GoFundUS: A Critical and Creative GIS and Geovisualization Project to Unmap and Understand Inequalities in Medical Crowdfunding

What would be the ways in which digital spatial information and mapping can constitute the means for, and be part of, social transformation, confronting/contesting social, spatial, and digital health inequality in the era of Big Data and data spectacle? What interventions from critical/qualitative/creative GIS and geovisualization could demonstrate how digital data could be reappropriated and repurposed to produce spatial knowledges that are situated, reflexive, non-masculinist, emotional/affective, inclusive, and polyvocal and flexible rather than foundational? After years of intensive ethnographic, quantitative, and geospatial efforts to understand the experiences of people using a medical crowdfunding campaign like GoFundMe, we embarked on a project to develop a public interactive web map site—GofundUS—which uses non-linear ‘storyscapes’ to disrupt the affects, narratives, and ontologies of crowdfunding platforms, creating transformative spaces for new affective engagements, knowledges, and narratives to emerge. Our presentation will showcase and critically analyze some of the speculative strategies used to create these storyscapes, including polyvocal composite poetry from campaign text fragments, creatively reconstituted campaign pages embedded with social “metadata” that is typically invisible to platform users, and creative geovisualizations that map the affective and unknowable terrains of crowdfunding economies. The talk will also demonstrate how multi-epistemological ‘processual’ approaches of making, engaging, and representing spatial knowledge and complexity can transcend the persistent limitations of scientific/quantitative social scientific GIS mapping approaches.