Building a Community Geography Lab

Abstract:

Community Geography is an emerging subfield that focuses on working with and for local residents to “do” geography with a goal of affecting social and environmental change. In the past decade much work has been done in this field, most of it pursued by individual researcher-activists at universities across the U.S.(and beyond). But increasingly community geographers see value in working with their home institutions to create larger programs that integrate undergraduate and graduate students as well as the college itself: incorporating community geography into pedagogy as well as the physical and digital infrastructure of the university. This paper will briefly discuss the roots and goals of community geography before focusing attention on how these approaches might inform a future of community geography labs in geography departments, highlighting ideas and examples from across the country.   

Keywords: community geography, participatory GIS, applied geography

Authors: