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CSDE Research Affiliate

Jin-Kyu Jung

Associate Professor, School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences
University of Washington
Box: 358530

In the News:

I am an urban geographer/planner whose interdisciplinary research focused on developing new ways of critical, qualitative, and creative possibilities of Geographic Information Sciences (GIS) and geographic visualization in understanding socio-spatial processes and politics of urban space and community. On the one hand, I continuously explore the importance of power and politics as well as the complexities of race, class, gender and sexualities in cities, and ask how the shaping of these categories effectively complicates urban geographical knowledge. On the other hand, my research offers epistemological and methodological innovations in digital spatial technologies that expand the critical and qualitative capabilities of GIS and geographic visualization. I have tried to integrate various forms of data and representation, and analysis often considered as incompatible in GIS environments: quantitative and qualitative, visuality and numeracy, maps and text, artistic and scientific, and real and digital. Applying digital innovations grounded in the community-based research, I show how this integrated approach generates stronger and more ‘nuanced’ urban geographical insights than are possible within singular epistemological/methodological framework. I also demonstrate how the substantive insights made possible through the intermingling of these (different) data and methods, when applied in researches on people’s conceptualization of urban space and community, spatial inequality and urban poverty, smart urbanism, and imagining the critical and creative in/with GIS and geographic visualization. Much of these works have drawn on researches I conducted in inner city Buffalo, NY, and more recently from community-based engaged researches in Seattle, WA. Recently, I am also interested in further implementing the qualitative aspects of GIS and geovisualization complementing current Big Data and digital social/spatial research. It will help us to see a deeper contextual meaning, drawn from diverse socio-spatial, cultural, political and technological boundaries of knowledge in a hybrid (both real and digital) space we live now.