Teaching critical open GIS

Abstract

Teaching critical open GIS has the potential to disrupt common GIS representations and bridge the divide between GIS and non-GIS human geography curricula. • Open-source GIS creates opportunities for critical GIS to effectively and affectively engage with GIS technology at the level of code. Higher-education geographic information system (GIS) curricula largely marginalize and separate instruction of critical GIS and open GIS, paralleling a divide between GIS and non-GIS in geography. GIS is typically represented as a singular, infallibly objective, and universally applicable technology. GIS generally dismisses the critiques from human geography, while critical human geography dismisses GIS for its association with positivism and unethical applications. Teaching critical open GIS may bridge this divide, creating a transformative pedagogical space for human geography to affectively and effectively engage with open GIS technology at the level of code. Critical open GIS students practice and critique GIS as conflicted insiders, bridging the divide between GIS and non-GIS in their geography education. Reviews of GIS curricula find support for teaching critical and open GIS, but reviews of texts and syllabi confirm their marginalization and separation. A new critical open GIS course is introduced, using GIS in development and political ecology as integrative frameworks.

Human Geography With Open Gis as a Transformative Introductory Higher Education Course

“…Finally, FOSS4G is also changing, in the development of OpenStreetMap humanitarian data and open city toolkits. This paper follows previous work developing an advanced critical and open GIS course with thematic focus on environmental and demographic change in developing countries (Holler, 2019). Responses to that work questioned whether integration would also be possible at the introductory level, and this paper answers affirmatively: yes.…”

“…I have proposed that teaching critical human geography with open-source GIS has the potential to make the GIS lab into a space for transformation of curricula, of students, and of critical and open GIS research. Prior research and experience suggest this is possible at graduate (Granell et al, 2018) and advanced undergraduate (Holler, 2019) levels, but to what extent is it also possible at the introductory level?…”

“…Previous reviews of GIS curricula have found a divide between critical human geography and GIS (Holler, 2019;St. Martin and Wing, 2007), paralleling a divide within the discipline (Schuurman, 2000).…”

“…Higher education GIS curricula too often lack both critical and open GIS, presenting GIS as an infallible uncontested technology, linearly progressing in its development and limitlessly expanding its commercial applications (St. Martin and Wing, 2007). GIS curricula are not only missing critical human geography perspectives; they are also often missing more pragmatic geographic information science (GIScience) topics of alternative (open-source) software and data options, open standards, ethics, metadata, error, and uncertainty (Holler, 2019;Wikle and Fagin, 2014). Open source GIS presents opportunities to destabilize mainstream representations of GIS as commercial and infallible, investigate the history and social context of GIS development, expand access to GIS by marginal social groups or grassroots movements, encounter data errors and software bugs and participate in fixing them, and develop open GIS for critical and qualitative human geography research (Cope and Elwood, 2009;Garnett and Kanaroglou, 2016;Rey, 2009;Sieber, 2004;Sui, 2014).…”

Introduction to the special section: Teaching critical GIS | Teaching GIS critically

“…These authors occupy a common space that Joseph Holler (2019), drawing from Wilson (2009), refers to as contested borderlands inhabited by both technology insiders and critical outsiders. Holler and Bowlick et al (2020) both provide updated curriculum and syllabi reviews in their papers; little has demonstrably changed since Wikle and Fagin's assessment in 2014.…”