(Un)Mapping the Digital Landscape of Medical Crowdfunding: A Critical and Creative Geovisualization Pedagogy for Public Engagement

Jin-Kyu Jung, Nora Kenworthy and Hayley Park 

Critical and creative geovisualization emphasises mapping and visualisation that represents and generates more authentic, contextual, and nuanced meanings of space and people by adopting/adapting artistic and humanistic perspectives and approaches. This paper describes a multi-year, cross-disciplinary critical and creative geovisualization project with dual pedagogical purposes of unmapping and remaking knowledge about the hidden inequities of a new digital media landscape. Emerging out of more traditional forms of empirical scholarship about the use of digital crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe to address health and medical needs in the US, this project sought to use creative and critical approaches to address, and transcend, some of the methodological and ethical challenges of more traditional empirical approaches. In doing so, it also aimed to upend powerfully dominant public knowledge about the role of crowdfunding for health needs in US public life.

The past three decades has seen tremendous growth in efforts to understand the ontological, epistemological, and methodological positions and limits of traditional forms of GIS and geographic visualisation through feminist, queer, and nonnormative theories and analyses (e.g., critical cartography, socially-relevant GIS, and critical data studies), and mapping practices that draw connections between local, community-based, participatory, and policy engagements (e.g., participatory GIS, radical-counter-feminist-indigenous cartography and GIS).[1] This diverse range of evolutions of critical GIS and geovisualization have extended the discussions and conceptualizations of GIS as it relates to social, political, and cultural practices and as a means of knowledge production. Critical GIS and cartography provide a unique opportunity for scholars and students to continue the tradition of mapping and GIS as innovative methodology, but also as the result of critical inquiry and reflexivity attuned to the broader social, political, and digital processes that influences issues or areas that are being researched. Creative geographic visualisation is an expansion of critical and qualitative GIS practices, and a new alternative to historically science-rooted approaches to GIS and mapping fostered artistic, emotive and affective ways of knowing.[2]

Our project emerges from a recognition of key challenges presented by public narratives of crowdfunding, and of the limitations of traditional research methods in fully understanding Americans’ crowdfunding experiences. To illustrate this point, consider the widely lauded ad that GoFundMe released at the end of 2022 to commemorate what it portrays as the numerous public impacts on communities that the site has facilitated in recent years. “Help Changes Everything” uses AI-generated art in the style of a moving painting that depicts the kinds of help people provide through the platform. Simple white letters read “When the world needs kindness…look to those who help,” set against a backdrop of a house in flames, followed by a dog being rescued in a storm, and then a patient in a hospital room. GoFundMe said that it made the ad to commemorate “one donation made every second in 2022” on the platform.[3]

This is the narrative of crowdfunding that most Americans are familiar with - one of kindness, community-building and corporate beneficence. Research, however, largely documents a wholly different reality that exists behind the carefully crafted homepages of sites like GoFundMe. Ethical issues and inequities abound, amplified by the dynamics of the crowd.[4] Success is rare - approximately 9 out of 10 campaigns do not reach their goal - and failure is far too common - about a third of all medical campaigns in 2020 got no donations at all.[5] While research has been important in documenting these realities, there are some considerable limitations and ethical dilemmas with how crowdfunding data is leveraged in research. In addition, we were eager to explore other ways of teaching about crowdfunding inequities for a broader audience, and creating a space where those could be understood and reimagined by students, scholars, and the public in interactive, creative, and affective ways.

The project we describe below sits at the intersection of geography, health studies, and digital (spatial) humanities. It emphasises mapping and visualisation that produce spatial knowledges and complexities that are situated, reflexive, affective/emotional, and flexible. It also offers a new alternative to traditional science-rooted approaches to GIS and mapping (Euclidean and Cartesian understanding and representation of the world), notable in its capacity to accentuate perceptual, affective, and creative representation, rather than precisely measured objects.

In thinking through what we know of the medical crowdfunding ecosystem, this project arises from new questions about mapping, particularly in the context of higher education: How can we create counter- or alternative maps that ‘disrupt’ the narratives and ontologies of popular media and create new (ontogenetic) transformative spaces for affective engagement, knowledge, and narratives to emerge? How can we create maps and pedagogical media that engage students and publics in collectively re-imagining what alternative data, representation, and visualisation would/could look like, beyond the ontological, digital, and algorithmic constraints of sites like GoFundMe? How can we teach critical and creative forms of mapping to help students experience generative modes of data and analysis that value representation in different ways? And finally, how can we weave critical-creative geovisualization into pedagogies to contribute to modes of critiquing, interrupting, and revising dominant forms of knowledge production in the digital crowdfunding space? 

Theoretical grounds

Critical GIS offers a unique opportunity to continue a critical reflexivity deeply attuned to the broader social and political processes that structure areas of issues being studied. It considers how GIS and mapping are not, and cannot be, separated from the social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions [systematic and structural issues] within which they exist or are situated. Researchers have called into question the ontological, epistemological, and methodological positions and limits of traditional forms of GIS and geographic visualisation through feminist, queer, and non-normative analyses that push against positivist approaches.[6] Critical GIS and geovisualization provide a unique opportunity to continue the tradition of mapping and GIS as innovative methodology to understanding and revealing the geographic dimensions of social relations, but also as the result of critical inquiry and reflexivity attuned to the broader social, political, and digital processes. Critical GIS also emerged in the praxis of engaging GIS as an always-interconnected set of technical and social practices, mindful of both its limitations and possibilities.[7] However, there have been relatively few discussions of pedagogies for helping students learn what it means to do critical GIS relative to critical GIS scholarship.[8] Teaching critical GIS is indeed oriented towards GIS praxis that uses a questioning standpoint to enquire about how we know. Critical GIS teaching and learning may require different modes of engagement and visualization.  

