Models of Citizenship: A Comparative Analysis of Crowdsourced and Local Mapping Projects
Date
2021-09-23
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Abstract
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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digital geographies, crowdsourcing, crowdsourced mapping, citizenship, critical technology studies, Latin American studies, digital technologies, informal settlements, humanitarian mapping
Citation
Ambrose, A. D. (2021). Models of Citizenship: A Comparative Analysis of Crowdsourced and Local Mapping Projects (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.