feminist mapping
More wondering whether it was possible to be a feminist and someone engaged in digitizing. Tracey sent me a good paper:
Is GIS for Women? Reflections on the critical discourse in the 1990’s - pub. 2002 (pdf)
Mei-Po Kwan
In this article, I reflect upon the implications of the critical discourse on GIS in the 1990’s for feminist geographic research. . . . I emphasize the need to go beyond the conventional understanding of GIS as largely a quantitative practice and to recognize the potential for such realization for disrupting the rigid distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods in geographic research. Extending Gillian Rose’s (2001) exposition may be a possible point of departure for enacting critical visual methods in visual geography. Further, I argue that acknowledging the critical agency and subjectivities of the GIS user/researcher, and the possibility for GIS to be practiced in a more reflexive manner than we previously thought possible, would open up new discoursive spaces for subverting dominant GIS practices and the power of the oppostional discourse (à la Gibson-Graham, 1994). While recent feminist and critical GIS literatures have explored some of these issues (e.g. epistemologies and reflexivity), the article forgrounds the critical insights from these literatures in the context of feminist geographic research. It calls for the engagement of feminist geographers in resisting dominant GIS practices and in reimagining alternative practices that are congenial to feminist espistemologies and politics.
. . .Are GIS methods inherently positivist, empiricist, or quantitative? What ways of knowing and what kind of knowledge are possible through GIS methods, given it’s many limitations? Are there alternative GIS practices that are more congenial to feminist epistomologies and politics?
. . .
Given the limited numbers of studies that have examined GIS technology and methods from feminist perspectives to date, there is a whole series of questions that need to be answered. For instance, is GIS an inherently masculinist technology or social practice (as Bondi & Domosh [1992] asserted)? How are particular subjectivities or gendered identities constituted through routine interaction with GIS technology? Do women and men interact with or use GIS technology differently? Do they ascribe different meanings or have different attitudes towards GIS technology? How do racial or cultural identities mediate the interaction between gender and GIS technology? What are the implications of all of these for feminist pedagogy and how this understanding is relevant to feminist GIS practices? . . .[Gillian Rose] identified three sigtes which I think can be the focus for practicing feminist reflexivities when using GIS methods. First, there is the site(s) of production where we need to reflect on our own meaning-making tactics. Why certain GIS techniques are being used? What kinds of trueth does the representation claim? Second, there is the site of the image itself. What knowledges are excluded from our GIS-produced visual representations? Do our particular GIS representations disempower their subjects? Third, there is the site(s) where the images is being seen by various audiences. Whose views are not being acknowledged in our GIS representations? How to counter the tendency of our visual representations in producing the objectifying male gaze through subversive practices? Do our representations encourage alternative ways fo looking (i.e. different spectator positions) and the production of alternative subjectivities other than that of the master subject? To what extent can viewers contend and renegotiate these meanings in a particular context?
It’s nice to see that other people are serious about questioning these things. Makes me feel less freaky.
April 15th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
mike you seem very interested these days in what things are supposed to do, what one is supposed to do, whether a tool “ought” to be used for one thing rather than another.
why?
why not ask: what do I think ought to be done? do the tools to do them exist? if so lets use them for this or that project. if they don’t exist, let’s build them.
I don’t understand this preoccupation you have: “can you do X if you are Y?” or “is it right for tool A to be used for purpose B?”
The first question seems to me to be a very stange sort of upside down intellectual fascism. why limit, for instance, tools that feminists are “allowed” (by whom?) to use, if they still want to be called feminists?
The second question is … what? … lots of intellectual belly-scratching for nothing. I think the question should better be: “what can I do to promote the use of tools to do things I think are interesting & worth doing?”
why worry yourself whether there is a Right use for a tool. Do you want someone else to tell you how you are allowed to use your hammer? computer?
April 15th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
Funny - I have a very different understanding of that first question than you. I kinda thought that this would come up. I don’t interpret that question as “are women allowed to use GIS?”. I interpret it as “Is the use of GIS (by both men and women) something that promotes the welfare of women?”. Or by it’s very nature (cartesian, positivistic, god’s-eye-view,advocating that we can know something meaningful about a place without experiencing it directly or even talking to someone who has lived experience of it, etc) is it not a feminist practice?
I’m not sure in which way the author meant it. But I kinda suspect the second.
In terms of your second question which you’re suggesting that I would be better off asking myself “”what can I do to promote the use of tools to do things I think are interesting & worth doing?”.
I am. You know that. ISF and CivicAccess are examples of that. And it’s because I’m so heavily engaged in *doing* that I feel a heavy responsability to be critical about what I’m doing.
If there were people around me telling me that they knew the outcome of all of this stuff, that it would all be okay, that it all ends up that we’re helping mankind, that would be fantastic and I would stop asking academic wankery-type questions. But no one I’ve talked to seems to have that certainty about what’s actually going on. So I’m going to stay worried about what I’m participating in.
:-)
April 15th, 2006 at 9:05 pm
no no, asking: “is using this tool to do that thing going to have good or bad outcomes …” that’s groovy, and worth pondering, very much so. That’s a practical and useful question.
what seems less important to me is: “is some use that someone uses a tool for living up to the moral attributes that I give to that tool…?” ie what *should* a podcast, vlog, blog *be*. Those things are nothing but a means of exchanging information. and saying: “oh, I think they are useful to do X or Y, and we should promote that,” makes sense. but saying, “podcasts should not be used for such & such purpose because that betrays their moral genesis…” well, that’s just wasted time & energy.
tools (GIS, podcasting etc) are not good or bad. what we use them for, and what the impacts are, can be good or bad, and it’s worth considering that when deciding what tools we wish to promote and how.
