Associate Professor of History, Director of Urban Studies Program
Manhattan College

Paper Title
“Slavery in the Bronx: Mapping, Advocacy, and Genealogy in a Digital Public History Project”

Bio
Adam Arenson is Associate Professor of History and the Director of Urban Studies at Manhattan College. He is the author of two award-winning books, The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (Harvard, 2011) and Banking on Beauty: Millard Sheets and Midcentury Commercial Architecture in California (Texas, 2018), and co-editor of Civil War Wests and Frontier Cities. He has taught Slavery in the Bronx as a community-engaged learning course. His current research, After the Underground Railroad, is a political, economic, and family history of African North Americans crossing the U.S.-Canada border, 1860-1930. Learn more at http://adamarenson.com.

@adamarenson
https://adamarenson.com/teaching/

Affiliate Faculty
University of Washington – Bothell

Paper Title
“Augmenting People’s Geographies of Seattle: Digital platforms as participatory methods“

Bio
Amir Sheikh is a transdisciplinary urban environmental researcher, curator, and collaboration builder. He utilizes the tools of anthropology, geography, environmental science, historical inquiry, and arts-based collaboration to examine critical questions about our spatial relationships to landscapes, and their deeply intertwined narratives of place. He is a Curatorial Associate at the Burke Museum at the University of Washington where he is a team leader for The Waterlines Project. He is Affiliate Faculty at the University of Washington-Bothell where he is a program manager for the People’s Geography of Seattle Project. Previously at the University of Washington, he has contributed to a range of environmental modeling and urban planning projects from hyper-local scales to global development contexts, historical ecology research, and the development of place-based curricula bridging the environmental sciences, social sciences, and the humanities.

Independent Researcher

Project Title
“A Tale of Two Cities: Sur Before and After”

Bio
An independent researcher and journalist, Anna Rebrii reports on political and human rights situation in Turkey while engaging with local civil society organizations that address rights violations by the state against the Kurdish ethnic minority. She has published with openDemocracy, The Region and Jadalliyya.

Associate Professor
Wilfrid Laurier University

Paper Title
“Mapping stories: Using GPS as an ethnographic approach to socio-spatial research with families displaced by war”

Bio
Bree Akesson is an Assistant Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Faculty of Social Work and the Associate Director of the Centre for Research on Security Practices. Her research program ranges from micro-level understandings of the experiences of children and families to macro-level projects to strengthen social welfare and mental health systems in crisis-affected countries. 

@bree_akesson
http://www.outofplaceresearch.com

Assistant Professor
University of Alabama

Paper Title
“Mapping and placemaking to understand school segregation and integration”

Bio
Bryan Mann is an Assistant Professor of Educational Policy and Foundations at the University of Alabama. His research explores the effects that school choice and alternative models of education have on various aspects of schooling ecosystems. This research especially focuses on how these models relate to equity in student enrollment placements and how school leaders and policymakers interpret and respond to choice-based developments in their own settings. Dr. Mann received his Ph.D. in Educational Theory and Policy from the Pennsylvania State University.

@bmann_edu

Lecturer
James Cook University

Paper Title
“Visualising Everyday Colonial Commemoration: Digitally Mapping Settler-Colonial Commemoration”

Bio
Bryan Smith is a lecturer at James Cook University (Education). His work looks at how toponymic practices across settler contexts re-inscribe colonial commemorative landscapes and how critical engagements with this can help to reveal the banality of colonial logics of place and history. To support this, he develops Topomapper, a web based application that documents what critical toponymists call the “city-text” (the comemmorative naming practices) for a small Australian city.

https://bryanabsmith.com

Visiting Professor/Scholar
UC Berkeley

Paper Title
“Geography of Charter School Opportunity: The Case of New York City Subway Lines and Education Deserts”

Bio
Charisse Gulosino, an Associate Professor in the Leadership and Policy Studies Program at the University of Memphis, received her Doctorate in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. Charisse was a Postdoctoral Research Associate and a faculty member of the Alfred Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University. Charisse is currently a Visiting Scholar/Professor in the Graduate School of Education and the Center for Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) at University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the evaluation of educational policies and programs with a specific interest in school choice that enhance education access, equity, efficiency and results-based accountability. She has applied geospatial, financial and organizational behavior analyses to the study of charter schools in metropolitan education markets.

https://sites.google.com/site/charissegulosino/

Associate Professor
University of Washington Bothell

Paper Title
“Augmenting People’s Geographies of Seattle: Digital platforms as participatory methods”

Bio
My scholarly work is situated at the intersections of human geography, urban studies, cultural studies, and critical social thought. Integrating approaches from across these fields and using place-based ethnographic and participatory methods in particular, I explore how ordinary, routine practices and taken for granted or ‘common sense’ conceptions of the world are—in and through their embeddedness in space—bound up with broader formations of urbanized culture, power, social reproduction, and political economy. 

