About

Professor and Chair of the UW Department of Geography, co-founder of the Relational Poverty Network (with Vicky Lawson), past editor of Progress in Human Geography (2013- 2018). Proud teacher and advisor to 2+ decades of undergrad and grad students at DePaul University, University of Arizona, and University of Washington. Winner of UW Distinguished Teaching Award and Richard Morrill Public Outreach Award. Top 3 list: Family & friends, riding my bike, pie for breakfast. Research and teaching: Urban geography, relational poverty studies, digital geographies, visual methods.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Law
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Aesthetics
• Geography
• Philosophy
• Political economy
• Gender studies
• Epistemology
• Economics
• Development economics

Selected publications

• Digital Geographies and The City: Queer Methodologies of Hope

  Media and Communication · 2026-01-08

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Critical digital geographies scholarship has a well-developed repertoire for theorizing adverse relations between technology, media, society, and space, setting up an enduring ambivalence in the analysis of minor, small-scale, improvisational efforts to rewrite these relations. At this impasse, I argue for an intentional turn to analytic frames rooted in queer of color critique, such as methodologies of hope. This approach emerges from Jose Esteban Muñoz’s writings on queer futurities, which he crafted as an epistemological-political frame for apprehending hope, justice, and life-affirming futures from positions of deep material and ideological exclusion. Muñoz’s approach offers vital off-ramps from the theoretical cycles of negation found in much critical digital geography thought. My article demonstrates how orienting to minoritarian digital activisms through a queer methodology of hope illuminates dynamic cycles of critique and creation that transgress accepted limits to urban inhabitations and demonstrate normatively unthinkable, yet already existing, possibilities for being and being in relation in the city. I demonstrate this approach through a close reading of the digital mediations and mediatizations advanced in the social media tactics of Stop the Sweeps Seattle, a local collective fighting the systematic eviction of tent encampments of unsheltered people by municipal authorities. A queer relational analysis of these emplaced politics illuminates the digital, material, and ideological pathways they forge toward staying put and living well in the city against seemingly impossible odds.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Computational urbanisms & insurgent mediations of the city: Stop the Sweeps

  Digital Geography and Society · 2025-10-25 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper considers digital and emplaced struggles over urban homelessness, specifically the computational and sociospatial politics of municipal systems of tent encampment removal and of the efforts of autonomous collectives to resist sweeps and support encampment dwellers. I theorize municipal systems of tent encampment removal as a form of administrative-algorithmic governance structured around the logics and practices of computation urbanism and trace their entanglements with liberal poverty governance. Through a close reading of the City of Seattle's encampment removal system, I show how these overlapping logics enable a tightly integrated self-referential system of datafication, problematization and justification that overdetermines the removability of encampments and reaffirms property and propertied personhood as (the only) legitimate basis for claims to space and permanence. My analysis takes seriously ongoing calls for orienting to the incompleteness of such computational rationalities, reading for the presence and significance of insurgent mediations that refuse these logics and generate other possible urban futures. To this end, I read the digital activism and mutual aid work of a local collective known as Stop the Sweeps Seattle as insurgent mediations of the city, examining the social and spatial claims they advance in visual and narrative representations circulated via social media. My analysis of Stop the Sweeps Seattle's content reveals a public archive of sweeps that refuses dominant computational and poverty governance logics and circulates already-existing possibilities for urban inhabitations anchored around solidarities, mutual support, and staying put.

  PublisherDOI

• The world from a bicycle: Cycling as kinesthetic methodology

  Progress in Human Geography · 2025-08-26

  articleSenior author

  We theorize the epistemological orientations and methodological possibilities of cycling as a sociotechnical, kinesthetic, and emplaced practice relevant across human geography. Foregrounding the liminalities, contingencies, and improvisational potentials of cycling, we highlight how its unique pacing and capacity to traverse and transcend infrastructural and social constraints foster embodied engagements. Our cycling experiences illustrate the activity’s generativeness across research lifecycles. We conceptualize cycling as an exemplar of kinesthetic methodologies, which integrate body, machine, and motion in ways that deepen embodied knowing, inspire serendipitous interactions, prompt reflection on positionality, and expand possibilities for understanding the world in and across place.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Networks

  Annals of the American Association of Geographers · 2024-08-27 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Networks represent connections between people, things, ideas, and events in physical, digital, or hybrid spaces. The topic has long piqued geographers’ curiosity in regard to enduring fundamental questions in our field: How and why do we perceive and represent geographic phenomena as networks? Do networked spaces challenge established geographic thoughts? What kinds of new knowledge inform or transform how we view geographic phenomena as networks? Might this network thinking collectively foster new policies or approaches to social and spatial problems? The collection of twenty-three articles included in this special issue addresses these questions by showcasing theoretical, epistemological, ontological, and methodological innovation in contemporary geography scholarship on networks. Insights gained from the discussion advance our discipline forward and meet societal needs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Thinking Geomedia Futures: Indigenous Futurisms, Afrofuturisms, and Counter-Mediations of Temporality, Spatiality, and Digitality

  Media and Communication · 2024-08-28 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  For critical scholars, abiding concerns about geomedia futures have included utopian–dystopian formulations of geomedia in popular culture and governance, the deep harms and inequalities that inevitably flow from technocapitalist geomedia regimes, and the urgent need for a plurality of counter-normative ways of theorizing and engaging geomedia. Toward these concerns, I argue here that Indigenous futurism and Afrofuturism hold vital conceptual and analytic insights for thinking and realizing geomedia futures that assemble time, space, and digitality in just and life-sustaining ways. Here, I briefly explore work by geographers, historians, and digital studies scholars that has engaged Indigenous and Black feminist speculative traditions to critique the structural, embodied, and emplaced violence of racial capitalist and settler colonial histories, chronopolitics, and futures. The minoritarian futures expressed and circulated through speculative fiction, visual arts, everyday digital practices, and technocultures by structurally-oppressed groups for whom the future has never been taken for granted hold vital conceptual and analytical insights for thinking geomedia futures beyond the limits of its technocapitalist roots and present structures.