April 16th, 2006 at 1:26 am
Industrial designers invent great & cool stuff for the heck of it. Often their mockups are made of crazy toxic materials, made in unhealthy environments. Mockups that they toss as part of the design iteration process. These designs are then mass produced into products we use, often slick, colourful and useful. Imagine however, the IDer thinking of the full production cycle of all of the materials, processes, wastes etc. of each of the products they created. Would those products differ? Would the choice of materials change? Would the product remain necessary for that matter? Would they be less harmful on the environment? Would they be more durable?
The first apartments were designed with very small kitchens, seperated from the eating area, with very high cupbpards, and little or no storage space. Those apartments were designed by those who did not have to spend the entire day in them, maintaining and cleaning the stuff in them. Apartments in and of themselves are not good nor bad, but those early models that lasted until about the +/-1970s were particularly unsuited for women, the kitchens they worked in seperated them from those they served, or made them feel very small because everything they interacted with was for a different average height!
Imagine if early car builders foresaw the poor air quality issues, the money spent on pavement by taxation or the wars over fuel. Would we have had better, more efficient cars and an excellent transit system?
I think there are ethical principals that should go into all practices, particularly when designs, technologies and infrastructures come with path dependencies that could yield unwanted/undesired results. Design reflexivity is particularly critical when the public is involved with the objects/artefacts that are designed or worse are stuck uncomfortably living with?
This does not mean stop making stuff, stop being innovative, it simply means think about it as you are doing it and think about the broader implications.
So I think there is great merit in carefully thinking about the implications of what we do, how we do it, why we do it, who it affects and who it benefits, and who it excludes. Einstein deeply regretted some of the outcomes of his research, and so have we.
April 16th, 2006 at 2:16 am
Is GIS (and other tech) anti-feminist? I don’t think so. Is the way it’s being implemented and the society which surrounds it anti-feminist? Possibly. Here is an article with interesting commentary on a related issue. Basically I think it’s much more a social thing than anything inherent in the tool itself. (By the way, it would be cool if you could define obscure-ish terms like GIS, I had to look it up.) The idea of GIS (as I understand it) is not in any way anti-feminist - however the execution may well be. I think it’s important to differentiate between the two, however - while a sexism that is inherent in a technology may require a total rethink of technology, a sexism that is inherent to our society requires a total rethink of the culture in question, which, while not at all easier, is a very different problem.
I’ve been hesitant to comment on your posts on this as I, personally, (as a feminist) strongly disagree with the idea that IT itself is anti-feminist. I can, however, totally get behind a conversation about how the society that surrounds IT may frequently be anti-feminist, any day.
April 16th, 2006 at 8:41 am
here here!
April 16th, 2006 at 10:49 am
or is that: “hear hear!” ? not sure.
April 18th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
I think that one of the most relevant/interesting parts of Kwan’s article is where she writes about “GIS methods and data should be used in a particular study based on the research questions, instead of letting the technology and existing data determine what to study.”
We can talk all we want about it not being about the tools, but about what we can do with them, but tools are constructed in a certain what that we never think about, and that construction leads to certain outcomes rather than others.
I wrote a bit about this here, while reading Pickles’ A History of Spaces. He writes
“Because the technologies with which we live more or less work as they are supposed to, we tend not to ask why or how any particular technology or ensemble of technologies work, or why the came into being inthe first place…We certianly tend not to ask about the design decisions, the logics and the rejected alternative that went into the selection of particular paths tothe construction of the technologies with which we work today. We probably think even less about the preofessional, plitical, econocmic and social contexts withing which these decisions and choices were made.”
Kwan realizes this, she says “it is important to recognize that GIS software and data do not predetermine the results. These resources can be put togetehr in many ways for different purposes.”
It is when we ignore the truth of this and get mired in technological determinism, that GIS becomes unfeminist, classist, racist, whatever, because most of the people employing it are using it to reaffirm the status quo. So Kwan clearly calls for feminists and postcolonialists to get _more_ involved in the production and use of the tech to ensure that the things they can do with it are visible.
This all centres around the important disjunct between speaking and being listened to though; the things that Kwan says that GIS _actually_ has the cabability to do (represent women’s lives) are things that people have been doing for quite some time, and if the dominant tools with their power, such as GIS, become an outlet for getting listened to, well that’s super useful, but also really troubling that it takes that to be heard.
I’m working on taking all this and looking at it through Mary Lousie Pratt’s idea of “autoethnography” (I found the source of the term!), which she defines as “instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms.”
I think we’re at this weird juncture in terms of mapping (and mapmaking) where we have a lot more access to the tools for it, and we’re producing more and more maps in really neat and interesting ways, but the world at large still doesn’t put a lot of stock in the use or importance of these sorts of maps.
There’s also the whole matter (Robert Rundstrom’s ideas) of inscription cartography (for text-based cultures where an end-product of a map is a useful tool for maintaining and reproducing history and culture) and process cartography (for lots of non-text-based cultures that rely on dance and performance and oral storytelling)–for the non-text-based, the _map_ is not the important thing, the _mapping_ is…and so focusing so much on the map itself means that these cultures have to stretch themselves even further to engage with the colonizer’s terms. I think part of Kwan’s feminist approach to GIS is to realize that the process of using it is a really important part of what GIS can do and does.
I’m still bashing this all out. When I finish my paper, I’ll let you know.