Youth Advocacy through Civic Mapmaking
Youth Advocacy through Civic Mapmaking
Overview
Join the DHLab and the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library for an online presentation by Yanni Loukissas (Georgia Tech). Drawing on ten years of research, Dr. Loukissas will rethink what data can mean for civic life and discuss his recent work on civic mapmaking tools for youth advocacy.
Children often are left out of civic life and have few tools for advocating on behalf of the places they live. To remedy this problem, Dr. Loukissas spent the past year working with colleagues at Georgia Tech, Savannah State University, and the City of Savannah to develop a toolkit that can support youth advocacy through civic mapmaking. This toolkit is not what one might expect in our data-driven society: it relies on paint pens, drawing paper, and conversation prompts, which are meant to help kids reflect on the uneven social and economic effects of disasters. To give digital precision to these analog tools, Dr. Loukissas and his colleagues used Map Spot, an open-source software and hardware system for collaborative mapmaking.
This civil mapmaking toolkit has already been used successfully in a middle school on the west side of Savannah, Ga., where students connected their own family stories about environmental disasters—hurricanes, heat waves, industrial accidents, and of course the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic—to existing sources of data, such as sea level sensors, historical maps, and census records. They also considered the underlying assumptions and biases such data sources carry. Using both their personal experiences and these other data sources, the students created their own advocacy maps, 36 square feet in size, and presented them to local policymakers. Not only did the maps powerfully express how the students saw environmental threats to their communities; they also suggested imaginative ways of mitigating these risks.
About the Speaker
Yanni Alexander Loukissas is Associate Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. His research is focused on helping creative people think critically about the social implications of information technologies. His most recent book, All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society (MIT Press, 2019), is addressed to a growing audience of practitioners who want to work with unfamiliar data sources both effectively and ethically. He is also the author of Co-Designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture (Routledge, 2012) and co-editor of The DigitalSTS Handbook (Princeton, 2019). Originally trained as an architect at Cornell, he subsequently attended MIT, where he completed a Ph.D. in Design and Computation and a postdoc at the Program in Science, Technology and Society.
Event Details
Time:
Tuesday, February 14, 2023
1-2 p.m. EST
Location:
Zoom
Registration
This online event is open to all, though registration is required. To register, please visit the Eventbrite page for the talk.
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