About
Our approach
The project GIS, Policing and Us investigates the entanglement of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and urban policing in Canada and the USA.
The role of GIS tools and spatial analysis technologies in policing is facilitated by technology companies, and exacerbates the ongoing crisis of racialized police violence. The goal of this project is to uncover the extent of the relationships between GIS industry and policing in Canada and the USA in order to facilitate urgently needed discourse about decarceral futures.
This project investigates the ways in which GIS’s role in policing is remaking cities into spaces of control and surveillance. It answers calls from scholars working within the interdisciplinary fields of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, LGBTQIA2S, and urban studies that challenge us to produce spaces of liberation that are anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, and queer.
The project has two objectives:
- Unpack the relationship between Geography and policing, often entangled through the tools for geo-spatial analysis. We investigate and document the uneven but broad uptake of GIS technologies in police agencies across Canada and the USA.
- Provoke a renewed conversation on teaching practices in Geography that will divest from racialized policing, asking Geography instructors to think about what we can do differently within our institutions to contribute to more just futures.
Who we are
We are four human geographers connected to a broader interdisciplinary group of spatial thinkers working in radical geography, including abolition, carceral, Black, feminist, and Indigenous geographies, as well as critical Geographic Information Science (GIS), political ecology, and political economy. Our collaboration goes beyond the walls of our universities as we are educators, designers, podcasters, poets, and scholar-activists.
The work for this project began in 2022 through the Making Abolition in Geography Collective, which was initiated after a series of roundtables and presentations at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual meeting entitled “Cops Off Campus… and Everywhere.” Responding to calls across universities for Cops Off Campus, as well as community calls to defund police, divest from carceral technologies, we work in solidarity with abolition movements across the globe. As educators and scholars, we connect these movements to our ongoing struggles to reconcile the discipline of geography’s history and complicity with militarism and empire, as well as new work on critical GIS and counter-cartographies.
Bridging activism and scholarship, together with others we distributed a call for geographers and spatial thinkers to consider how the discipline of Geography and Geography Departments are implicated in the police and prison industrial complex through research and teaching, signed by 154 people. We created a Special Forum in Society and Space in October 2022 entitled “Making Abolition in Geography,” organized a hybrid panel discussion on Spatial Analytics and Abolitionist Futures in November 2022 that was attended by 150 people, and launched the Beyond Esri Resource Guide with the support of the Antipode Foundation in February 2024.
Project team
Dr. Leah Montagne
Bissell-Heyd Lecturer and Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream of American Studies
Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto
Dr. Montange is a human geographer whose work addresses the relations between human life and state power in contexts of bordering, detention, and labor — contexts where freedom, unfreedom and mobility are at stake. Her work is published in journals such as Citizenship Studies; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space; and Globalizations. In the American Studies program at U of T, she teaches core courses as well as specialized thematic courses on borders, labor, (non-)citizenship and empire. Dr. Montange received a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Toronto, where she was a recipient of the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and was a Pruitt Dissertation Fellow of the Society of Women Geographers. She also recently taught with the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound.
Dr. Araby Smyth
Assistant Professor (sessional)
Department of Geography & Environment Mount Allison University
Dr. Smyth is a feminist economic and urban geographer. Prior to Mount Allison University, she worked as a Post-Doctoral Visitor on the SSHRC funded GenUrb Project at the City Institute of York University in Toronto. Her research on debt, remittance economies, and decolonizing knowledge production has been funded by the Antipode Foundation, National Science Foundation (USA), and Society of Woman Geographers. She has published in journals such as Antipode, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and she is on the Editorial Collective of ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies.
Dr. Jane Henderson
Assistant Professor
Department of Geography, Dartmouth College
Dr. Henderson is interested in Black geographies beyond the plantation. Her first book project examines the historical and contemporary relationship of blackness to the frontier, in order to think through the place of blackness in settler geographies and imaginaries. Dr. Henderson asks questions about Black and Indigenous claims to space through her hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her research is indebted to Black Caribbean thinkers and writers, whose work has pushed her toward entirely new questions and possibilities for Black life in the Americas.
Drew Heiderscheidt
PhD Candidate
Department of Geography, Indiana University, Bloomington
Drew Heiderscheidt is a critical historical GIScientist who studies the relationship between collective action and criminalization in Colorado’s Front Range during the 20th century. His dissertation focuses on the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), a radical industrial union, and the ways that it both engaged in place-based labor organizing and was criminalized by an alliance of politicians, corporations, and news media during the late 19th c. to early 20th c. Methodologically, Drew synthesizes archival research and qualitative GIS methods to unearth how geographical imaginations were developed in order to materially and discursively suppress the WFM’s radicalism.
This project would not have been possible without funding from the Antipode Foundation’s Right to the Discipline Grant and a Munk Seed and SIG Grant. This website was designed and built with the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative UX Design for DH Accelerator Program at the University of Toronto. It was designed by Meg Sanchez and developed by Matt Lefaive.
The content on this website is the result of three years of collaborations with many people. We are grateful to the following people for their insight, support, and contributions along the way.
Patricia Basile
Amber Bosse
Stefan Chavez-Noorgard
Carrie Chennault
Frank Donnelly
Jah Elyse Sayers
Carrie Freshour
Mara Henderson
Maria Lovett
Rasul Mowatt
Ian Spangler
Sara Smith
Tim Stallmann
Too Black
Megan Ybarra