Models of Citizenship: A Comparative Analysis of Crowdsourced and Local Mapping Projects

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University of Calgary

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2021-09-23

Models of Citizenship: A Comparative Analysis of Crowdsourced and Local Mapping Projects

Ambrose, Angela Diane

Ambrose, A. D. (2021). Models of Citizenship: A Comparative Analysis of Crowdsourced and Local Mapping Projects (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB.

http://hdl.handle.net/1880/113963 master thesis

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UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Models of Citizenship: A Comparative Analysis of Crowdsourced and Local Mapping Projects

by

Angela Diane Ambrose

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN GEOGRAPHY

CALGARY, ALBERTA

SEPTEMBER, 2021

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Abstract

Citizenship is contested, re-negotiated, and evaluated in shifting sociopolitical and economic contexts: it is scalar, spatialized, embedded with power relations and exclusionary at its foundations. Digital technologies shift conceptualizations of citizenship in humanitarian, legal, social and urban development work contexts. Digital technologies in these contexts produce emergent, digitized power asymmetries between mappers and the communities they map, including places and ideas that are translated into mapped data. These power asymmetries are characterized by dominant forms of knowledge producing digital categories through which mapped individuals become perceived, reinforcing stigmatized views of the Other. This thesis details a cross-organizational case study undertaken in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which explored how citizenship is modulated by, and embedded within, digital mapping practices and the organizational approaches that underlie them. In this research I engage with ways that citizenship is both conceptualized and performed in digital mapping projects. I primarily argue that digital citizenship, a performative tool, is a key way that socially excluded communities seek justice within digital mapping practices and that crowdsourced mapping volunteers in turn perform a digital citizenship that introduces complex power dynamics.

Keywords: citizenship, crowdsourcing, digital technologies, digital geographies, informal settlements, Latin American studies

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Figures

Figure 1: Caminos de la Villa platform ... 39

Figure 2: Resident participating in Google Streetview project (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIL6EpVlcX0) ... 41

Figure 3: Urbanization Indicators in Villa 31: Public Services (Feb 2020) ... 48

Figure 4: ACIJ graphic: Internet is a public service/the state must guarantee access to the entire population ... 57

Figure 5: Screen capture from a Reddit thread (pascalsgirlfriend & justablondeguy (Reddit), 2019) ... 60

Tables

Table 1: Summary of citizenship concepts ... 12

Table 2: Research participants by organization (pseudonymized) ... 26

Table 3: Data Collection ... 29

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Acknowledgments

I’m deeply indebted to the folks in my life who have given me endless motivation, support, inspiration, nudges in the right direction and pushes to complete something I once thought was unreachable for me -- from the moment I decided to apply to a master’s program, to the finish line I’m now rapidly, exhilaratingly approaching.

I would first like to express my profound gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Ryan Burns, who is much more than an expert in his field: He has supported me with his guidance and personal experience, from transitioning into graduate school to being a constant, invaluable support for everything I’ve sought to achieve. If it weren’t for our countless conversations, directed reading studies and other interactions, I would never have thought graduate school was possible. Over the past few years, Dr. Burns has helped to form the way I understand geography, digital technologies, and society more broadly. I am incredibly grateful for that.

I would also like to acknowledge the inspiration, motivation and support I received from faculty and committee members along the way: First, I thank Dr. Darren Sjogren for being my first point of contact when the idea of graduate school was still only a seed in my mind. Drs. Dianne Draper and Chui-Ling Tam are constant sources of inspiration, knowledge, and support for me. I’m very grateful for Dr. Mónica Farías, who gave me an incredible opportunity to travel to Buenos Aires, Argentina for fieldwork. Her kindness, local knowledge and expertise helped both myself and my project greatly while I was in a new, unfamiliar place. Thank you to University of Buenos Aires’ Instituto de Geografía and the Grupo de Estudios Geografías Emergentes for very graciously hosting me as a visiting scholar and inviting me to present my work. COVID-19 cut my time there short, but I will return!

I owe endless gratitude to and appreciation for my cohort, peers, and friends, who were (and are) my leaning post whenever I face a challenge. Our conversations about many anxieties and elations we

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vi experience, philosophy in human geography, The Simpsons, and the happy distractions we had: Thank you to Jeremy John Escobar Torio, Joyce Percel, Dare Adeyemi, Preston Welker, Suzanne Chew, Shifa Hayat, Russell Copley, and Debra Mackinnon. I owe many thanks to Arielle Stirling as well, who may not be a University of Calgary student, but who inspired me to go back to school and supported me from a long distance. Thank you all so much for building me up.