Assistant Professor
Hofstra University

Paper Title
“Who’s map? Everyday actions of spatial data resistance”

Bio
Dr. Dalton’s work focuses on web-based geotechnologies and social justice applications in our everyday lives. This work seeks to understand the power geometries, political economies, and cultural priorities that underlie geographic technologies, posing questions about the limits of current geotechnologies and GIS, the ethical conundrums they raise, and the possibilities of better technological relationships. Currently, he is collaborating with Jim Thatcher (Univ. of Washington-Tacoma) to develop a socially situated, contextualized approach to personal location data and resistance data practices. Dr. Dalton also studies and engages in counter-mapping and GIS for social justice, often with a local or regional orientation. 

https://www.hofstra.edu/faculty/

Assistant Director, Center for Spatial Research
M.S. Urban Planning Candidate
Columbia University, GSAPP

Paper Title
“Ethics and/of Uncertainty: Urban Computing’s Synthetic People”

Bio
Dare Brawley is a researcher and designer. She is Assistant Director of the Center for Spatial Research at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University where she is also a degree candidate for the M.S. in Urban Planning. Her work focuses on the interactions of technology, urban governance, and spatial politics using methods from critical urban studies and geographic information systems. Her work has been exhibited and published by the Venice Architecture Biennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture, The Architectural League, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

@darebrawley

Post Doctoral Fellow 
University of Calgary

Paper Title
“Vulnerable Bodies: Relations of visibility in the speculative smart city”

Bio
Debra Mackinnon began a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Calgary in July 2019. Her research explores the intersections of smart cities, governance, and (in)justice. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Queen’s University in 2019. Her PhD titled “Mundane Surveillance: Mobile Applications and Accounting in Business Improvement Areas”, examines the adoption and use of smarter urban technologies for asset management in Canadian Cities. 

Technical Instruction Lead
Barnard College, Columbia University

Paper Title
“(Un)Privileging the Map: A Community Collaboration in Understanding Economic Security”

Bio
Fatima Koli is the Technical Instruction Lead for the Empirical Reasoning Center at Barnard College, where she develops training on empirical methods that incorporate critical understandings of data. She is also currently a Masters Data Science student at Columbia, studying at the intersection of data science, public policy, and cartography. Her interests lie in the ethics of data analysis and in racial justice, particularly through the lens of the criminal justice system and the War on Terror.  

@fatima_koli
https://fatimakoli.github.io

Housing Fellow
New York City Housing Preservation and Development

Paper Title
“Ethics and/of Uncertainty: Urban Computing’s Synthetic People”

Bio
Francis Yu serves as a Housing Fellow for the New York City Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) and Housing Development Corporation (HDC). He currently researches a myriad of affordable housing policy and finance issues specific to programs managed by the two agencies. He is a recent M.S. Urban Planning graduate from GSAPP at Columbia University where he focused on the intersection of community development practices, participatory democracy, and the role technology plays in policy and decision making processes. Prior to his current role, he was a Morgan Stanley/Association of Neighborhood and Housing Development Fellow working with Cooper Square Committee.

@_francisyu

PhD Student
Columbia University

Paper Title
“Ethics and/of Uncertainty: Urban Computing’s Synthetic People”

Bio
Gayatri Kawlra is a PhD student in Urban Planning at Columbia University. Her research explores the ways in which technologies of digital governance are transforming urban politics and issues of spatial justice, and their potential implications for cities in the Global South. Gayatri is also a Research Associate at Columbia World Projects, a recent initiative that aims to bring university research to the ground in the form of projects that have transformational potential, and is working alongside the Digital Identity and Elections Security project teams. Prior to joining her PhD program, Gayatri worked as a Strategy Analyst at the Rockefeller Foundation.

PhD Student
University of Warwick, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies

Paper Title
“Mapping Feminicide”

Bio
Helena Suárez Val is a researcher, activist, and producer focused on human rights and feminism. She has worked as web developer and digital communications strategist with Amnesty International’s International Secretariat, the Global Call to Action against Poverty and Cotidiano Mujer, amongst others. She holds an MA in Gender, Media and Culture from Goldsmiths, University of London and is currently on a PhD programme at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM), University of Warwick. She is the creator of ongoing feminist activist cartography project Feminicidio Uruguay and co-hosts weekly podcast #InformativoFeminista de Nunca en Domingo with Elena Fonseca.

@ladelentes

Data Team Member
Portrait of Unbelonging

Paper Title
“A Tale of Two Cities: Sur Before and After”

Bio
Idil Onen is a historian who has been working on Turkish state violence, nationalist ideologies and ethnic and religious communities. She is currently a data member of Portrait of Unbelonging under the supervision of Dr. Zeynep Devrim Gursel. Portrait of Unbelonging is a public facing digital humanities project which examines the migration pattern of the Armenian diaspora. She has been working to develop a digital mapping project that aims to visualize the destruction of  the UNESCO World Heritage site Sur, Diyarbakir during and after the military operations carried out by the Turkish government against its Kurdish population in 2015-2016.

Instructional Designer
University of Alabama

Paper Title
“Mapping and placemaking to understand school segregation and integration”

Bio
Jaclyn Dudek is a Learning Sciences qualitative researcher focusing on learning-spaces and arts and humanities-focused informal learning. Jaclyn is also a learning, design, and technology specialist with over 10 years experience teaching and designing for higher educational contexts.

