Social learning as an analytical lens for co-creative planning

This article highlights the psychological dimension of social learning. Insights from psychology address the interrelated role of personal and group dynamics in social learning. This can provide a useful starting point for a rewarding use of social learning as an analytical tool in co-creative planning. Such an approach to social learning proves beneficial to (i) identify both positive and negative potential effects of social learning, (ii) untangle hidden power relationships at play at individual and small group levels in relation to social psychological factors, and (iii) discern the role of individuals and small groups within their larger contexts. The findings are empirically illustrated with a case of incremental urban development in Groningen, the Netherlands.     

A hard binary to shake: The limitations and possibilities of teaching GIS critically

This paper builds upon studies employing a syllabi-based methodology that suggest a tendency for critical geographic information science (GIS) courses to emphasize reading/discussion about GIS without actually doing GIS, and for traditional GIS instruction courses to emphasize the technical capacities of GIS software without incorporating critical theory in substantive ways. However, through ethnographic evidence we reveal that there is likely more innovative theory-practice transcending pedagogies being utilized than would necessarily show up in such a syllabi-based methodology. There are also very real and differentially manifest pragmatic, departmental, and institutional barriers in place to effectively incorporating critical social theory into courses that actually do GIS. We first catalogue these barriers as a means of ascertaining what can (and cannot) be done to overcome them through GIS pedagogic innovation. We then outline the (often-veiled) pedagogic strategies deployed by critical GIS scholars today to navigate and circumvent these barriers.     

Teaching critical open GIS

Higher-education geographic information system (GIS) curricula largely marginalize and separate instruction of critical GIS and open GIS, paralleling a divide between GIS and non-GIS in geography. GIS is typically represented as a singular, infallibly objective, and universally applicable technology. GIS generally dismisses the critiques from human geography, while critical human geography dismisses GIS for its association with positivism and unethical applications. Teaching critical open GIS may bridge this divide, creating a transformative pedagogical space for human geography to affectively and effectively engage with open GIS technology at the level of code. Critical open GIS students practice and critique GIS as conflicted insiders, bridging the divide between GIS and non-GIS in their geography education. Reviews of GIS curricula find support for teaching critical and open GIS, but reviews of texts and syllabi confirm their marginalization and separation. A new critical open GIS course is introduced, using GIS in development and political ecology as integrative frameworks.     

Red Foxes in the Filing Cabinet: Günter Tembrock's Image Collection and Media Use in Mid-Century Ethology**

This paper considers the epistemic career of visual media in ethology in the mid-20th century. Above all, ethologists claimed close contact with research animals and drew scientific evidence from these human-animal communities, particularly in public relations. However, if we look into the toolboxes of comparative behavioral biologists, it becomes evident that scientifically valid research results were primarily obtained by experimenting with model images. These visual specimens tell a technical story of the methodological requirements in behavioral science necessary to bridge everyday observations between the laboratory and the field. By neutralizing individual traces of animal bodies as well as their observers, they prompted the abstraction of ethological hypotheses. The case study of East-German biologist Günter Tembrock (1918–2011), who maintained his own collection of newspaper clippings, drawings, photographs, and films, offers a new perspective on the methodological development of this field. Furthermore, this article contributes to a scholarly discussion geared toward expanding the spaces of ethological research. My analysis of the image collections of the Forschungsstätte für Tierpsychologie presents the archive as a relevant site of study in the history of ethology.     

Critical spatial learning: participatory mapping,spatial histories,and youth civic engagement

As digital technologies become ubiquitous in many places, scholars of civic engagement, youth and political life, and geographic education have explored the potential of teaching critical and spatial thinking through digital technologies. This paper examines interactive digital mapping as a technology environment for teaching and practicing critical spatial thinking, in relation to civic engagement. From this participatory and dialogic mapping project with teenage girls in Seattle, Washington, we develop a conceptualization of critical spatial thinking that emphasizes how social and spatial processes intertwine to generate societal inequalities and show how this learning informs students’ social and spatial civic responses. We show how interactive digital mapping pedagogies offer students an opportunity to develop awareness of what happens in their urban geographies, but also how and what they might do to intervene.     