  PublisherDOI

• Digital Politics, Urban Geographies: Emergence as an Orientation to Life with Platforms

  Economic geography · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Portraits for change: Refusal politics and liberatory futures

  Environment and Planning D Society and Space · 2022-05-19 · 6 citations

  articleCorresponding

  We analyze viewers' experiences and understandings of an installation of portraits featuring vendors who sell Seattle’s Real Change street newspaper. In doing so, we argue that Real Change is enacting a complex politics of refusal and explore this in relation to future political lives of Real Change activism. We explore political possibilities for the transformation of urban life opened by the politics the exhibit expresses. We analyze the exhibit goals, representational strategies and viewer responses, exploring the complex politics Real Change is enacting to ensure vendor survival and anti-poverty activism. We argue that the white liberal visual regime (WLVR) ensures continued comfort of white privileged viewers, guaranteeing that their normatively white liberal understanding of impoverishment remains relatively untroubled. We explore disruptions of cultural norms that were possible within the WLVR as well as the limits of these disruptions. Drawing on critical race scholars we theorize visual fields as racially saturated, bolstering white comfort and white supremacy. While our argument begins from an art exhibit, it extends far beyond the politics of art. We analyze viewers’ responses to pose questions about whether/how these visual politics open pathways toward more profound re-learning of racialized relations that produce propertied personhood, racialized dispossession and premature death.

  PublisherDOI

• Glitch epistemologies for computational cities

  Dialogues in Human Geography · 2022 · 123 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology

  This intervention advances glitches as epistemological vectors for apprehending and engaging the significance of digitally-mediated spatialities that appear nonperformative against normative scripts of urban computational paradigms. Drawing on two strands of contemporary thinking about glitches as systemic design features of digital systems and as generative fissures within them, we mobilize a queer orientation that stays with the generative tensions of urban spatialities that present as idiosyncratic and as interrupting. We mobilize this epistemological approach through illustrative U.S. based examples of seemingly abandoned shared e-bikes, performatively ‘ugly’ homes, and wilful property dilapidation wrought through the registers of desire and aesthetics. In so doing, we show how glitch empistemologies render visible how the technocapitalist manufacturing of normative spatial desires for particular kinds of urban sociospatialities and aesthetic visual signatures are both secured and interrupted on digitally-mediated and -mediatized terrains. Glitch epistemologies establish the significance of small-scale disorientations in digital urban mediations, engaging these nonperformativities and non-computes as unexceptional openings onto everyday possibilities for politics in computational cities.

  PublisherDOI

• Glitch cities

  Dialogues in Human Geography · 2022-09-22 · 9 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The generous responses to our intervention, Glitch epistemologies for computational cities , open onto knowing cities via glitches through an expanded attention to temporalities, subject/ivities, and power and politics in addition to our initial concern with urban spatialities. We respond to our interlocutors by engaging their responses as engendering more robust theorizations of what we here term glitch cities : pervasively digitally mediated and mediatized urban environments knowable not only through an attunement to configurations that appear out of place, but also those which present as being out of time, as counter-topographical against the violence of imposed legibility, and as more closely contending with subjects and subjectivities. We discuss how and why thinking more holistically about glitch cities while avoiding the tendency to reduce this epistemological claim to an archetype or conceptual singularity matters for digital urban geographies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “GIS Use in Community Planning: A Multidimensional Analysis of Empowerment”

  2020-04-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Geographical Information Systems technology treats different sets of attributes, such as land use or population, as map layers which can be examined in order to establish what, if any, relationships exist between these different layers. This chapter focuses on a crucial area of ambivalence that surrounds the implications of GIS technology for the empowerment and disempowerment of individuals and communities. The chapter argues that it is vital to “unpack” what is meant by empowerment in order to understand potentially very different social implications of GIS. It distinguishes three specific dimensions of this concept: distributive change in the form of greater access to both goods and services and increased opportunities for political participation; procedural change whereby the views of citizens or community groups are given authority and legitimacy in the decision-making process; and capacity building in which the ability of citizens or communities to take action on their own behalf is enhanced.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Transforming the Politics of Place: GIS, Knowledge Production, and Community-Based Organizations in Urban Governance

  NSF · $181k · 2006–2010

• Collaborative Research: A GIScience Approach for Assessing the Quality, Potential Applications, and Impact of Volunteered Geographic Information

  NSF · $167k · 2009–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Victoria Lawson

  21 shared

• Katharyne Mitchell

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  13 shared

• Noel Castree

  6 shared

• Agnieszka Leszczynski

  Western University

  6 shared

• Meghan Cope

  5 shared

• Helga Leitner

  5 shared

• Robert McMaster

  University of Toronto

  4 shared

• Eric Sheppard

  University of California, Los Angeles

  4 shared

Education

• PhD, Geography

  University of Minnesota System

  2000

• MA, Geography

  University of Minnesota

  1996

• BA, Geography

  Macalester College

  1994

Awards & honors

• UW Distinguished Teaching Award
• Richard Morrill Public Outreach Award