As the fall term approaches faster than I anticipated, I am racing to complete my syllabus for my (re)imagined, (re)designed introduction to GIS course at Pomona College. I had hoped to put this out in some form to the wider audience of critical GIS scholars who have helped me to rethink how to do GIS, but here we are, two weeks out with a draft syllabus still in draft form on my computer screen. Rather than wait until the syllabus, the guiding document or map if you will, of my course, I have decided to put out into the world the course description and rationale that my colleagues deemed worthy of entering into our course catalog.
If you are A GIS practitioner I expect you may have strong opinions on how I have decided to frame this course. I cannot anticipate whether you will be supportive or dismissive of the destination point that I have framed or if you will be excited or concerned for the world of possibilities that this class could generate.
If anything here resonates with you I would be grateful to be in conversation with you as I seek to move my GIS class towards what I am inspired by the work of Eduardo Galeano to call the horizon of social and ecological justice. In the same vain, I do not pretend that I can possibly set up an introductory course that would accomplish such a lofty goal of reaching or even fully defining a just horizon, rather I set my intentions to move in that direction and look forward to joining those who are on a similar path.
Maps have the power to reveal relationships that are not readily seen, such as uneven impacts of COVID-19, global climate change, environmental pollution, and so on. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) act as the unseen infrastructures for gathering, managing, and analyzing data that is or can be mapped. GIS can be applied broadly in multiple domains to create maps that guide policymakers, businesses, communities, and individuals to make important decisions. In recent years, these tools have increased in sophistication allowing us to model complex socio-spatial relationships while simplifying the processes involved with easy-to-follow drop-down menus and an increasing array of off-the-shelf plug-ins for mobile and desktop applications.
Collectively these transformations have enabled an expanded user-base to enter the world of map-making. Yet, how do we ensure that these tools are (re)oriented toward the ends of creating a more ecologically and socially just world? This is the question I pose in my introduction to GIS course at Pomona College. In this course, I will work with my students to develop a solid foundation on the commonly used processes for creating static and interactive maps that reflect hidden inequalities and disparities; as well as highlight hopeful imaginations of a more just world.
In order to reach these aims, this course takes a student-centered approach, grounded in critical pedagogies and anti-racist frameworks. Students will work with the instructor and their peers to develop a collective model of engagement that values the contributions of all classroom participants and allows for an individualized assessment of growth in developing fluency of the complex mix of technological tools and theoretical understandings that undergird GIS.
This course will provide an introduction and overview of GIS – specifically, ESRI WebGIS and ArcGIS mapping software – to demonstrate the basic analysis of spatial data for those interested in answering questions about the spatial significance of environmental justice, racial inequality, hazard exposure, and health equity.
Grading:
In recent years, the proliferation and simplification of mapping tools has enabled a greater number of new map users to enter the world of spatial data analysis. This two-pronged process runs the risk of rendering GIS tools into, what Bruno Latour (1999) described as, black-boxes–an apparatus whose inter workings are unknown yet produce resultst hat have severe consequences on the world around us. Critical GIS, a subfield of GIS has long worked to critique the products of GIS, yet the work of critical GIS scholars has been critiqued with the epithet “Do you actually do GIS?”(Wilson, 2017).
This course re-design seeks to address the calls from Critical GIS and translate relevant and practical applications of GIS to producing better maps. However, I am not content to produce a better map in some abstract rendering of the world. Rather, this course redesign is the product of multiple years of reflection on how to bridge the practical, theoretical, and ethical demands for GIS. From this process of re-imagining, I aim to orient this course toward the ecological and socially just horizon. To do so, this course pulls from a long legacy of popular education, critical pedagogies, and anti-racist frameworks towards the end of what Paolo Frieire (1985) describes as a liberatory project, and can be best summed in his words, “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” (p. 122)
On a practical level, this course will rely on data sets and spatial problems that reveal the environmental and health inequities and disparities. By employing an anti-racist framework we will actively seek to create an inclusive classroom where varying degrees of prior knowledge is not penalized but rather celebrated as an opportunity for developing and supporting individual and collective growth.
Freire, P. (1985). The politics of education: Culture, power, and liberation. Greenwood Publishing Group.
Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes, PhD 
Guillermo, It looks like a good class proposal. I really can’t imagine the general paradigm and approach being controversial. Something I would consider is how the main versions of GIS software require extremely costly licenses for data analysis and many other things. So to provide equitable access, the use of freeware versions could be advocated, as well as making those versions more user-friendly.
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Hi Ben, thanks for reading and your thoughtful comments! I am glad to read that you don’t find this approach to be controversial. When I wrote this, I was thinking of the demands that are often placed within the academy to maintain “objectivity” and the potential concern that an approach that calls for moving toward a just! society would be a form of bias. I reject this claim, however I saw this as a likely critique. Perhaps I underestimated who would read this, and I am glad to see that I am in good company. And to your point on using tools that are open source, I am looking forward to introducing my students to QGIS! Though I will still teach with ArcGIS Online, and work toward moving with each iteration toward open-source tools as I am still working on expanding my abilities with these tools.
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