Browsing by Author "Burns, Ryan"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    A City of Digital Engagement (Instagram)
    (2019-01) Burns, Ryan
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    A COVID-19 panacea in digital technologies? Challenges for democracy and higher education
    (SAGE : Dialogues in Human Geography, 2020-06-02) Burns, Ryan
    Universities have transitioned to online education in order to slow the spread of COVID-19. This transition mobilizes the technological utopian imaginary that digital technologies can rescue populations from the disease. It also raises the risk of deepening neoliberal educational reforms and, by extension, poses a threat to democracy itself. This commentary explores this risk and suggests ways to resist the resulting neoliberalization of education that it could entail.
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    Critical Geographies of Biotechnology Governance: A Case Study of Genetically Modified Mosquitoes for Vector-Borne Disease Control
    (2024-07-03) Sihota, Roshanne; Blue, Gwendolyn; Burns, Ryan; Wasmuth, James
    Biotechnology governance has garnered significant attention in the last decade. One notable example is the use of genetically modified mosquitoes (GMMs) to control vector-borne diseases (VBDs) such as malaria and dengue fever. While promising, GMMs are controversial. Some scientists and public health agencies support GMMs, however not all groups welcome biotechnology as a disease control measure. To date, most field trials have been met with controversial reception. While extensive literature addresses GMM governance, gaps remain including attention to geographical scale and scientific experts’ perspectives on engagement in governance processes. Considering these gaps, the objective of this thesis is to examine academic debates in GMM governance. Using methods such as a scoping review, and semi-structured qualitative interviews (n = 14), this thesis asks two interrelated questions. Drawing on critical geographies of scale, the first question asks: How is scale represented in the academic literature on GMM governance, and what power dynamics do representations of scale uphold or challenge? Drawing on theories of public engagement in science and technology studies (STS), the second question asks: What perspectives do scientific experts hold regarding public engagement for GMMs? First, key findings reveal that in the academic literature, GMM governance is largely framed through global/local scalar binaries which run the risk of perpetuating historical inequalities between regions and groups in ways that limit the potential for democratic engagement. Second, key findings spotlight how the values and visions of scientific experts, who are at the forefront of GMM development, play a central role in how public engagement unfolds. While participants valued the principle of engagement as an integral part of ethical research, most did not consider integrating engagement into research agenda-setting processes beyond GMM field trials. A critical geography lens provides an opportunity to examine how ideas and values around GMMs are embedded in sociocultural contexts. This research is timely given that these applications are in the early stages of development and oversight frameworks are evolving.
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    Mapping Our Cities for All as VGI Research: Completeness and Insights of a Crowdsourced Business Accessibility Dataset
    (2022-04) Copley, Russell; Victoria, Fast; Burns, Ryan; Edwards, Meaghan
    Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is a form of crowdsourcing which deals with spatial information. Given the spatial nature of accessibility barriers, the proliferation of crowdsourcing apps made by and for disabled people has provided easy-to-interpret repositories for business accessibility information. Claims made with VGI data are related to the dataset’s quality—such as positional accuracy, completeness, temporal accuracy, among others—and our research question answers the ‘completeness’ component of disability advocacy company AccessNow’s dataset. While previous work has theorized the potential of VGI for advancing civil rights or have investigated the utility of OpenStreetMap or Project Sidewalk as viable accessibility platforms, minimal work has applied data quality techniques to such data. Through the joint University of Calgary/AccessNow “Mapping Our Cities for All” (MOCA) initiative, 37 people were hired to map business districts in Vancouver, BC; Calgary, AB; Ottawa, ON; and 17 rural municipalities in Alberta. Using RStudio and ArcGIS Pro, we conducted completeness assessments for all study regions before exploring business accessibility through both spatial and industrial lenses. The findings of the MOCA project are being reported to Accessibility Standards Canada as a first attempt at quantifying our baseline level of accessibility, and which industries and regions could benefit from further investment, to work towards the goal of building a more accessible society.
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    Models of Citizenship: A Comparative Analysis of Crowdsourced and Local Mapping Projects
    (2021-09-23) Ambrose, Angela Diane; Burns, Ryan; Farías, Mónica; Kraay, Hendrik
    Citizenship is contested, re-negotiated, and evaluated in shifting sociopolitical and economic contexts: it is scalar, spatialized, embedded with power relations and exclusionary at its foundations. Digital technologies shift conceptualizations of citizenship in humanitarian, legal, social and urban development work contexts. Digital technologies in these contexts produce emergent, digitized power asymmetries between mappers and the communities they map, including places and ideas that are translated into mapped data. These power asymmetries are characterized by dominant forms of knowledge producing digital categories through which mapped individuals become perceived, reinforcing stigmatized views of the Other. This thesis details a cross-organizational case study undertaken in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which explored how citizenship is modulated by, and embedded within, digital mapping practices and the organizational approaches that underlie them. In this research I engage with ways that citizenship is both conceptualized and performed in digital mapping projects. I primarily argue that digital citizenship, a performative tool, is a key way that socially excluded communities seek justice within digital mapping practices and that crowdsourced mapping volunteers in turn perform a digital citizenship that introduces complex power dynamics.