I would like to thank my family and my partner, Marco, for being my pillar of support and motivating me when I needed it the most. You are all the reason I have achieved this success and I will never have the right (or enough) words to express how much I appreciate that. I love you.

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Acronyms & Terms

ACIJ: La Asociación Civil por la Igualdad y la Justicia, or The Association for Equality and Justice

Caminos/Caminos de la Villa: Caminos de la Villa, referred to in short by ACIJ directors as Caminos, is the participatory mapping project and platform in part of my case study.

HOT: Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team

Informal settlements: Informal settlements are often colloquially described as “slums”. In this thesis, I

use the term when speaking broadly about lived spaces that are not formally recognized through such means as property titles and land entitlement.

Villas (or Villas Miserías): Villas and villas miserías are colloquial terms used to describe informal settlements in Buenos Aires.

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Chapter One: Introduction

A young neighbourhood resident has a medical emergency after falling into an abandoned open pit, but they don’t receive care because their city’s emergency management refuses to enter your community citing a lack of safety – beyond that, there are no formal street names and no way to readily and quickly locate the person in crisis. Years later, and many grassroots activist movements later, a prominent legal action organization facilitates a participatory mapping project that enables residents to communicate where they live, and importantly, that they live, through digital mapping technologies.

While the resident didn’t make it, others in the community see gradual changes – new buildings and infrastructures, new services, new customers to their places of business. Some see the changes as good, other changes are bad, tone-deaf or, simply, neutral. The city they live in recognizes their lived space and is pushed to grant recognition through formal measures such as property ownership, and major private sector corporation representatives approach them to form a partnership and buy into their platform’s services. Utilities like water and electricity are inconsistent, but at least they legally own the property they live in and can be found on Google Maps.

In another community far away, a similar story is told in a different spatial, social, political, and methodological context. A community in crisis sees infrastructural changes happening in their neighbourhood over time. They don’t necessarily know who sanctioned those changes – their community is newly on a map, but they didn’t necessarily participate or know anyone involved in the making of that map – a volunteer from Canada digitized buildings using satellite imagery without ever stepping foot in the community. The Canadian feels good about what they did, because their actions resulted in digitized geospatial data that were used by non-profit organizations to identify needs and distribute resources – at least, that’s what they were told. A resident feels that they aren’t being heard, and that they’re being treated as a passive beneficiary.

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2 What I described above are events happening in many informal settlements and underrepresented, invisibilized communities worldwide. Digital technologies are fostering agency and acts of justice-seeking by people who live in communities that are often invisibilized in policy because they don’t meet a particular standard of formality. Those technologies are used as a medium to see and be seen on platforms, and through that visibility, to advocate for what aspects of society they should be able to participate in. They are, however, forms of power modulated by how they’re used (and who uses them), influencing perceptions of people and places. Digital technologies shape and reinforce the way we view ourselves, our responsibilities, and our perceptions of others. Broadly, they facilitate new social relations and forms of participation in nearly all aspects of society that transcend previous understandings of space and citizenship. One of these new forms of participation, crowdsourcing knowledge in humanitarian aid work and participatory mapping for digital representation, has proven to support both emancipatory and greatly limiting ways depending on the approach.

Critical research in digital geographies explores this idea and largely examines data, software, platforms, algorithms, and related digital technologies to show that social and technological processes are mutually constitutive. This research also explores how data collection, categorization, analysis and dissemination, and the decisions made as a result, mediate everyday life in varied spaces and contexts at different socially-defined scales (Ash, Kitchin, & Leszczynski, 2018; Burns, 2014; Elwood, 2006; Elwood &

Leszczynski, 2013; Taylor, 2017; Cheney-Lippold, 2017; Kitchin, 2016). Those mediations occur within all types of digital technologies, such as desktop computers, smartphones, internet-of-things technologies (smart devices that aren’t phones), and humanitarian drones deployed to collect information about crises.