An innovative critical GIS-inspired body of work emerged while introducing new ways of transcending disciplines, methodologies, and practices. Critical and creative engagements with GIS and geovisualization highlight the ways in which geography, arts, and digital spatial humanities all aim to create room for thinking about understandings, experiences, and feelings of space, valuing creative practices for their ability to question and deconstruct conventional norms and meanings. Various new forms of geovisualization present innovative ways to not only describe or depict space, but also to produce and even imagine qualitative, artistic, and humanistic experiential and interpretative visual representations. This new trend demonstrates an evolution of ways of integrating critical research of mapping and geovisualization, and points toward ways we can now creatively challenge the production and use of maps.[9] 

A non-representational or post-representational perspective on mapping re-theorizes mapping as a ‘process’ that is ‘performative’ rather than ‘representational.’[10] It is a denial of the ontological security of a map, but also a celebration of the idea that maps are always fleeting, contingent, relational, transitory, and in the process of becoming.[11]  Maps here are not considered fixed or completed, but rather continuously evolving and changing, from ontological to ontogenetic.[12] A post-representational theory also integrates with various ranges of ideas and practices, unified by a recognition that human’s affective connections to the world do not solely operate through the sense of vision; rather, geographical knowledge is diversely performative even more than it is representational.[13] These re-conceptualizations of maps as performative in post-representational theory also create the possibility for generating new geographies: maps become inherently creative as they emerge, evolve and perform. More recently, Object-Oriented Cartography (inspired by Tania Rossetto’s work in 2019)[14] considers maps as things. It asks us to return our focus to the maps themselves–not only as representational cartographies, but as objects with their own lives. It makes us think about maps as both relational and ontogenetic practices and ontological beings. There might be a sense of the moments at which the hidden side of maps are revealed to us, for example, maps may express or withdraw themselves!

Our project also derives from science and technology studies approaches, particularly those of queer feminist theories for understanding sociality, care, mutuality, and labour in online spaces.[15] We place these alongside feminist relational ontologies that treat space as a dynamic constellation of material relations, structural processes, ideologies, and bodily relations that structure the possibilities for knowing in particular space-time—the ‘multiple yet contingent comings together of technology, people, place, space, and in everyday lived reality.’[16] As a pedagogical project, our work also brings in decolonizing approaches to knowledge, research, and epistemology, which aim to deconstruct and unsettle seemingly authoritative and hierarchical forms of knowledge.[17] Within higher education settings, and GIS and data science pedagogies in particular, decolonizing epistemologies help students use humility to approach questions of how we think we know what we know, and how power, history, racism, and structural inequities create positivistic knowledge and shape what is knowable.[18] Such pedagogical approaches are particularly important given the role that mapping and geographic knowledge has played in colonialism and imperialism.

Finally, this project draws on, and hopes to contribute to, scholarship on how digital technologies are interlaced with health and social inequities. While social scientists and media scholars have extensively documented how social media can amplify inequities while also providing an important space for engagement and support, health scholarship has been slower to critically engage with new digital technologies.[19] As scholars spanning the fields of geography, public health, and information studies, our collaborative work has surfaced the importance and opportunities of thinking about digital inequalities from a geospatial perspective, attending to the topographies of inequity within digital landscapes through which people move and seek care.

Drawing on these approaches, our project explores critical, even radical, unmapping strategies that are closely bound to the epistemological qualities of the method.These various forms of (un)mapping of geographic, health and social, and digital inequities of medical crowdfundingdepict the limitations of mapping / representation / visualisation; however, they also don’t preclude an attention to, and possibility of, mapping and representation. (Un)mapping gives attention to the emergent and transformative possibilities of mapping for understanding and engaging with digital inequities. It also proffers ways to think about experiences, understandings, and feelings of (digital) space, valuing critical and creative practices for questioning and deconstructing conventional norms and meanings of crowdfunding and revealing hidden meanings, relationships, and experiences.  

Three challenges of knowing in crowdfunding research

Crowdfunding for basic needs on platforms like GoFundMe now constitutes one of America’s largest, and most ineffective, shadow safety nets.[20] Millions of Americans crowdfund each year for healthcare costs, basic needs - and, increasingly, precarities arising from COVID-19. Aimee is one of those Americans. She wrote on her page: “With the coronavirus going on my hubby lost his job and we need money to upgrade the camper we’ve been living in. Anything would and will be appreciated very much. No matter how small, anything will help.” Aime raised $0 of the $6000 she requested. Unfortunately, her experience is the norm, not the exception. Forty-three percent of campaigns for COVID-19 related needs had zero donations.[21]

Too often, these stories are invisible. For-profit crowdfunding sites project narratives of easy, individualised success, concealing how this crucial, but profoundly unfair, social safety net is being used, and to what ends.[22] After studying crowdfunding for a number of years, we realised that several persistent challenges limited our ability to communicate with the public about this important online digital archive of American precarity and inequality. Specifically, crowdfunding data is powerfully shaped by platform algorithms, social media dynamics and cultural scripts that create challenges of what is known and knowable about crowdfunding experiences through traditional research methods. These challenges include narrative and affective challenges, access challenges, and ethical challenges.

