GIS for Social Justice
Teaching GIS in the Liberal Arts:
The courses below are taught by Dr. Keith Reeves at Swarthmore College. The added GIS, cartography, and geovisualization material is made possible by the Lang Center’s Urban Inequality & Incarceration Program. Each set of modules were created to supplement a rigorous syllabus of readings, policy papers, and discussion. For more information regarding instructional materials, please contact us using the form at the bottom of the page.
The Courses:
Pols 20C — Policing, Prosecution, and Racial (In)Justice in America
Introduction to dot density maps, QGIS, choropleth maps, crime data, and geovisualization.
Pols 28 — The Urban Underclass and Public Policy
An introduction to thematic cartography using Opportunity Atlas and its data.
Most Recent Articles:
Interested in Learning More?
The collection of materials here explore the issues of social justice from a data science and geospatial perspective. That is, what types of analyses and visualizations might we do to investigate the nature of social advantage, policing, incarceration, and justice?
To this end, we work with a variety of datasets related to stop-and-frisk reports, crime incidents, arrests, jail and prison populations, police jurisdiction boundaries, city land-use, and the United States Census. By engaging with these materials, students will have the skills to support policy narratives and arguments with reference maps and meaningful geospatial graphics.
Archives:
A Review of the Opportunity Atlas
Middlebury student and Rhumbline intern Leo Sovell-Fernandez reviews the website The Opportunity Atlas and provides a brief tutorial. The website was created by researchers at the Census Bureau and Harvard University and enables users to analyze the geography of social mobility in the US.