Recent research has shown that neoliberalizing digital economies have become more exploitative by facilitating new forms of digital labour (like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing marketplace) that involve widespread surveillance of any individuals who produce data about themselves (Burns, 2019; Graham, 2019; Thatcher, O’Sullivan, & Mahmoudi, 2016). Digital labor then represents a

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3 shift of both political-economic and social relations made possible through digitization. Further, digital geographies research within humanitarianism has shown that humanitarianism often relies on digital technologies without giving them sufficient critical analysis, or incorporating local knowledges (Burns, 2014, 2015; Read, Taithe, & MacGinty, 2016; Sandvik & Lohne, 2013).

Digital technologies also mediate, and are implicated in, conceptualizations of responsibilities and rights, often as a form of membership understood as citizenship. ‘Citizenship’ should be understood here as a pliable, dynamic, place-contingent concept designed to delineate both formal and informal modes of belonging and non-belonging (Desforges, Jones, & Woods, 2005; Staeheli, 1999, 2010, 2013). Digital technologies increasingly enable global-scale societal participation that transcends physically and socially defined boundaries, and so citizenship and ideas of belonging and non-belonging are no longer solely defined by the nation-state to which a person belongs. Rapid advancements in digital technologies, particularly in digital mapping technologies, enable geographically removed, digitally connected contributors to produce spatial knowledge about spaces where citizenship, in many ways, is socio- politically contingent. At the same time, digital technologies once viewed as free and public are now entangled in public-private partnerships (Burns, 2019). These partnerships and the politics embedded within them are influencing how global-scale and even participatory grassroots-scale mapping projects produce and visualize spatial knowledge, complicating actions that are typically viewed as citizen action and citizen-making processes.

I situate my work within these ongoing debates. In this thesis, I will highlight how conceptions of belonging, exclusion, and citizenship shift alongside social relations with the use of digital mapping technologies. Furthermore, digital technologies mediate and re-shape our daily existence, and the way we use them (and for whom) influences knowledge production about a place and its people. Digital technologies (re)produce and facilitate the constant negotiation of the realities and lived experiences of individuals living in informal settlements. The way that communities are engaged (local

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4 engagement/participatory or remote, crowdsourced) is an indication of how power structures influence informal communities. The language used by actors in positions of power also serve both as an indication of what kind of power structures are in place and how local perspectives are engaged within the process of urban development. Tensions between city government and local advocacy and activist organizations and between remote volunteers and residents of mapped communities, as I will discuss in Chapter 5, uncover hierarchies of power.

There is a pressing research need to bridge the ways digital technologies influence and are influenced by informal living and working practices with conceptualizations of a citizen: informal settlements, for example, are both spatially and socially excluded, have widely inconsistent access to, participation in and education about digital technologies. Digital technologies are now a defining aspect of participating as a citizen in many aspects of society, including reporting observations of city infrastructure, attending virtual civic engagement sessions, and now, remote public education as a result of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. This more prominent role raises a tension. On the one hand, digital mapping technologies in particular have the power to reinforce spatialized inequality, produce and reproduce stigmatized views of excluded communities. On the other hand, these technologies have the power to facilitate social integration depending on how they are used and who uses them. Digital mapping projects both produce new, socio-technologically contingent forms of citizenship that unevenly impact populations and therefore raise pressing new questions for researchers of the socio-technical.

In Chapter Two, I will highlight literature relevant to my research with a focus on critical technology studies (used in digital geographies) and citizenship studies. In Chapter Three, I outline my research design and methodology. In Chapter Four, I set the organizational context of both cases and the relevant geographic context of the project. In Chapter Five, I highlight my findings to argue that, first, digital technologies frame perceptions of individuals and consequently the boundaries of their citizenship.

Second, I argue that different forms of citizenship emerge in different digital mapping contexts and that

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5 differential participatory roles warrant a typology of active and passive digital citizenship. Finally, in Chapter Six, I will conclude by summarizing some of this project’s key contributions and highlighting a need for a more inclusive understanding of digital citizenship.

Chapter Two: Literature Review, Definitions & Concepts

In this chapter, I discuss key research exploring digital technologies and citizenship and how this research is evolving. The literature I focus on is key to understanding the social construction of technologies and citizenship, and the power asymmetries embedded within them. The unevennesses of digital technology design and use have had implications for processes and systems of citizenship. This discussion helps to conceptualize new ways of understanding these implications in light of the socio- technical shifts I laid out above. Specifically, I cover two broad areas of research that call into question common claims that digital technologies revolutionize social justice and boost supports for socially excluded communities: conceptions of citizenship, and representational power (digital divides, datafication and data colonialism).

