Ground-truthing as Critical Race Feminista Methodology: toward an embodied and community-centered GIS in educational inquiry

Abstract

This article extends the methodological proposal of “ground-truthing” in Critical Race Spatial Analysis (CRSA) to consider GIS as Critical Race Feminista Methodology (CRFM). Traditionally, GIS technicians are sent into the field to verify remote-sensing data via “ground-truthing.” This process was repurposed in CRSA to “ground” mapmaking in the spatial wisdom of Communities of Color to examine “color-lines” and their everyday impact. Missing in this initial (re)conceptualization was the theoretical and methodological sensitivity to examine spatiality in these experiences—the more intimate aspects of space that center on identity and knowledge of place. The authors engage CRFM to extend ground-truthing to capture structural and embodied experiences in socio-spatial relationships by redefining technical GIS approaches key to ground-truthing—projection, layers, scale, and visualization. They conclude with implications for the ongoing practice of GIS, particularly the merits of ground-truthing as CRFM in educational research.

Keywords:

• Ground-truthing
• critical race spatial analysis
• geographic information systems (GIS)
• spatiality
• Critical Race Feminista Methodology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 English translation: When we made maps, we controlled how we defined home to the public. This was more than just redrawing boundaries of the Northwest neighborhood. It was defining its meaning, its people, its relationships, and its purpose. It was about authoring the stories of struggle, joy, and possibility about a place—a home—that matters so much to us.

2 All research collaborators referenced in this article are given pseudonyms.

3 In her discussion of the Black home as a site of resistance, hooks (1990) describes the feeling of a space and how racism can be physically and emotionally experienced. For hooks there is a visceral, embodied reaction that comes from walking through an area where it is clearly understood that one is not welcomed.

4 In this paper, we choose not to capitalize white and do choose to capitalize Black, Chicanx, Latinx, Communities of Color, and other similar iterations. This decision is informed by critical scholarship and activism. For example, Dumas (2016) writes that Black is a “self-determined name of a racialized social group that shares a specific set of histories, cultural processes, and imagined and performed kinships” (pp. 12–13). white, on the other hand, is a socially constructed category that was created for the purposes of dominance and exclusion; it “does not describe a group with a sense of common experiences or kinship outside of acts of colonization or terror” (p. 13).

5 In GIS practice, “ground-truthing” is traditionally spelled as two words, without the hyphen. We have chosen to link “ground” and “truth” with a hyphen to emphasize the inextricable connection between these two words in redefining “ground-truthing” in this paper. We include a hyphen as a grammatical marker that makes visible this connection, while underscoring the tension in linking these concepts through a geospatial mapping platform, such as GIS.

6 We intentionally place a “/” between “im” and “migrant” to disrupt the normalized asymmetrical relationship im/migrants are assumed to have with the United States. Transnational migration is not always one-directional. Im/migrants may migrate back and forth from the U.S. and their home countries, send remittances to family members outside of the U.S., and/or disidentify with citizenship structures and efforts to assimilate. To represent these varied and complex realities more accurately, we chose to use “im/migrant” in lieu of “immigrant” as a grammatical move toward social and racial justice.

7 This phrase is depicted on the mural of the Escuela Primaria Rebelde Autonoma Zapatista in Oventic, Chiapas. English translation: “different worlds, where many true worlds with truths fit.”