Keynote Address
GoFundUS: A Critical and Creative GIS and Geovisualization Project to Unmap and Understand Inequalities in Medical Crowdfunding
Jin-Kyu Jung, School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell and Department of Geography at the University of Washington Seattle. Nora Kenworthy, School of Nursing and Health Studies at the University of Washington Bothell and Departments of Global Health and Anthropology at UW Seattle.
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.
Jin-Kyu Jung is an Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Department of Geography at the University of Washington Seattle. He received a PhD in Geography and a M.U.P. in Urban Planning from State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY-Buffalo), and a BA in Urban Engineering in Pusan National University in South Korea. He is an urban geographer/planner whose interdisciplinary research program contributes to critical, qualitative and creative possibilities of GIS and geographic visualization in understanding socio-spatial processes and politics of urban space in an engaged way.
Nora Kenworthy is an Associate Professor in the School of Nursing and Health Studies at the University of Washington (UW) Bothell, and holds adjunct faculty positions in the Departments of Global Health and Anthropology at UW Seattle. Her research, teaching, and public outreach explores the unintended impacts and politics of charitable health initiatives for communities. More broadly, her work tracks how digital technologies, commercial interests, and political inequities are key determinants shaping health in the US and globally. She is currently finishing up a multi-year, collaborative project on the use of crowdfunding for personal healthcare expenses, and its implications for health equity and health financing. She holds a PhD and MA from Columbia University and a BA from Williams College.