Energy geographies: thinking critically about energy issues in the classroom

Energy issues are becoming increasingly common subjects of instruction in undergraduate- and graduate-level classrooms across a variety of disciplines. The interdisciplinary character of energy studies provides geographers with a great opportunity to present different applied and theoretical approaches to help students conceptualize energy issues from a critical perspective. This article presents a class intervention as an example of how to incorporate geographic concepts and political economic theory into the classroom to help students understand the social, political, economic, and environmental implications of energy production, distribution, and consumption at multiple scales from a critical perspective.     

Fostering deeper critical inquiry with causal layered analysis

Causal layered analysis (CLA) is a technique that enables deeper critical inquiry through a structured exploration of four layers of causation. CLA’s layers reach down from the surface litany of media understanding, through the layer of systemic causes identified by conventional research, to underpinning worldviews, ideologies and philosophies, and deep subconscious drivers that manifest in myth and metaphor. CLA applies equally to geographical research’s socioculturally constructed situations and to the exploration of individual meta-cognition and motivation through pedagogic research. Outcomes, explored through reflective journals and term papers, suggest that CLA helps more, especially middle achievement, learners discover deeper structures within their studies.     

Strange encounters: a dialogue on cultural geography across the political divide

Disagreement is a fundamental aspect of scholarly inquiry, yet it is exceedingly rare for scholars on opposite sides of the political spectrum to engage in a sustained dialogue across the political divide. This article seeks to contribute to precisely such a dialogue with specific reference to the field of cultural geography. The discussion featured herein consists of an encounter between “critical” and “conservative” approaches to cultural geography in the form of a back-and-forth exchange of arguments and counter-arguments by the interlocutors. The dialogue covers a wide range of issues, including the cultural politics of essentialism, white supremacy, racial segregation, patriarchy, traditional morality, secularism, justice, authority, friendship, difference-as-strangeness, and the very question of disagreement itself. The broader aim of this dialogical intervention is not to find some sort of common ground that will resolve all differences but rather to explore what those differences are with the hope of opening up a space for more constructive dialogue on cultural geography across the political divide.     

Negotiating Particularity in Neoliberalism Studies: Tracing Development Strategies Across Neoliberal Urban Governance Projects

A reading of critical perspectives on neoliberalism would suggest that it is dead but dominant, a revanchist zombie that appears paradoxically ubiquitous despite its inherent idiosyncrasy. We argue that neoliberalism's paradoxical death, dominance, and retrenchment can be interpreted by analyzing the dialectic of universalizing processes and particular forms within capitalism. Neoliberal projects draw political import from systemic, universalizing tendencies in capitalism, particularly those ideological processes by which contradictions and crises come to be discursively, institutionally, and politically conceptualized within the same paradigm from which they emerged. Building on well developed research frameworks in neoliberalism studies, we propose a set of analytical tools to interpret links between particular projects and homogenizing practices. We illustrate this with a case study of urban “megaevents” (eg Olympic Games or football World Cup), demonstrating how ideological commitments to event‐based development strategies allow both the homogenizing imposition of entrepreneurial urban policy, and localized innovations in urban governance.     

Revelation and Resolution: Religion as the Key to Cognition,Power, and History in Anthropology

Religion is often considered as key to interpreting human psychological and social processes. Yet, the notion that ritual performance and religious beliefs offer a transparent portal onto the inner workings of culture, power relations, historical change, and cognition are subject to critique. The political and psychological implications of ritual practice differ considerably from culture to culture and religion defies reduction to a single explanatory or etiological framework. Anthropologists best learn about emic and etic understandings of belief by interpreting the historically varied articulations of religious experience with other social domains.