Each of these areas sets the scholarly context (and the need) for my project and offers complementary theorizations that, together, help highlight how informal and socially excluded communities are differently influenced by digital mapping technologies. As well, a foundation of my ideas is that maps are a form of power (Harley, 1989). First, I call attention to the socio-technical context in which digital mapping projects are situated in humanitarian aid, highlighting its beginnings and relevant ideas. Second, I describe and discuss theorizations of citizenship to demonstrate that citizenship is socially contingent and embedded with power relations. Last, I engage with some key theorizations of representational power within digital mapping technologies, elaborating the impacts those ideas have for socially excluded and informal communities.

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6

Conceptions of Belonging: Local, Global and Digital Citizenship

Citizenship has always been widely and constantly contested, re-negotiated, and re-evaluated in shifting political, social, and economic processes. It is a dynamic, socially contingent term used to evoke notions of responsibility, rights, and belonging/non-belonging. It is scalar (Desforges et al., 2005; Staeheli, 1999; Swyngedouw, 1997), spatial (Ceuppens & Geschiere, 2005; Desforges et al., 2005; Ryburn, 2018), embedded with power relations and exclusionary at its foundations (Ceuppens & Geschiere, 2005; Falk, 1993; Holston, 1999; Mossberger, Tolbert, & McNeal, 2007; Ryburn, 2018; Staeheli, 1999, 2010;

Swyngedouw, 1997; van Steenbergen, 1994). Citizenship, foundationally, demarcates criteria for belonging and non-belonging. This section details the conversations happening within critical citizenship studies literature and where there are gaps.

Digital mapping projects at both grassroots-level and through crowdsourcing often promote inclusivity, social justice and equal representation as primary goals through evoking citizenship as a motivation to, and outcome of, contributing to a project, but do so to the appeal of actors in different structural positions. Digital maps are a critical tool for conceptualizing citizenship because they involve what is often understood as citizen-making process: being responsible, contributing to a community whether local, digital, or global, accessing rights through making one’s self and one’s community visible.

Isin & Ruppert (2015) identify the citizen as a historical, geographic figure that emerged in “particular historical configurations and a dynamic, changing and…contested figure of politics that comes into being by performing politics” (21). In other words, there are understandings of the citizen as a rights-bearing object, and more critical understandings of the citizen as a performative rights-claiming, rights-defining subject.

T.H. Marshall (1950)’s conceptualization of citizenship was foundational to the development of its contemporary understandings. For Marshall, citizenship is threefold and formed over times of profound sociopolitical change. He first outlines the component of how we navigate and identify ourselves

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7 in civil society: freedom of speech, rights to justice, rights to own property, and “liberty of the person” (p.

10). Second, he describes a right to exercise political power, through the ability to vote and participate in government. Third is social citizenship, which he conceptualizes as “the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in society” (11), including the right to public education and social services. Marshall (1950) explained that this threefold citizenship was once wound into a single thread and amalgamated by the state. He argues that, over time, the change in the role of the state resulted in citizenship as three separate components that an individual could experience concurrently or disparately depending on the economic class of the individual. These components, according to Marshall, separated from the state over different centuries, and that the social component to citizenship was not acknowledged until the early 20^th century in arguments over individual rights (25).

The role of the state in defining, designating and distributing rights as well as establishing who should be included within that modicum of rights is key to his conceptualization and remains key to thinking through economic influences impacts on citizenship. For Marshall, citizenship was a way to conceptualize a form of equality of what rights all individuals can enjoy, as long as they did not conflict with the inequalities necessary for a productive capitalist society (Rees, 1996). In its earlier forms, it was defined as a series of civil rights, and civil rights were indispensable to a competitive market economy. In that sense, the civil rights granted turned societies into groups of individuals who were theoretically equipped to protect themselves instead of relying on the state for social protections. In the advent and proliferation of neoliberalism, the rollback of state-sanctioned rights and responsibilities have in turn reduced what rights constituted a formal citizenship, and that social components of citizenship (like social services and welfare rights) became directly influenced by the free market (Woolford & Nelund, 2013).