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    Remaking Nature Through Public Participation in Resilient Calgary
    (2022-01) Welker, Preston; Burns, Ryan; Rosol, Marit; Blue, Gwendolyn; Keough, Noel
    Cities around the world are embracing agendas to build urban resilience, in part by harnessing “nature” and engaging citizens. Critical geographers have argued that top-down resilience agendas deploy frameworks that homogenize understandings of “urban natures”, legitimate technocratic approaches to urbanism, and disempower citizens. These scholars call for in-depth case studies that situate “urban natures” to bring out crucial politics of how knowledges of these phenomena are used in contexts of contested urbanization. This thesis is an intensive qualitative case study of public participation in urban resilience governance in The City of Calgary, following the 2013 Alberta floods. Through a scholar-activist approach, I employ participant observation and semi-structured interview methods to bring out politics in the redevelopment of a multi-functional infrastructure, the Sunnyside Flood Barrier. Drawing from theory on the “social production of nature” – where discourse and materiality are entangled and iteratively reproduced – I argue that processes of public participation in urban resilience governance operate as power-laden “technologies” in the social production of nature, and can depoliticize contested urban transformations. An analysis of two such technologies – community engagement and a triple bottom line analysis – illuminates how power operates through participatory knowledge production activities to remake actors’ conceptualizations of “nature” in ways that influence decision making and urbanization. The study also expands on participant “counter-conduct”, documenting how this subtle form of resistance can build citizen power in the process. I conclude that public participation offers powerful tools in the social production of nature however, additional research and practice are needed to explore how “nature” might be remade in radical alternative ways that shift our collective praxis towards more sustainable, and socially and environmentally just futures.
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    Smart Cities: Who Cares?
    (SAGE : EPA: Economy and Space, 2020-07-15) Burns, Ryan; Andrucki, Max J.
    The growing critical research agenda on smart cities and open data programs has largely overlooked the body-subjects that enable its (re)production. The “ideal” subject of the smart city is prefigured as tech-savvy, independent, and uber-modern, able to produce digital data and analyze it to hold city government “accountable.” In this subject production, however, we argue that smart cities continue to rely on forms of reproductive labor that are invisibilized in current research and public discourse: We focus here on unpaid domestic labor, low-paid caring and reproductive labor, and volunteer work. We introduce the term “digital care worker” to capture a new category of reproductive worker in the smart city—voluntary and low-paid data producers and analyzers such as those who undertake “hackathons,” usually expected to do so out of love for their cities and communities. Drawing on geographies of care and Eve Sedgwick’s notion of the “closet.” we argue that the invisibility of digital caring laborers exists in dialectic relation to the spectacularization of particular body-subjects charged with caring for the smart city. Drawing on a discourse analysis of promotional materials and mission statements of key open data advocacy organizations, we propose the idea of “marginalized coder incubators,” who deploy assimilationist rhetoric to spectacularize the voluntary labor of women, people of color, and LGBTQ communities that is ultimately performed for the benefit of elites in the neoliberalizing city.
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    Waste Collection Technologies, Informal Waste Pickers, and Urban Exclusion: A Case Study of Calgary
    (2020-09-22) Adeyemi, Dare Moses; Burns, Ryan; Smart, Alan; Tam, Chui Ling; Lucas, Jack
    Waste management engineers and administrators have conceived of technological efficiency and optimization as the “modern” way to sustainable waste collection and management. This instrumental ideology of technology offers a progressive chant for modern waste collection technologies and a less enthusiastic one for the tools and techniques of informal waste pickers. Few efforts have gone into conceptualizing the social context and implication of waste collection technologies. In this thesis, I used a qualitative case study to explore the impact of residential waste collection technologies on the exclusion of informal waste pickers in Calgary. I draw on Andrew Feenberg's critical theory of technology to situate waste collection technologies within social, economic, and political contexts in Calgary. I argue that the social relations of ownership and control over waste collection technologies in Calgary illustrate complex and contested values, norms, and privileges, which create an unequal social, material, and technical relationship contributing to the exclusion of pickers and the exploitation of labor and waste. Calgary’s new curbside program protects the social norms of private asset ownership and consumerism, as well as the interest of private homeowners and some bureaucratic and large capitalist individuals in Calgary. A local third-sector organization, Calgary Can, has resisted these acts through its hook program; local bottle pickers have also resisted them through their collection activity and technologies. These realities push back against the colloquial understanding of modern waste collection technologies as value-free, a conception that dominates academic research and city policies and programs in waste management.
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    Where’s the database in digital ethnography? Exploring database ethnography for open data research
    (SAGE : Qualitative Research, 2019-01) Burns, Ryan; Wark, Grace
    Contemporary cities are witnessing momentous shifts in how institutions and individuals produce and circulate data. Despite recent trends claiming that anyone can create and use data, cities remain marked by persistently uneven access and usage of digital technologies. This is the case as well within the emergent phenomenon of the ‘smart city,’ where open data are a key strategy for achieving ‘smartness,’ and increasingly constitute a fundamental dimension of urban life, governance, economic activity, and epistemology. The digital ethnography has extended traditional ethnographic research practices into such digital realms, yet its applicability within open data and smart cities is unclear. The method has tended to overlook the important roles of particular digital artifacts such as the database in structuring and producing knowledge. In this paper, we develop the database ethnography as a rich methodological resource for open data research. This approach centers the database as a key site for the production and materialization of social meaning. The database ethnography draws attention to the ways digital choices and practices—around database design, schema, data models, and so on—leave traces through time. From these traces, we may infer lessons about how phenomena come to be encoded as data and acted upon in urban contexts. Open databases are, in other words, key ways in which knowledges about the smart city are framed, delimited, and represented. More specifically, we argue that open databases limit data types, categorize and classify data to align with technical specifications, reflect the database designer’s episteme, and (re)produce conceptions of the world. We substantiate these claims through a database ethnography of the open data portal for the city of Calgary, in Western Canada.