Narrative and affective challenges arise from the cultures of engagement cultivated by crowdfunding platforms. Typically, such platforms reward and amplify affects of positivity, hopefulness, and resilience, even when their campaigns struggle.[23] Research shows that platforms use numerous approaches to train users to set low financial goals and expectations, and to coach them in projecting positive, resilient affects to appear more appealing to donors.[24] In doing so, they shift crowdfunder expectations about what they can and should deserve in terms of assistance. For example, Makayla, a young black woman in Chicago, Illinois, is one of many who turned to GoFundMe during the early months of the pandemic, when social safety nets were particularly unavailable or hard to access. Makayla’s campaign showed a picture of her kissing her toddler son’s head, and asked for $500 to help them pay for rent and food until she could find more work. She raised $0. Her narrative revealed a messy friction between the grim conditions of her campaign and the positive affect users like her try to cultivate: ““Hello!  I am raising money for my son and me. I have lost my job due to the Coronavirus disease! I am trying to do what is possible to make everything a smooth transition but it is very hard and sad!” When research relies solely on narrative data like Makayla’s that appeals to these affective norms created by platforms, it can unintentionally reinforce platform norms and values, even when it takes a critical analytic stance. These narrative and affective challenges also have significant ramifications for the felt experiences of crowdfunding, and also broader public knowledge about what crowdfunding solves, who it helps, and what it leaves behind.

Ultimately, Makayla’s campaign was removed from GoFundMe, and thus became invisible to future researchers and to the public. This reflects some of the access challenges in crowdfunding research. In our more recent work, we have uncovered platform design decisions that tend to primarily obscure less successful campaigns from public scrutiny.[25]While search engines have always prioritised more popular content on these sites, we are now seeing additional phenomena. First, a large subset of unsuccessful campaigns appear to not be indexed in the official sitemap for GoFundMe, meaning that they are not discoverable with search engines or many sampling strategies. Second, after a year, nearly all campaigns that raised $0 disappear from the site entirely. It is difficult to assess whether these campaigns are removed by users or by site administrators, but their collective removal powerfully changes what is publicly known, knowable, and remembered about crowdfunding realities.

Finally, there are ethical challenges in working with crowdfunding data, which is ostensibly ‘publicly-shared information’ but also involves deeply personal stories. Platforms encourage disclosure of highly private health information in order to elicit donor engagement and trust.[26] There are almost no privacy safeguards on the site, and many users are turning to these sites in states of economic distress that could be considered coercive. As crowdfunding becomes more popular, it cultivates a culture of medical disclosure and information sharing that may not be safe for, or respectful of, users. Researchers’ own efforts at data collection and retention may benefit from, and reinforce, these privacy intrusions, even when following IRB protocols.

To tackle these challenges, we pursued an approach that appropriated tactics of remaking crowdfunding data more meaningfully and ethically, and unmapped that re-made (re-imagined) data in order to make its nuances more accessible, visible, and publicly engaged. Yet our aim was not just to unmake this digital health data, but to remake it through a process of humanistic sensemaking - using composite, creative, and geovisual processes that tell a more complex and nuanced story about the crowdfunding experience. These strategies aim to challenge dominant public narratives, fuelled by crowdfunding, which equate access to help with individual goodness and success, rather than rights or entitlements. We seek to make what is invisible in this ecosystem - its inequities, the systematic safety net gaps from which it profits - visible and sensory, eliciting a far different affective engagement from the public.

Processual approach

Unmapping develops multi-epistemological ‘processual’ approaches of making, engaging and representing spatial knowledge and complexity that transcends the persistent limitations of quantitative social scientific mapping approaches. It opens up new ways of understanding and mapping relational digital health inequity geographies by exploring critical and creative mapping works, such as the more-than-numerical, more-than-textual, and multi-sensual. It epitomises the shift from a traditional essentialist cartography to an ‘emergent cartography,’[27] in which geography, art, health studies, and humanities weave together to think and practice space, geography and representation. These multi-epistemological and methodological processual approaches of making, engaging and representing spatial knowledge and complexity continuously unfolds new ways of seeing and showing relational geographies in space.[28] This processual understanding of mapping allows us to approach maps as embodied and fluid entities that are performed and negotiated by users in their meanings, which have important epistemological and methodological implications.

As part of this processual approach, we also engage in continual change and repair[29] work with our site, GoFundUS, and the storyscapes it uses. This includes soliciting ongoing feedback and affective data from site visitors, and integrating this into future iterations of the site. We also have engaged undergraduate students of critical GIS and geovisualization classes to evaluate the site as an example of critical GIS, and offer reflections, feedback, and questions about the site and what it attempts to accomplish. This feedback, again, is integrated into site redesign and repair work.

Ethically, our approach also attempts to “care for” users’ crowdfunding data. We do this by making it anonymous without stripping it of meaning or specificities of experience. We strive to archive it meaningfully while preserving privacy and reducing shame, particularly for those whose campaigns are unsuccessful and otherwise would quickly become invisible. These practices of care are informed by our ethnographic work with crowdfunders and work against the forms of capitalistic carelessness with which platforms often treat users’ data.

We use these strategies to create multiple “storyscapes” of the crowdfunding experience that remake and unmap multi-modal crowdfunding data. These storyscapes create a more complex and humane portrait of US crowdfunding and the inequities it produces. None of these explorations are definitive, finished, or conclusive – rather they are an invitation to the public to co-explore crowdfunding data with us and challenge some of our assumptions about it. We present several examples of these storyscapes below, before describing how we integrate them into our public website, GoFundUS.[30]

Storyscape: Mapping invisible content

Our initial GIS-based analysis focused on mapping how socio-economic, health and racial inequities shape the prevalence, proliferation and outcomes of crowdfunding campaigns. We created a ‘terrains’ map that geo-visually represents the spatial dimensions of medical crowdfunding and some of its inequities across the U.S. based medical crowdfunding campaigns created between 2016 and 2020. The data emerging from these social, spatial and digital media was highly visual and vividly portrayed spatial inequities in medical crowdfunding.

