In the last week of March, Rob, Juliette and Carla’s schedules were packed full with a week-long attendance at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, held in Detroit, Michigan. This was the first AAG for Juliette, and a return after many years’ absence for Carla and Rob. It must be said that the sessions certainly did not disappoint. The week was packed with sessions organised by the team and papers presented by them, but we also co-organised a tour of Detroit and a print-making workshop. Below we highlight some of the key moments from the conference.
Data, Housing and Planning I & II
Despite flying all Sunday and feeling jet lagged, the Data Stories team, along with co-organiser Dr. Taylor Shelton, had the (mis)fortune of having their first back-to-back sessions slotted for Monday, the very first day of the conference, at 8.30 am. A total of 8 papers were presented on the themes of data debates, deriving sentiment from housing on data, data narratives and the politics and complications of aggregating housing data. Rob Kitchin presented work from phase 1 of the project in a paper titled, Data debates in housing and planning: The data politics of facts and counter-facts. Overall, the papers presented in this session were excellent. If all goes as planned, a selection of these papers will become part of a special issue in a housing journal. We will update the blog with details when that happens.
Theoretical Perspectives on Research Creation in Place and the Built Environment I & II
The second organised session was also held bright and early at 8.30 on Wednesday. Two back-to-back sessions brought together researchers and artists working at the intersection where social science methods and arts-based methods intersect. A total of 9 presenters used wide-ranging case studies (green and blue environments, transportation, disability, war, data dashboards) as well as a series of mediums (comics, workshops, storytelling, archiveology, sculpture, visual storytelling, photographs) to theorise research creation and the co-creation of knowledge. Carla Kayanan opened up the session with a paper titled, Exploring the synergy between artistic practices and academia in shaping the built environment towards research-creation methods. This paper builds on previous work on research creation but draws from longer engagement with the first set of artists in residence.
The final paper-related event occurred on Thursday with Juliette Davret presenting the paper Rethinking datafied movements: A critical comparison of direct action and lobbying as data activism in an urban context. This paper was accepted in Dr. Eugene McCann and Dr. Magie Ramirez’s pre-organised session, Futures of organizing and the urban: Confronting crisis in theory and practice.
Exploring beyond the conference
Outside of Huntington Place’s walls, the convention centre that housed the AAG, the Data Stories team members engaged in events that gave them the opportunity to experience Detroit’s built environment and its artistic community. On Thursday afternoon, Detroit scholar and historian, Dr. Patrick Cooper-McCann, took a group of Irish Geographers on a walking tour of downtown Detroit.
The walk consisted mostly of discussions outside of buildings along Woodward, however we did enter the Guardian building and the Whitney hotel.
Finally, on the last day of the conference, Data Stories team members tagged along with Australian Geographers to attend a workshop by visual artist and printer Wendy Murray hosted in the workshop of Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. Wendy kindly took a morning to share her love of printing with the group. As part of the event, Dr. Kurt Iveson lead us on a walk of Wendy’s Detroit neighbourhood while the group, per Wendy’s request, focused on emergent feelings from the walk. These sentiments were then used to co-create a series of prints that Wendy then gifted to us. Additionally, though absent on the day, Amos had generously prepared a series of prints to present to our group. We cannot encourage you enough to purchase Amos’s beautiful and recently released book, Citizen Printer, and to read more about him and his work in this 2024 article by Charlotte Beach.