Assistant Professor
Chapman University

Paper Title
“Participatory mapping for community empowerment and health equity”

Bio
Jason A. Douglas, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Health Sciences, Crean College of Health and Behavioral Sciences, at Chapman University. He works with community residents and organizations in participatory research contexts to investigate social and environmental determinants of health disparities in disadvantaged communities. 

@JADouglasPhD
https://www.chapman.edu/our-faculty/jason-douglas

Assistant Professor of Psychology
College of Mount Saint Vincent

Paper Title
“Out of Bounds: Mapping Uptown Youth’s Everyday Mobility through Geotagged Photo-making”

Bio
Jennifer M. Pipitone is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx. As an environmental psychologist and experiential educator, her research focuses on understanding human-environment relations in multicultural settings locally and abroad.  Her Environmental Psychology Lab engages with various qualitative and visual methodologies with the overarching goal of understanding ideas about difference. Situated at the nexus of Western youth culture and digital environments, Jennifer’s most recent research project assesses the thematic content of memes in order to explore what issues are representative of, and significant within, the current sociopolitical context.

https://mountsaintvincent.edu/academics/undergraduate-college/areas-of-study/all-areas-of-study/department-of-psychology/faculty/jennifer-pipitone/

PhD Student
Wayne State University 

Paper Title
“How Policymakers Make Sense of and Act On Mapping Data in Education Research”

Bio
Jeremy Singer is a doctoral student in Educational Leadership and Policy at Wayne State University.

Assistant Professor of English
Pace University

Paper Title
“Humanities Futures: Digital Mapping for Democratizing the Production of Knowledge”

Bio
Kelley Kreitz is assistant professor of English and affiliate faculty member in the Latinx Studies program at Pace University in New York City. She is also co-director of the university’s digital humanities center, Babble Lab. Her research on print and digital cultures of the Americas has appeared in American Literary History, English Language Notes, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and the digital mapping project C19LatinoNYC.org. She is working on a book that recovers the leading role played by U.S.-based Latin American writers in the media innovation of the 1880s and 1890s.

@kelley_kreitz
https://www.c19latinonyc.com/

Associate Professor
Fordham University

Paper Title
“Rights based data practice: data justice in virtual spaces and on the ground”

Bio
Dr. Goldkind is an associate professor at Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service as well as the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Technology in Human Services. Dr. Goldkind’s current research has two strands: technology adoption in the human services and the social justice and ethics implications of data collection, use and dissemination in community based organizations. Dr. Goldkind was in residence at the United Nations University Institute on Computing and Society, located in Macau, SAR, China from June to August 2017 with plans to return in the Fall of 2019.  

@brooklyn11210
http://www.laurigoldkind.net

Professor
University of Vermont

Paper Title
“Mapping Critical Historical Geographies of Childhood”

Bio
Meghan Cope explores historical geographies of American childhoods through a social justice lens. She specializes in qualitative research, archives, and creative mappings to learn about the geographic meanings and processes that matter to socially and economically marginalized groups.

@geomeg
http://blog.uvm.edu/mcope-childhoods/

Post Doctorate Fellow
Ben Gurion University, Israel

Paper Title
“Restoration of Erased Landscapes: Counter-Mapping and Memory Activism, the Case of the of Zochrt’s Nakba Map”

Bio
Dr. Orna Vaadia is a Post-doc at the Geography and Environmental Development, Ben Gurion University.  Her research field deal with issues related to critical cartography and the new spatial media and their use as resistance practices.

Research Associate
The New School, Urban Systems Lab

Paper Title
“Distributional Justice of Urban Environmental Quality: Mapping the Mismatches in Supply and Demand of Ecosystem Services in New York City”

Bio
Pablo Herreros is an urban ecologist focused on merging ecological and socioeconomic data to inform urban planners about issues related to environmental justice and climate change adaptation. With New York City as data laboratory, he relies on spatial data science to produce visually impactful maps that report on the distribution of environmental risks and services across different socioeconomic groups. He recently graduated from the MSc programme Urban Environmental Management in Wageningen University, and is currently a research associate at the Urban Systems Lab. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pablo-herreros-cantis/

Visiting Professor of History
Fordham University

Paper Title
“Digital Sing Sing: Specters of the Incarcerated“

Bio
Roger Panetta Ph.D. is a retired history professor who taught at Fordham University. He edited Westchester: The American Suburb(Fordham University Press 2006) and Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture (Fordham University Press 2009). He co-edited On Shattered Ground: A Civil War Mosaic (Penguin books 2013). He also co-authored The Hudson: An Illustrated Guide to the Living River (Rutgers University Press rev. second edition 2010) and authored The Tappan Zee and the Forging of the Rockland Suburb (Historical Society of Rockland County 2010) and Kingston: The IBM Years (Overlook Press 2014). He served as curator of the Hudson River Digital Collection at Fordham University and was elected to the New York Academy of History. He is currently working on The Inescapable Shadow: A History of the Original Sing Sing Cell Block 1825-1925 and The Rise of the Prison Museum in America.