Figure 1 presents a 3D display of the spatial distribution of campaign funds raised by medical crowdfunding users, aggregated to the county-level, with the vertical height of each county reflecting the sum of funds raised. This effort at mapping inequities raises questions about whether a striking inequality represented in the 3D prism visualisation can fully depict the spatial scale and perspectives of crowdfunding inequities, or not. To us, part of the purpose of the map is that the map itself seems to have a hard time capturing and containing the drastic inequity (spikes) in the visual form. It demonstrates how compelling visual analysis can contribute to broader conversations and investigations of social, spatial and digital inequities, as well as depict the challenges of fully capturing the spatial scale of crowdfunding inequities visually.

We created our first storyscape intending to disrupt audiences’ perceptions of crowdfunding by taking them through a processual unmapping of crowdfunding data (Figure 2). We move from normative representational GIS maps of crowdfunding – its geographies of practice, how those map onto new and existing inequities, and representations of where success occurs – to more speculative ones. Here, we have taken the data from unindexed campaigns to create a map of invisible GoFundMes - literally, remaking visibility by mapping platforms’ invisible content -mapping the unmapped.

In terms of the map-making process, an elevation surface has been spatially interpolated from a set of points representing a location where disappeared campaigns are located.

Storyscape: Mock Campaigns

Our second storyscape strategy seeks to accomplish two goals: to fully anonymize campaign web pages while also challenging some of the narrative and affective frames that typically constrain them. Our first step in this process is to create fully anonymized versions of a representative subset of real campaign pages. To do this we used HTML editing tools to change all identifying data and replace them with highly similar, but not identical, content. We reverse searched key components of the revised page to ensure it no longer pulled up the original (Figure 3A).

We then built a second version of the page which we somewhat irreverently called “the GoFundMe upside-down.” On this version we used the page’s original geo-tagged location to look up key demographic, socioeconomic, and political data that contextualised the campaigner’s experiences. We elucidate structural issues – in the example below, COVID-19 safety nets that were limited and late to arrive in Connecticut, and Amazon labour practices. And to these we added ethnographic data about the case, when we had it. We then used local estimates of income, education, and other key correlates to replace what would have been the ‘donation’ pane of the page with information about how similar campaigns might perform, and show some of the inequities between highly successful and unsuccessful campaigns (Figure 3B).

GoFundUS features an archive of dozens of these mock campaign pages emplaced into an interactive storymap. Campaigns have been selected to be representative of the wide array of medical and social needs of users, crowdfunding outcomes, and geographic and demographic diversity. The aim is not just to capture and convey anonymized stories, but to show people what is often not visible on GoFundMe - both the full spectrum of unsuccessful and successful campaigns, and the hidden structural factors that lead to campaign motivations and outcomes.

Storyscape: Composite Poems

Another storyscape draws on traditions of found poetry, composite ethnography, and poetic mapping techniques to assemble composite poems that reflect crowdfunders’ experiences and narratives.[31] The lines and stanzas of these poems are made up of anonymized or paraphrased text from many different crowdfunding narratives collected throughout our research, organised around key affective themes. Text fragments are compiled into the poem through paraphrasing or splicing such that they cannot be traced back to their original campaigns. Reverse online searches of each text fragment check to ensure confidentiality. These poems create an assemblage of common crowdfunding experiences to reveal and challenge the affective dissonance and narrative limitations of traditional campaigns, while reconstituting narratives that speak to more complex experiences. We use this polyvocal poetry to serve as a kind of chorus, articulating common experiences, affects, and strategies of appeal in ways that are anonymous but humane and personal (Figure 5).

To make these poems both more geospatial and interactive, we gave the text fragments that make up these poems a geospatial and data ‘anchor.’ GoFundUS embeds each line of poetry geospatially - connecting it to a place on a map where its originating campaign was located using the zip code and adding some statistics on the campaign’s outcomes. Site visitors can interact with these data points as they experience the poems (Figure 6). We are in the process of creating site features that visitors can re-mix poem fragments to make their own, new poems from the data. Our intention in mapping these poems is to give each text fragment a sense of emplacement while contributing to the sense of diverse, geographically-dispersed polyvocality for each poem.

Digital creative geovisualization as public pedagogy

GoFundUS was not created with a single pedagogical strategy in mind, but rather developed as a flexible, open-ended interactive experience which can be used to foster a diverse array of public and higher education pedagogies. Below, we offer some lessons and ideas for its pedagogical applications with different audiences including students and general publics. We feel these are only a preliminary accounting of possibilities, however. The site is designed to evolve and change, and incorporate new storyscapes, as possibilities and opportunities arise. Some of these new storyscapes could be developed as part of extended pedagogical projects with graduate or undergraduate students in higher education, and others may emerge from feedback and data collected from students and public audiences as they engage with the site, as we describe below.

Critical-Creative GIS pedagogies

How could digital spatial information and mapping constitute the means for, and be part of, social transformation, confronting/contesting social, spatial, and digital health inequalities? 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, polyvocal and flexible, rather than essentialist and positivistic? How can the integration of the critical GIS point towards a new form of qualitative, affective, and creative GIS and mapping? What are the ways critical and creative GIS and its pedagogies epitomize the convergence of geography, arts and humanities, and digital health studies? These are the kind of questions that critical GIS pedagogies allow us to ask through lecture, assignment and class activities and projects without losing sight of core GIS ideas and methods.[32] Critical GIS pedagogy is often focused on what critical GIS is. However, teaching students what critical GIS does, and helping students question how we know what we know about the “doing” of GIS.[33] It is about teaching students how we question data, data analysis, visualisation and representation. It pushes students to approach GIS teaching and learning in ways that may require different modes of engagement and spaces of representation, where we see the value of critical and creative geovisualization.  

