Innovative Critical Approaches to Place: Teaching Narrative Mapping in Southern New Mexico Brings GIS to an Expanded Array of Disciplines
As GIS becomes more approachable and more powerful as it advances, it is reaching disciplines that were almost inconceivable a few short years ago. The Critical Approaches to Place: Teaching Narrative Mapping initiative from New Mexico State Univer... is a manifestation of precisely this trend. This project is bringing GIS to the fingertips of the university's researchers, their teaching faculty, and students, particularly in the arts and humanities.
I was honored to be a part of this effort, as it embodies one of the core missions of the Esri education team--to bring spatial thinking and GIS tools and methods to disciplines outside its traditional core. It also meshed well with Esri's new social science research initiative. I was brought in to conduct workshops in web mapping applications, including but not limited to ArcGIS Story Maps (here is some of the content I created for this effort). As I often advocate that the audience watching my videos and attending my career workshops seize opportunities to work with a group that is completely "outside of your normal wheelhouse", I jumped at the opportunity here to work with students and faculty in fine arts and humanities. It turned out that the geo-enviro community and I have much in common with this arts and humanities: Space and place are intertwined with telling stories through narrative, music, painting, and sculpture. We have a deep connection with space and GIS can bring the digital and analog tools together in innovative and creative ways. See a few of the resulting story maps here.
Selected story maps from the NMSU community as a result of this project.
I learned a great deal from Professor Kerry Banazek and Professor Eric Magrane and all those involved in this initiative, namely, that environmental and place-based themes are often framed vis-à-vis “problems that require address by STEM disciplines, but the humanities offer essential insights into place, the environment, and entanglement of related issues with cultural dynamics and power imbalances." Global environmental challenges encapsulated by the designation of the “Anthropocene,” a proposed geologic epoch that marks human impact on the Earth, have facilitated a growth of geohumanities and aligned environmental humanities research, but organized pedagogical programs in this vein remain relatively few--hence the importance of this effort at NMSU.
While environmental challenges such as climate change, population dynamics, water, and energy are global in scope, they play out in particular ways in particular places and scales. The university is located in the Chihuahuan Desert, where sustainability issues such as water use, agriculture, and the urban heat island effect are of critical importance—and are intertwined with social challenges along the US/Mexico border.
New Mexico State University: Photographs I took during one of my campus visits there.
It has been wonderful to serve as one of the industry partners to NMSU in this initiative, and it fits perfectly into the university's strong history of educational outreach and successful partnership with business and nonprofit organizations. I encourage you to investigate this initiative and consider whether components will work on your own campus.