Resuscitating (and Refusing) Cartesian Representations of Daily Life: When Mobile and Grid Epistemologies of the City Meet

Abstract

In community planning, the consequence of a failed or productive teaching and learning interaction could mean the preservation or destruction of someone’s house, a neighborhood school, a park, all of it. This article elucidates consistencies in how people collaborate across spatial epistemologies and power imbalances for making recommendations and decisions about communities. Holding two epistemic stances in tension—mobile and grid epistemologies—the article follows the arc of a design-based research study, beginning with ethnographic observations of participatory planning meetings, the findings from which informed the design of experimental teaching cases with youth. I focus on two vibrant and consequential instances of people walking others through a storyline of their home communities that moves in and out of epistemic commensurability. Building upon findings from interaction and multi-modal analyses, I argue that consequential learning occurred when people enacted relational attunement in which new spatial imaginaries of a community came into view and were informed by both mobile and grid epistemologies. This article serves as one instance of finding, analyzing, and designing for moments where the roles of “teaching” and “learning” are under negotiation or unknown, and how people engage with one another in politically charged and tenuous interactions.

Acknowledgements

Much of this research was in collaboration with, and made possible by, members of the SLaM Lab at Vanderbilt University (e.g., Rogers Hall, Kevin Leander, Jasmine Ma, and Nathan Phillips), as well as the Mobile City Science research team at New York Hall of Science (Catherine Cramer, Andrés Henríquez, and Anthony Negron). Deborah Silvis was the University of Washington Research Assistant. I do not include them as authors because I conducted this specific analysis and writing solo, though their contributions cannot be overstated.

This manuscript spans more than a decade of relationship building and research in partnership with youth, families, friends, and colleagues. There are a lot of people to thank over ten years and across four cities, so I will hit the highlights. Thank you to Ananda Marin for her thoughtful shepherding of this manuscript across many versions. I am grateful everyday that our paths crossed, and for our friendship. Thank you to all the youth, their families, adult residents, urban planners, and fellow researchers for making these strands of work exist and come together. To Rogers Hall, Jasmine Ma, Nathan Phillips, and Kevin Leander in the SLaM Lab, were we some mobile family back in those days. Special thanks to Rogers Hall and Karen Wieckert for supporting what, at the time, seemed like some hairbrained ideas. Thank you Ben Shapiro, Ty Hollett, and Jennifer Kahn for pushing the work forward in ways we once thought impossible. Thank you also to the Mobile City Science team, Elaina Boytor, Catherine Cramer, Tenè Gray, Andrés Henríquez, Remi Kalir, Anthony Negron, Nichole Pinkard, and Deborah Silvis for expanding the movement, as it were. Special thanks to Chris Hoadley for bringing us together. As always, thank you to Dan Furbish, with Judy Freudenthal’s support, and the Oasis Bike Workshop for igniting people’s passion for learning on-the-move, across generations. Thank you to Susan Jurow and Josh Radinsky for seeing many versions of this manuscript at conferences over the years and always providing generative feedback. Thank you Nashville, New York, Chicago, and Seattle for being places of such wonderful and terrible discovery. Thank you to the three reviewers of this manuscript; the writing reflects the beginning of our generative conversation and I hope we continue the dialog.

Notes

1 I use “Mr.” throughout to highlight the stark age contrast between residents (older) and planners (younger) at these meetings.

2 I use “place” rather than “land,” knowing that the former centers the human experience and meaning-making within a space, rather than centering the earth and potentially new relations a person may come to have with Her. In future work, I hope to move to the latter paradigm written about by Ananda Marin, Megan Bang, Eve Tuck and other scholars, while holding that place-making has been an important lever for power for African-American communities (Hunter & Robinson, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the National Science Foundation [DRL-0816406, 1645102] and the Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education.