GoFundUS allows students to explore questions of levels of geographic analysis unit and scale (methodologically), data privacy/protection, and why these questions are so important. Students are invited to explore challenges of mapping for understanding inequities and critically analyse some of the speculative strategies that were used to create various storyscapes. It also allows students to experience multi-epistemological and methodological approaches of making, engaging, and representing spatial knowledge and complexity, and how they can be included in the process of transcending the persistent limitations of conventional positivistic and social scientific mapping and GIS approaches. It makes a transformative impact on how students learn GIS and mapping, and helps them generate knowledge of diverse modes of mapping—the spatial narratives that “create shifting storylines of linkages that do not crystalize into fixed form.”[34] Students see, experience, and feel that GIS and geographic visualization can take a generative form and understand how maps and GIS can become not just analytical and representational, but also embodied and expressive through critical GIS pedagogy.  

Public health / health policy pedagogies

GoFundUS also offers opportunities for students to reflect on how medical crowdfunding reflects broader US health access disparities and safety net gaps. Students can engage with these ideas through the interactive map on the first page of the site, but also through the mock campaigns. The mock campaigns in particular help students understand and explore some of the structural gaps and drivers of what Merid (2020)[35] calls “health insurance precarity” and which drives many users to seek crowdfunding to help pay for medical bills. These examples can help students think, in the parlance of public health, “upstream” to the social, political, and commercial forces that shape health.[36] One interesting application of this practice would be to assign students to find medical crowdfunding campaigns and create their own “GoFundMe upside-down” mock campaigns like those on the site. What new upstream drivers are students able to identify? How are these linked to and interconnected with geospatial indicators and data? Another interesting learning activity is to explore how mock campaigns might be different if located in different places where these structural conditions vary, particularly in terms of social safety net provisions and health coverage options.

Humanities / digital humanities pedagogies

Our site also engages in critical and experimental digital humanities approaches that can provide rich learning opportunities. These include aspects of creative storytelling, poesis, and data ‘unmaking.’ The site provides an opportunity to explore, critically reflect on, and unpack these approaches, but it can also provide a model for similar work. What composite / polyvocal / found poetry projects could students create from similarly public but deeply personal online data? What are the ethics and aesthetics of engaging in such practices of re-creation? We encourage submissions of ethically-created found poems from crowdfunding sites to be added to the site as well. Students might also extend their narrative exploration of crowdfunding platforms using the site. What are the hidden narrative rules of this social media landscape? What does it mean to break or unmake these rules? Are there other kinds of ‘GoFundMe upside-downs’ that could be created or explored through such unmaking? And what would these potentially teach us, and what alternatives to crowdfunding might they allow us to imagine? Spatial and visual thinking and practices emerged in digital spatial humanities and arts already enrich critical GIS scholarship and shifts in critical GIS pedagogies.

Digital creative geovisualization as public pedagogy

Ultimately, we envision our project as a teaching tool for broader public audiences, not just classroom students. As representatives of a publicly funded state institution with a strong mandate of community-engagement, public scholarship, and policy impact, we recognize that a broader impact of critical GIS in higher education is the way it enables public outreach, pedagogy, and scholarship. Through participatory features on the site, we invite public audiences to create counter-narratives of crowdfunding experiences and understandings. This includes a participation link that offers users an opportunity to share their own reflections on crowdfunding, questions and feedback about the site, and selected demographic data. Some of this data will be used to improve and evolve the site; and some will be used, with participants’ permission, to create additional storyscapes using geolocational word clouds and creative narration maps.

On a broader level, GoFundUS is posited as a public response to the highly individualistic, curated, and inequitable experiences of GoFundMe. It aims to create a more collective, solidaristic conversation around crowdfunding that engages audiences in imagining crowdfunding alternatives. A final page of the site also directs participants to existing models of alternatives to crowdfunding that are mutualistic and community-driven. It then asks participants to share their own ideas for other alternatives and opportunities. The site offers a place and a set of methods for unlearning some of the ways that platforms have shaped our own attempts at platform inquiry. What we mean is that the ways in which we seek to know platforms or algorithmic systems are often shaped, in part, by the platforms themselves. It is an effort to push against the ways platforms ‘train’ us as researchers, users, creators, and public audiences - shaping the questions we ask, the data we use to ask them, the limitations we place on ourselves in terms of what can be known.

Concluding reflection

Critical and creative cartography and geovisualization provides us with a unique opportunity for critical inquiry and reflexivity attuned to the broader social, political, and digital processes that influence areas or issues being mapped. The processual approach to GIS and geovisualisation eschews the fixity and essentialism embedded in conventional GIS and cartography, and tries instead to represent an unstable world in flux and therefore contingent and open to change.[37](Un)mapping practices and pedagogies within higher education settings are deliberately constructed to facilitate a deeper engagement with social and spatial issues such as digital health inequities in the crowdfunding space. These practices constantly open up new ways of mapping and create transformative spaces for new knowledge, affective engagements, and narratives to emerge. 

GoFundUS embodies limitations and contradictions. We continue to struggle with challenges both technological as well as epistemological and ethical. For example, we struggle to balance between wanting to facilitate the telling of more honest crowdfunding stories, while acting as the curators of those stories and the data on which they sometimes rely. We want to highlight how structural factors shape campaign outcomes without also sending overly deterministic messages to our audiences. And we constantly face challenges of how we interpret and convey these complex reams of data in ways that are digestible to a broad public but also convey the complexities of the crowdfunding economy and its diversity of experiences.

