Keynote Speakers

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Sarah Elwood, PhD

“DOING CRITICAL GIS OTHERWISE:
DIGITAL MEDIATIONS OF LIFE, THRIVING AND POSSIBILITY”
Keynote Lecture

Thursday, November 7th, 2019, 5:15 – 6:30 pm
McNally Amphitheatre – 140 West 62nd Street, NY, NY
Discussant: Gregory Donovan (Fordham University)

SPEAKER BIO
Sarah Elwood is Professor and Chair of Geography at University of Washington, former editor of Progress in Human Geography (2013-2017), and co-founder of the Relational Poverty Network with Victoria Lawson. Her research contributes to relational poverty studies, critical GIScience and digital geographies, visual politics and mixed methods, and urban geography. Current activities include research on poverty politics of creative activisms around homelessness, feminist and critical race theorizations of digital geographies, and a collaborative public scholarly project on horizons of critical poverty studies under emerging nationalist populisms. She is co-editor of Relational Poverty Politics (University of Georgia Press 2018), Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge (Springer 2012) and Qualitative GIS (Sage 2009), and author of journal articles in Progress in Human Geography, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, International Journal of Geographic Information Science and others.

KEYNOTE ABSTRACT
In this paper, I examine a range of radical politics rendered through spatial data, GIS, locative technologies, and interactive mapping. While the social, political, epistemological violences they confront are frighteningly consistent across place and time, it is also the case that we stand in the midst of a surge of creative digital practice aimed at social and spatial justice. I argue that critical spatial media praxis for this moment starts from remembering what historically oppressed groups have long known: That making new worlds requires radical imaginaries and intentional ruptures of an oppressive status quo. Emergent theoretical innovations in critical digital geographies are building these new lines of flights, as are creative digital spatial politics that code for life, survival and thriving in marginalized communities. They have much to teach us.

Project Links: Relational Poverty Network | @relpov | Soundcloud

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Nazera Sadiq Wright, PhD

“DIGITAL GI(RL)S:
MAPPING BLACK GIRLHOOD IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY”
Keynote Lecture

Friday, November 8th, 2019, 5:15 – 6:30 pm
12th Floor Lounge – 113 West 60th Street, NY, NY
Discussant: Maryanne Kowaleski (Fordham University)

SPEAKER BIO
Nazera Sadiq Wright is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. Her first book, Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (University of Illinois Press, 2016) examines early black newspapers, slave narratives, advice columns and etiquette books to tell a literary history of black girlhood from the 1820’s to the early twentieth century. Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century won the 2018 Children’s Literature Association’s Honor Book Award.

KEYNOTE ABSTRACT
To make the history of black girlhood visible and accessible, Nazera sadie Wright developed a Digital Humanities project titled DIGITAL GI(RL)S: Mapping Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century. Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping is a computer system designed to capture and display coordinates and data related to positions on Earth’s surface. Digital GI(RL)S uses GIS mapping technologies and archival sources to trace the movement, lifestyles and cultural activities of black girls living in the Northeast during the 1870’s and 1880’s—the first two decades after Emancipation. By transcribing signatures and inscriptions in black girls’ autograph albums, translating their diaries, and mining program announcements from classical music concerts and performances, Dr. Wright reveals how black girls found freedom through network-building and ephemeral communication practices post-Emancipation. Translating archival research on nineteenth-century black girlhoods onto a digital platform centers black girls in Digital Humanities research.