Michele Masucci

Toward Mentoring as Feminist Praxis: Strategies for ourselves and others

In this paper, we outline some strategies that we have found useful in our everyday practices as faculty members at a variety of universities in Canada and the USA. We first set a framework for being a mentor while engaging feminist praxis. We then discuss strategies that would be useful in choosing a mentor as well as being a mentor; for mentoring undergraduate students as well as graduate students. We conclude by suggesting that working toward self-mentoring is a goal.

The Implications of Including Women's Daily Lives in a Feminist GIScience

In this paper, we argue that a feminist geographical analysis that examines women as active agents in their daily lives, pays attention to the multiplicity of women’s experiences in relational space, and values knowledge for transformative purposes, provides insights as to how GIScience might develop in the near future. We draw upon our research with two different community organizations in North Philadelphia to show how a feminist geographical analysis can shape the conceptualization of a community GIS. We argue that collaborative work with community organizations based on “a view from below” necessitates alternative institutional arrangements while providing rich data to better understand the intersection of daily life and information and communication technologies (ICT) as experienced, in the particular case of our work, by poor women. Our research illustrates that understanding ICT frameworks from the perspective of women and in the context of their daily lives has important implications for GIScience.

Exploring youth socio-spatial perceptions of higher education landscapes through sketch maps

Previous research on broadening participation in higher education and Science Technology Engineering and Math has inadequately examined the role of place. This article explores the socio-spatial perceptions of youth of a college campus and changes in perceptions youth experience during their transition from being a university neighbor to becoming part of a university community. This study uses sketch maps and qualitative Geographic Information Systems to document the changing perceptions of 43 youth aged 14–18 during their participation in a university program. The results suggest that some students started to identify with campus spaces as a university student or employee rather than as a neighbor of the university.

Libraries at the Crossroads of the Digital Content Divide: Pathways for Information Continuity in a Youth-Led Geospatial Technology Program

This article reviews the implementation and outcomes of a social action research, university-community partnership titled Building Information Technology Skills (BITS). BITS trains high school–age youth in geographic field methods to gather and analyze geospatial information as a means of fostering their civic engagement and motivation to persist in the study of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) disciplines. The program was designed from its inception to be culturally, historically, and geographically relevant. In order to accomplish this, the authors leveraged access to and use of the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection as a beginning point for the youth in the program to consider and focus on the relationships between place, history, and digital geospatial technologies. This was achieved by introducing the youth involved in the program to geographic information through an inventory of historic markers depicting African American sites of interest in Philadelphia. The primary aim of the social action methods employed was to simultaneously increase the interest, engagement and geographic skills among the youth participants and to create a digital archive related to the historic markers that could in and of itself become a resource for the education of youth and community members in Philadelphia. Use of the Blockson Collection anchored the programs goals of a) advancing digital inclusion and digital content creation among relatively under-represented communities and b) promoting youth empowerment by fostering the development of STEM skills and engagement within a university setting. In grounding the acquisition of field methods and geospatial information technology skills in an understanding of local history and culture, the BITS program mutually reinforces the dual-objective of advancing STEM engagement and creating a more-empowering geography for students to learn from.