The processual approach to this kind of critical and creative geovisualisation means that GoFundUS will continue to change over time and in cooperation with its audiences. Continual tinkering, experimenting, and repair are an important part of the process of challenging authoritative knowledge and inviting collective reflexivity. Our use of GoFundUS as a higher education tool for both students and broader publics means that these users will become an important part of the continual, changing reflexivity of the site, through feedback, submissions, and proffered experiences, different forms of data and analysis, and interpretations of them. Ultimately, we hope this site will hold up a mirror – a more collective, affective, unsettled, and honest one – to a digital practice (crowdfunding) that has become an undeniably large part of public life, private health care seeking, and complex human decisions about who can access much-needed resources.

Authors Information:  

Jin-Kyu Jung, PhD. jkjung5@uw.edu

School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, Professor, University of Washington Bothell

Jin-Kyu Jung is an urban geographer/planner whose interdisciplinary research program contributes to develop new ways of expanding critical, qualitative, and creative possibilities of/with GIS and geographic visualisation in understanding socio-spatial processes and politics of urban space in an engaged way.

Nora Kenworthy, PhD. njk8@uw.edu

School of Nursing and Health Studies, Associate Professor, University of Washington Bothell

Nora Kenworthy is an interdisciplinary scholar of public health and medical anthropology, whose work examines digital health inequities, the possibilities and limits of charitable and participatory health initiatives, and the health impacts of technology and philanthrocapitalism.

Hayley Park. hp00@uw.edu

Information School, University of Washington

Hayley is an M.L.I.S candidate whose focus has been in digital scholarship, data curation, and knowledge organisation. Hayley is drawn to ideas and practices that challenge cultural hegemony and structural inequities and is committed to ensuring equitable access for all people to pursue knowledge essential to their sensemaking journey(s). 

Notes

[1] Sarah Elwood, “Critical Issues in Participatory GIS: Deconstructions, Reconstructions, and New Research Directions," Transactions in GIS 10, no. 5 (2006): 693-708.; Eric S. Sheppard, "Knowledge Production through Critical GIS: Genealogy and Prospects," Cartographica 40, no. 4 (2005): 5-21.; Jim Thatcher and Craig M. Dalton, Data Power: Radical Geographies of Control and Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 2022).; Matthew W. Wilson, New Lines: Critical GIS and the Trouble of the Map (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

[2]  Stuart C Aitken, "Quelling Imperious Urges: Deep Emotional Mappings and the Ethnopoetics of Space," in Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives, eds. David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan and Trevor M. Harris (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015), 102-33.; Meghan Cope and Sarah Elwood. Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach (London: SAGE, 2009).; Harris Hawkins, Creativity (New York: Routledge, 2017).; Jin-Kyu Jung and Ted Hiebert, "Imagining the Details: Happy Places and Creative Geovisualization," Living Maps Review, no. 7 (2019). http://livingmaps.review/journal/index.php/LMR/article/view/172.; Christian Nold, "Bio Mapping: How Can We Use Emotion to Articulate Cities?" Living Maps Review, (Spring 2018). http://livingmaps.review/journal/index.php/LMR/article/view/103.; Marianna E. Pavlovskaya, "Critical GIS as a Tool for Social Transformation," The Canadian Geographer 62, no. 1 (2018): 40-54.; Denis Wood, "Lynch Debord: About Two Psychogeographies." Cartographica 45, no. 3 (2010): 185-200.

[3] Audrey Kemp, “US Ad of the Day: GoFundMe Paints the Power of Donating in ‘The Bigger Picture,’” The Drum, December 21, 2022, https://www.thedrum.com/news/2022/12/21/us-ad-the-day-gofundme-paints-the-power-donating-the-bigger-picture. 

[4] Nora Kenworthy, “Like a Grinding Stone: How Crowdfunding Platforms Create, Perpetuate, and Value Health Inequities.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2021): 327–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12639.; Nora Kenworthy and Mark Igra, “Medical Crowdfunding and Disparities in Health Care Access in the United States, 2016‒2020.” American Journal of Public Health 112, no. 3 (2022): 491–98. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306617.; Jeremy Snyder, Marco Zenone, Valorie Crooks, and Nadine Schuurman. “What Medical Crowdfunding Campaigns Can Tell Us About Local Health System Gaps and Deficiencies: Exploratory Analysis of British Columbia, Canada.” Journal of Medical Internet Research 22, no. 5 (May 22, 2020): e16982. https://doi.org/10.2196/16982.

[5] Lauren S. Berliner and Nora J. Kenworthy, “Producing a Worthy Illness: Personal Crowdfunding amidst Financial Crisis,” Social Science & Medicine 187 (2017): 233–42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.02.008.; Lauren S. Berliner and Nora J. Kenworthy, “Producing a Worthy Illness: Personal Crowdfunding amidst Financial Crisis,” Social Science & Medicine 187 (2017): 233–42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.02.008.