Critical conversations of citizenship have spotlighted unevennesses and power asymmetries of the concept. Marshall, at the time of his writing and publishing, focused on class inequality of citizenship

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8 and did not explore how race, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, cultural background and spatial contexts also influence how citizenship is formed, enacted and experienced (Rees, 1996). More recently, it has become understood as a structure of power that is most often a top-down approach. Formal citizenship status does not guarantee uniform rights or access to social services, and formality (like national citizenship) produces an illusion of evenness and equality (Fraser, 1994; Staeheli, 2013). Adriaansens (1994), Fraser (1994), Hewitt (1996), Lynn & Ho (2011), and Staeheli (1999, 2010, 2013) all highlight different aspects of who is missing from, and who is included in different concepts of citizenship. For example, Fraser (1994) shows that, in the U.S. political context, social citizenship is not commonly addressed because, in discussing it, the discourse would necessitate welfare and similar programs to be a social right rather than what the popular media often labels a ‘handout’. As well, they have highlighted that the way we conceptualize citizenship influences who is viewed as a citizen or who is worthy of the rights associated with that membership and what those rights are. For example, formal state citizenship often includes social services and welfare programs, but because undocumented immigrants are not formal state citizens, they face impossible challenges in receiving any type of social aid (Adriaansens, 1994;

Fraser, 1994; Hewitt, 1996; Lynn & Ho, 2011; Runciman, 1996; Staeheli, 2013).

In the field of geography, Staeheli (1999) conceptualized citizenship as a scalar concept:

something experienced, enacted and practiced in tandem with one’s perceived relationship to the world as influenced by processes of globalization. More specifically, Staeheli highlights how individuals with different socioeconomic mobilities have varied opportunities to experience citizenship – for example, an individual who feels they practice global citizenship is most likely an individual with greater wealth, disposable income and time, and formal recognition. This positionality enables them to participate in many aspects of citizenship, including participation in civic engagement and volunteering on digital platforms. Desforges et. al (2005) have traced a gradual departure from ideas of national citizenship in which citizens enjoy social, political and civil rights distributed at a federal level, to more local, place-based

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9 conceptions of citizenship that appear to be scaled down, but are directly connected to, affect and are guided by global economic and political processes transcending the federal/national (see also Ceuppens

& Geschiere, 2005; Nagar, Lawson, McDowell, & Hanson, 2002; Staeheli, 1999; Swyngedouw, 1997). It is in this sense that citizenship is also made and enacted with spatial implications (Lynn & Ho, 2011).

Globalization re-constitutes scale from local to national to global through transnational economic processes, and has in turn re-scaled and offered different modes to redefining citizenship (Swyngedouw, 1997, 2007). Globalization and digital technologies are re-assigning the makers, definers, producers, and gatekeepers of citizenship.

Global citizenship is one conceptualization of belonging and responsibility that most often speaks to a demographic that holds disposable time, income, and the privilege of mobility across space. It has been conceptualized by scholars such as Falk (1993), and has been largely used in humanitarian, education and other public discourse as a strategy to influence individuals’ social responsibility beyond their own community and to evoke a feeling of commonality across cultures and shared human experience (Falk, 1993; Nussbaum, 2002). Global citizenship also evokes ideas of neocolonialism: globalization’s centralization of wealth and power enabling socioeconomically privileged individuals to identify as global citizens. For example, global citizenship and ‘to be a global citizen’ is often used as rhetoric in marketing materials geared toward western university students for humanitarian-branded programs such as volunteer abroad and service-learning projects. Mobility, as argued by Cresswell (2013), is central to being a citizen – with this in mind, digital technologies facilitate increased mobility of people, ideas, knowledge, goods and services and those with the greater ease of access tend to have the most influence and likelihood to self-identify as ‘global citizens’.

Contrasting the often top-down, marginalizing ideas of global citizenship, scholars have increasingly begun to think through how informality and lived experience (such as a sense of belonging within a community, feelings of responsibility to contribute to the community to which a person belongs)

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10 fit within this broader context and history of citizenship. Ryburn (2018) traces uncertainty and informal citizenship as a mosaic of multiple components of individual and cultural identity, and senses of (non-) belonging across spatial, cultural and personal social networks rather than within pre-defined political boundaries. This is an important step toward understanding that citizenship’s conceptualizations often omit, rather than underscore, lived experience and the social production of citizenship.

