Ari Hammond
Georgia Institute of Technology
Faculty Advisor: Prof. Fabio Duarte
Department: Urban Studies and Planning
BIO: Ari Hammond is a rising junior majoring in Computational Media at the Georgia
Institute of Technology. Their work uses research-through-design to examine how Black queer
and feminist approaches to information and interaction design can promote critical engagement
with data, archives, and digital technologies. During MSRP, under the supervision of Dr. Fabio
Duarte, Ari investigated how ArcGIS, a digital mapping tool, can be used to showcase Black
women’s geographies in Cambridge, MA. Through a series of interviews with Black women
around Cambridge, Ari identified key routes, locations, and activities that reveal how these
women live and interact with the city. This work builds upon their previous research by
drawing cross-disciplinary connections between design, human geography, feminist studies,
and urban studies. Ari is currently seeking further research opportunities in critical information
visualization and interaction design, particularly related to spatial justice, as they prepare for
graduate school applications.
Black Women’s Cambridge: A Case Study on Critical GIS and Black
Feminist Geographies
Ari Hammond1, Fabio Duarte2
1School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology
2Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Black feminist geographies examine how Black women’s intersectional identities shape their
imagination, organization, and conception of space. These geographies explain how the bodily and
emotional experiences of race and gender are expressed in and reinforced by landscapes.
However, they are obscured or ignored in traditional geographic practices. While previous work in
counter-cartography and feminist GIS examines how feminist geographies may reorient dominant
practices, namely visualization, to create more critical, subjective representations of
geography, this body of work pays minimal attention to race and intersectionality. In this study, we
use a research-through-design methodology to locate and visualize Black women’s geographies in
ArcGIS, extending previous arguments in feminist GIS to highlight Black feminist geographies.
Through a thematic analysis of oral histories of eight Black Cantabrigian women, supplemented
by archival records and existing GIS data from the City of Cambridge, we identified emotions
about, experiences with, and understandings of space in these women’s accounts of the Cambridge
landscape. The resulting ArcGIS visualization, composed of maps and multimedia information,
offers an alternative geographic perspective on race, class, leisure, and development in the city of
Cambridge; the accompanying design documentation explores how using ArcGIS with/for Black
feminist geographies reveals new design patterns and possibilities.