[6] Michael Brown and Larry Knopp, "Queering the Map: The Productive Tensions of Colliding Epistemologies," Annals of Association of American Geographers 98, no. 1 (2008): 40-58.; Meghan Cope and Sarah Elwood, Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach (London: SAGE, 2009).; Sarah Elwood, "Geographic Information Science: Visualization, Visual Methods, and the Geoweb," Progress in Human Geography 35, no. 3 (2011): 401-08.; Mei-Po Kwan, "Is GIS for Women? Reflections on the Critical Discourse in the 1990s," Gender, Place and Culture 9, no. 3 (2002): 271-79.; Francis Harvey, Mei-Po Kwan, and Marianna E. Pavlovskaya, "Introduction: Critical GIS," Cartographica 40, no. 4 (2005): 1-4.; Marianna E. Pavlovskaya, "Critical GIS as a Tool for Social Transformation," The Canadian Geographer 62, no. 1 (2018): 40-54. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12438; Johan Pickles, Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems (New York: The Guilford, 1995).; Nadine Schuurman, "Critical GIS: Theorizing an Emerging Discipline," Cartographica 36, no. 4 (1999): 1-109 (Monograph 53). 

[7] Sarah Elwood and Matthew Wilson, "Critical GIS Pedagogies Beyond 'Week 10: Ethics'," International Journal of Geographical Information Science 31, no. 10 (2017): 2098-116.

[8] There are, however, some exceptional works on critical GIS pedagogies, for example, as followings: Sarah Elwood and Matthew Wilson, "Critical GIS Pedagogies Beyond 'Week 10: Ethics'," International Journal of Geographical Information Science 31, no. 10 (2017): 2098-116.; Marianna E. Pavlovskaya, "Critical GIS as a Tool for Social Transformation," The Canadian Geographer 62, no. 1 (2018): 40-54.; Stacy Warren, "Teaching GIS as a Socially Constructed Technology," Cartography and Geographic Information Systems 22, no. 1 (January 1995): 70-77.

[9] Janet Abrams and Peter Hall, Else/Where: New Cartographies of Networks and Territories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006).; Harriet Hawkins, "Geography and Art. An Expanding Field: Site, the Body and Practice," Progress in Human Geography 37, no. 1 (2012): 52-71.

[10] Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison, Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2010).; Sébastien Caquard, "Cartography Iii: A Post-Representational Perspective on Cognitive Cartography," Progress in Human Geography 39, no. 2 (2015): 225-35.

[11] Joe Gerlach, "Lines, Contours and Legends: Coordinates for Vernacular Mapping," Progress in Human Geography 38, no. 1 (2014): 22-39.; Rob Kitchin, Justin Gleeson, and Martin Dodge, "Unfolding Mapping Practices: A New Epistemology for Cartography," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38, no. 3 (2013): 480-96.

[12] Sébastien Caquard, "Cartography III: A Post-Representational Perspective on Cognitive Cartography," Progress in Human Geography 39, no. 2 (2015): 225-35.; Rob Kitchin, Chris Perkins, and Martin Dodge, "Thinking About Maps," in Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory, ed. Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins, (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 1-25.; Tania Rossetto, "Theorizing Maps with Literature," Progress in Human Geography 38, no. 4 (2014): 513-30.

[13] Denis Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (New York: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, 2008).; Matthew H. Edney, Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

[14] Tania Rossetto, Object-Oriented Cartography: Maps as Things (London and New York: Routledge, 2019).

[15] Sarah Elwood and Agnieszka Leszczynski, "Feminist Digital Geographies," Gender, Place and Culture 25, no. 5 (2018): 629-44.; Jen Jack Gieseking, "Size Matter to Lesbians, Too: Queer Feminist Interventions into the Scale of Big Data," The Professional Geographer 70, no. 1 (2018): 150-56.; Dominica Whitesell and Caroline V.  Faria, "Gowns, Globalization, and "Global Intimate Mapping": Geovisualizing Uganda's Wedding Industry," Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 38, no.7-8 (2019): 1-16. doi: 10.1177/2399654418821133; Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).; Hannah Zeavin, “A New AI Lexicon: CARE,” A New AI Lexicon, June 22, 2021, https://medium.com/a-new-ai-lexicon/a-new-ai-lexicon-care-a1243f0e2bad.

[16] Agnieszka Leszczynski, "Digital Methods I: Wicked Tensions," Progress in Human Geography 42, no. 3 (2018): 473-81.

[17] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

[18] Himani Bhakuni and Seye Abimbola, “Epistemic Injustice in Academic Global Health,” The Lancet Global Health 9, no. 10 (2021): e1465–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(21)00301-6.; Gurminder K. Bhambra, “Decolonizing Critical Theory?,” Critical Times 4, no. 1 (April 1, 2021): 73–89. https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-8855227.; André Brock. Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (New York: NYU Press, 2020).; Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021)

[19] Ruha Benjamin, Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).; Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Medford, MA: Polity, 2019); André Brock, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. (New York: NYU Press, 2020).; Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018).; Katerini Storeng and Nora Kenworthy, “Global Health 2.0? Digital Technologies, Disruption, and Power,” in Global Health Watch 6: In the Shadow of the Pandemic (S.l.: ZED BOOKS LTD, 2022).; Stefan Timmermans and Rebecca Kaufman, “Technologies and Health Inequities,” Annual Review of Sociology 46, no. 1 (July 30, 2020): 583–602. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-121919-054802.

[20] Nora Kenworthy and Mark Igra, “Medical Crowdfunding and Disparities in Health Care Access in the United States, 2016‒2020,” American Journal of Public Health 112, no. 3 (2022): 491–98. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306617. 

[21] Mark Igra, Nora Kenworthy, Cadence Luchsinger, and Jin-Kyu Jung, “Crowdfunding as a Response to COVID-19: Increasing Inequities at a Time of Crisis,” Social Science & Medicine 282 (2021): 114105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114105.

[22] Nora Kenworthy, “Like a Grinding Stone: How Crowdfunding Platforms Create, Perpetuate, and Value Health Inequities,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2021): 327–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12639.

