Operating anew: Queering GIS with good enough software [pre-print]

In the last decade, conversations around queering of GIScience emerged. Drawing on literature from feminist and queer critical GIS, with special attention to the under‐examined political economy of GIS, I suggest that the critical project of queering all of GIS, both GIScience and GISystems, requires not just recognition of the labour and lives of queers and research in geographies of sexualities. Based upon a queer feminist political economic critique and evidenced in my teaching critical GIS at two elite liberal arts colleges, I argue that the “status quo” between ESRI and geography as a field must be interrupted. Extending a critical GIS focus beyond data structures and data ethics, I argue that geographic researchers and instructors have a responsibility in queering our choice and production of software, algorithms, and code alike. I call this production and choice of democratic, accessible, and useful software by, for, and about the needs of its users, good enough software

Where We Go from Here: The Mental Sketch Mapping Method and Its Analytic Components [post-print]

The mental mapping method affords a lens into the way people produce and experience space, forms of spatial intelligence, and dynamics of human-environment relations. Mental mapping is the representation of an individual or group’s cognitive map, hand sketched and/or computerassisted, in drafting and labeling a map or adding to and labeling an already existing map. Despite its long-term, rich, and multifaceted use across the social sciences, I found that the method’s development has been uneven and its analytics ad hoc and piecemeal. Drawing upon 32 mental sketch maps and the interviews during which they were drafted, this paper provides an extensive review of the method, and details a total of 57 analytic components and techniques drawn from the literature and my own work in this study. I address these analytics from a critical geographic perspective in four categories to follow trends the data reveal. In my discussion I offer some future guidelines for research with MSM to continue to extend the method while growing from the body of knowledge already produced. This paper contributes a deeper understanding of how the mental maps can inform qualitative studies of people, place, and space across the social sciences

Useful In/stability: the Dialectical Production of the Social and Spatial Lesbian Herstory Archives [pre-print]

Queer theory’s embrace of instability paints stabilizing practices as normalizing and unjust. Rather than upholding a stance of opposition by championing instability alone, what can be gleaned for queer theory by examining the tension of the in/stability dialectic? In this paper I reflect upon my own embodied experience as researcher within the social and spatial dimensions of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Informed by critical geographical studies and queer theories, I suggest that the usefulness of in/stability—all at once together and in conflict—is the work toward justice that results when Archives sits in the juxtaposition. The resultant practice of useful in/stability suggests a turn for queer theory as it illuminates a turn in queer analyses by examining and struggling with concepts rather than succumbing to binarial mores

Size Matters to Lesbians Too: Queer Feminist Interventions into the Scale of Big Data [pre-print]

How can we recognize those whose lives and data become attached to the far-from-groundbreaking framework of “small data”? Specifically, how can marginalized people who do not have the resources to produce, self-categorize, analyze, or store “big data” claim their place in the big data debates? I examine the place of lesbians and queer women in the big data debates through the Lesbian Herstory Archive\u27s not “big” enough lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) organizing history data set—perhaps the largest data set known to exist on LGBTQ activist history—as one such alternative. In a contribution to critical data studies, I take a queer feminist approach to the scale of big data by reading for the imbricated scales and situated knowledge of data

A Queer New York

Winner, 2021 Glenda Laws Award given by the American Association of Geographers The first lesbian and queer historical geography of New York City Over the past few decades, rapid gentrification in New York City has led to the disappearance of many lesbian and queer spaces, displacing some of the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ+ community. In A Queer New York, Jen Jack Gieseking highlights the historic significance of these spaces, mapping the political, economic, and geographic dispossession of an important, thriving community that once called certain New York neighborhoods home. Focusing on well-known neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, Park Slope, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights, Gieseking shows how lesbian and queer neighborhoods have folded under the capitalist influence of white, wealthy gentrifiers who have ultimately failed to make room for them. Nevertheless, they highlight the ways lesbian and queer communities have succeeded in carving out spaces—and lives—in a city that has consistently pushed its most vulnerable citizens away. Beautifully written, A Queer New York is an eye-opening account of how lesbians and queers have survived in the face of twenty-first century gentrification and urban development

Foreground and Background: Environment as Site and Social Issue [pre-print]

To examine how the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) has engaged with environmental issues throughout its 75-year history, we consulted five SPSSI-based data sources. Our analysis, attentive to the larger sociopolitical contexts over time, focuses on SPSSI\u27s attention to the physical environment, the places in which social living and interactions occur. In SPSSI\u27s early years, social issues research was often situated within specific locales. Since 1960 and the emergence of environmental psychology and the environmental movement, SPSSI increasing focuses on environment as a social issue in its own right as well part of other social issues. Over time there has been a decline in mentions of the physical environment in SPSSI\u27s methods texts. This historical analysis highlights the specifics of context in SPSSI\u27s environmental research and urges attention to the physical as well as social aspects of environment in research and activism

Shoestring Democracy: Gated Condominiums and Market Rate Co-operatives in New York [pre-print]

This article develops the concept of shoestring democracy as a way to characterize the resulting social relations of private governance structures embedded in two types of collective housing schemes found in New York City and the adjoining suburbs: gated condominium communities (gated condominiums) and market-rate cooperative apartment complexes (co-ops). Drawing from ethnographies of gated condominiums and co-ops in New York City and neighboring Nassau County, New York, we compare these two forms of collective home ownership regarding the impact of private governance structures on residents and their sense of representation and participation in ongoing community life. “Shoestring democracy” encompasses a broad range of behaviors utilized to insulate residents from local conflicts and disagreements, and limits rather than promotes political participation. The greatest differences between the co-ops and gated condominiums were found in discussions of safety and security, in that condominium residents have developed an elaborate discourse of the fear of crime and others, especially racialized others, to explain why they moved to their secured communities. Co-op interviewees, on the other hand, generally felt a sense of safety in their buildings, often due to the gatekeeper effect of the co-op board and doormen. In gated communities, covenants, contracts, and deed restrictions (CC&Rs) guarantee that most problems are resolved before they start. While the same can be said for co-ops, interviewees find that these rules and regulations seem to mystify everyday governing practices for the average co-op resident. Moral minimalism and a lack of structural and procedural knowledge may insulate residents from local conflicts and disagreement, but also may discourage civic participation. Exploring the apathy residents expressed about participation and a lack of representation suggests that although the Rochdale principles of cooperation that are the legal and social basis for co-ops may have been important at one time, current practices of private governing boards do more to restrict participatory democratic practices than encourage them. The policy implications are outlined with suggestions of how to make homeowners associations and co-op boards more accountable and encourage greater adherence to the original co-op mandate