of the workshop.

I'm facilitating a new take on an existing course at Ball State University this semester, developed with support from BSU's Emerging Media Initiative at the Center for Media Design .  GEOG448/548 is now ' GIS Workshop ', drawing on my previous experience supporting a similar course in the Dept. of Geography at the University of Washington, lead by Prof. Sarah Elwood (see also Elwood 2009 ).  In GIS Workshop, we'll have 20 students partner on around eight community-based projects to help the students learn collaborative- and participatory-research skills, while supporting community organizations to further their mission using spatial technologies. I'm excited about our potential community partners this semester: United Way of Delaware County , Open Door and Ball Memorial Hospital , the Indiana 500 Trail Project, and the City of Muncie Animal Shelter .  Students will have the opportunity to work on projects that focus on the social (justice) geographies of ...