[23] Chris A. Barcelos, “‘Bye-Bye Boobies’: Normativity, Deservingness and Medicalisation in Transgender Medical Crowdfunding,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 21, no. 12 (December 2, 2019): 1394–1408. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2019.1566971.; Lauren V. Ghazal, Samantha E. Watson, Brooke Gentry, and Sheila J. Santacroce, “‘Both a Life Saver and Totally Shameful’: Young Adult Cancer Survivors’ Perceptions of Medical Crowdfunding,” Journal of Cancer Survivorship, February 16, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11764-022-01188-x.; Lauren V. Ghazal, Samantha E. Watson, Brooke Gentry, and Sheila J. Santacroce, “‘Both a Life Saver and Totally Shameful’: Young Adult Cancer Survivors’ Perceptions of Medical Crowdfunding,” Journal of Cancer Survivorship, February 16, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11764-022-01188-x.; Trena M. Paulus and Katherine R. Roberts, “Crowdfunding a ‘Real-Life Superhero’: The Construction of Worthy Bodies in Medical Campaign Narratives ,” Discourse, Context & Media 21 (2018): 64–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2017.09.008.

[24] Nora Kenworthy, “Like a Grinding Stone: How Crowdfunding Platforms Create, Perpetuate, and Value Health Inequities,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2021): 327–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12639. 

[25] Nora Kenworthy and Mark Igra, “Medical Crowdfunding and Disparities in Health Care Access in the United States, 2016‒2020,” American Journal of Public Health 112, no. 3 (2022): 491–98. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306617.

[26] Lauren V. Ghazal, Samantha E. Watson, Brooke Gentry, and Sheila J. Santacroce, “‘Both a Life Saver and Totally Shameful’: Young Adult Cancer Survivors’ Perceptions of Medical Crowdfunding,” Journal of Cancer Survivorship, February 16, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11764-022-01188-x.; Amy L. Gonzales, Elizabeth Y Kwon, Teresa Lynch, and Nicole Fritz, “‘Better Everyone Should Know Our Business than We Lose Our House’: Costs and Benefits of Medical Crowdfunding for Support, Privacy, and Identity,” New Media & Society 20, no. 2 (February 1, 2018): 641–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816667723.

[27] Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, "Rethinking Maps," Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 3

(2007): 331-44.

[28] Ben Anderson, "Becoming and Being Hopeful: Towards a Theory of Affect," Environment and

Planning D 24, no. 5 (2006): 733-52.; David M. Berry, Critical Theory and the Digital (New York:

Bloomsbury, 2014).; Matthew H. Edney, Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2019).; Joe Gerlach, "Lines, Contours and Legends: Coordinates

for Vernacular Mapping," Progress in Human Geography 38, no. 1 (2014): 22-39.; Sarah Pink,

Situating Everyday Life (London: SAGE, 2012).

[29] Steven J. Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication,

Materiality, and Society, eds. Tarleton Gillespie and Pablo J. Boczkowski (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 2014): 21–39.

[30] https://tinyurl.com/GoFundUSweb

[31] Lynn Butler-Kisber, “Artful Portrayals in Qualitative Inquiry: The Road to Found Poetry and Beyond,” Alberta Journal of Educational Research 48, no. 3 (2002).; Claudia Castro Luna, “Seattle Poetic Grid,” November 2, 2020, https://seattlepoeticgrid.com/; Rebecca Willis, “The Use of Composite Narratives to Present Interview Findings,” Qualitative Research 19, no. 4 (2019): 471–80, https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794118787711.  

[32] Sarah Elwood and Matthew Wilson, "Critical GIS Pedagogies Beyond 'Week 10: Ethics'," International Journal of Geographical Information Science 31, no. 10 (2017): 2098-116.; Marianna E. Pavlovskaya, "Critical GIS as a Tool for Social Transformation," The Canadian Geographer 62, no. 1 (2018): 40-54. doi: 10.1111/cag.12438; Britta Ricker and Jim Thatcher, “Evolving Technology, Shifting Expectations: Cultivating Pedagogy for a Rapidly Changing GIS Landscape,” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 41, no. 3 (July, 2017): 368–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2017.1315533.; Stacy Warren, “Introduction to the Special Section: Teaching Critical GIS | Teaching GIS Critically.” The Canadian Geographer 64, no. 4 (2020): 467–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12669.

[33] Sarah Elwood and Matthew Wilson, "Critical GIS Pedagogies Beyond 'Week 10: Ethics'," International Journal of Geographical Information Science 31, no. 10 (2017): 2098-116.; Jin-Kyu Jung, "Teaching Creative Geovisualization: Imagining the Creative in/of GIS," The Canadian Geographer 64, no. 4 (2020): 512-28. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12657.

[34] Dydia DeLyser, Steve Herbert, Stuart Aitken, Mike Crang, and Linda McDowell, The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Geography (London: SAGE, 2010): 15, cited in Jin-Kyu Jung, "Teaching Creative Geovisualization: Imagining the Creative in/of GIS," The Canadian Geographer 64, no. 4 (2020): 526.

[35] Beza Merid, “Fight for Our Health: Activism in the Face of Health Insurance Precarity,” BioSocieties 15, no. 2 (2020): 159–81. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-019-00145-9.

[36] John B. McKinlay, “A Case for Refocusing Upstream—the Political Economy of Sickness,” in Applying Behavioral Science to Cardiovascular Risk (Dallas, TX: American Heart Association, 1975), 9-25.

[37] Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, "Rethinking Maps," Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 3

(2007): 331-44.; Rob Kitchin, Justin Gleeson, and Martin Dodge, "Unfolding Mapping Practices:

A New Epistemology for Cartography," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38,

no. 3 (2013): 480-96.