Digital citizenship builds on many of these previous conceptualizations of citizenship to incorporate the profound influence digital technologies have had on both the global economy and the new relations that produce different ideas of citizenship. For Mossberger et al. (2007), digital citizenship can be briefly summarized as “the ability to participate in society online” (1): they describe that it has become intertwined with the civil component of citizenship that Marshall (1950) outlined, and is a form of social inclusion. It is important to consider that our digital life is indeed intertwined with our offline life and participation in civil society, particularly as many city processes now engage its residents in online capacities. In Buenos Aires, for example, residents access utilities information, bill payments, and file civic complaints or grievances (which, according to their website, is possible only through their digital platform). Education institutions also often require parents to have internet and e-mail access for enrolment purposes. Mossberger et al. (2007) do not, however, engage with the many critiques of Marshall’s conceptualization of citizenship, leaving much room for examination of how digital citizenship (as any conceptualization of citizenship) reduces it to participation somehow, in some way, in society using a digital technology. Mossberger et al. describe a digital divide as part of what limits digital citizenship from being wholly representative of populations – these are disparities in who uses technologies and how they are used (2007; 2003). What they do not elucidate, however, is that representation and how an individual is participating, the ethics of what is done throughout the process (how their information is organized, categorized, and enacted) makes a significant impact on the amount of agency people experience as digital citizens.

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11 Isin and Ruppert (2015) advanced this discussion of digital citizenship. It is not mobilized by participation online, but is rather enacted by making digital rights claims, bridging the political subject with the digital subject, and understanding them as inseparably intertwined with one another. Critical citizenship studies research, for Isin and Ruppert, examines citizenship not as sets of rights and responsibilities, but as a site for contestation, social and political struggle. Citizenship is dynamic, and is an ongoing process of becoming, or making, rather than its most-often description in political discourse:

a static position indicating membership or non-membership, which to some degree is indicated in Mossberger et al.’s work. Hintz et al. (2019) take this theorization a step further by narrowing in on datafication (commonly conceptualized as the transmuting of aspects of daily life into data) and how, while it can provide opportunities for citizen action, it is also used opportunistically in ways the reinforce inequalities in nuanced ways. Datafication as part of a citizen-making process is fraught with limitations, biases, prejudices, and inequalities.

As there are many conceptions of citizenship, please see Table 1 for a summary of the key conceptualizations and scholars that I use:

Type Key Scholars Cited Broad Idea

Local Staeheli, Desforges, Lynn &

Ho, Ceuppens Spatially- and scale-bound forms of belonging based on ties to local community groups, associations, clubs, property ownership and more.

Informal Ryburn, Chauvin Networked, scaled and spatial forms of belonging through linguistic, religious, geographic, familial and cultural ties. These scholars trace them through migrant contexts.

Global Falk, Nussbaum, Staeheli An effect of globalization, characterized by an individual with perceived responsibility to contribute to a cause beyond one’s own community or place of belonging.

Digital Mossberger, Isin & Ruppert,

Hintz, Dencik Digital technologies and the social relations that underlie them influence and are influenced by performative citizenship. Individuals perceive different responsibilities through and by the digital.

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12 National Marshall, Lynn & Ho,

Ceuppens Individuals experience state-sanctioned rights and responsibilities by virtue of their state membership (a citizen of Canada, for example).

Formal Marshall, Desforges An ascribed membership of an individual to an association, state, or community bound by policy and regulation

Table 1: Summary of citizenship concepts

Each type of citizenship that I outline here often maps onto and is inseparably linked to other types. Falk’s and Nussbaum’s conceptions of global citizenship argue that it is about holding a sense of responsibility as a member of a global community to contribute across space and geopolitical boundaries. This can manifest in both through digital technologies and non-digital, analog space. Global citizenship was first conceptualized before digital technologies became part of nearly every aspect of society, and has been most often described relative to experiential learning, volunteer abroad, missionary, and humanitarian causes (Clifford & Montgomery, 2017; Lynn & Ho, 2011; Nussbaum, 2002). This past decade, in the advent and growing popularity of crowdsourced humanitarian mapping, digital citizenship and global citizenship became linked through new opportunities like digital volunteerism. For example, in the past, I have enacted a global digital citizenship as a volunteer for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team by (as Isin

& Ruppert might describe it) claiming rights through producing useable map data that mapped community residents could use to advocate for their justice with institutions such as state or civic government. More specifically, I experienced a global citizenship through my sense of responsibility to contribute to other communities, and I enacted a digital citizenship by facilitating rights claims for others like mapped community residents. Each type can also influence what constitutes a formal citizenship: through the rights claims digital citizens make, those rights can be incorporated into formal policy and regulation. For example, a digital map contribution can serve to highlight the need for, and lead to implementation of social housing, healthcare, or other commonly state-sanctioned social rights. The informal citizenship that Ryburn theorized through tracing migration journeys between Bolivia and Chile highlights that an individual also experiences belonging and responsibility by virtue of their own familial, cultural, spatial,

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13 work and other networks. One can then draw a line that connects it with digital and/or global citizenship, depending on whether individuals use digital technologies or transnational connections to claim rights for aspects of their networks. For example, the act of participatory mapping, like using OpenStreetMap to visualize spatial information about a meaningful place, can help to constitute a mapper’s informal social networks and places of belonging. Different types of citizenship are closely linked, making it is necessary to examine the power dynamics that exist between and within them.

Many recent discussions of citizenship focus closely on the ways formal citizenship is defined, critiquing its sociopolitical underpinnings in different contexts. These discussions do not sufficiently attend to how citizen-making processes for individuals who live and work in informal settlements, once informal and unrecognized, invisibilized in city governance, become a mode of formal recognition and visibility. I use citizenship, in this project, to examine shifting social relations and the power asymmetries that are embedded within them. Logically, to informal settlement residents, citizenship may only be experienced in the most informal sense within their neighbourhoods, community hubs and existing social networks. In the Buenos Aires context, informal settlements in the region are colloquially referred to as villas miserías or villas in short form. They were called this because they were originally meant to be temporary emergency communities during a period of severe economic downturn, but the communities (villas) remained and grew significantly over time. Limited, early theorizations of citizenship are important to understand where the ideas have come from and why they are heavily critiqued – it has been described as a status and an ongoing process of becoming. The process of mapping is a process of enacting citizenship, which continuously evolves and is redefined in countless ways. Digital citizenship, while discussed more in recent years, has not yet been examined in specific reference to individuals who are otherwise made invisible from broader civil society. If digital citizenship is a way to effectively participate in civil society, and thus enact a civil mode of citizenship, then it is critical to examine whether it’s a

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14 formalization process for individuals who aren’t formally recognized citizens and who facilitates the digital processes, who designates, controls, and categorizes that participation.

Representational power: Digital Divides, Datafication and Data Colonialism

Data and digital technologies are social constructions embedded with power and most often benefitting those who hold power: they are designed to collect particular sets of information based on particular sets of knowledge determining what is and is not relevant to understand phenomena. They are imbued with the norms, values and subjective perspectives of the individuals who use them as technologies of power. Foucault’s conception of technologies of power may be described as the tools used with the aspiration of shaping conduct to have particular desired effects (Oliver, 2013; Rose, 1997).

They may interact with inequalities and oppression in complex ways, reproducing historic patterns, introducing new relations, and shifting them in new ways. In my project, I examine the effects of digital divides, datafication and data colonialism. These are three different ways to examine how discrimination and oppression manifest in digital technologies, and how technologies are used to extract value from individuals. Power is performed by individuals who choose how data are represented and communicated and the purposes to which those data are put. Relatedly, who represents whom is indicative of what kinds of power relations are at play within processes of datafication. For that reason, both participatory and crowdsourced volunteerism are also interrogated in research on mapping projects because of the power asymmetries in knowledge representation they present.

Crowdsourced mapping, which assembles volunteer mappers from many countries on a global scale, is a key set of practices that reinforces an imbalance of knowledge representation in digital technologies. It is leveraged in digital humanitarianism, which relies heavily on crowdsourced mapping and is commonly understood as the deployment of humanitarian aid facilitated via digital technologies.

Burns (2014) has described with greater specificity as “the enacting of social and institutional networks, technologies, and practices that enable large, unrestricted numbers of remote and on-the-ground

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15 individuals to collaborate on humanitarian management through digital technologies”. Such technologies broadly include, for example, volunteer mapping platforms, human rights investigation lab platforms, humanitarian drones deployed during crisis, biometrics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, mobile money transfers and more (Bergtora, Prio, & Lohne, 2014; Burns, 2019; Graham, 2019; Sandvik, Jumbert, Karlsrud, Kaufmann, & Harvard, 2014). In many cases, the technologies are focused on creating, analyzing, and enacting decisions based on vast volumes of data about crisis-impacted individuals and their places of residence. In many mapping projects and human rights investigation labs, data is generated and analyzed by remotely based, crowdsourced volunteers, many of which are not from or intimately familiar with local contexts.

From critical technologies and data studies and its subset of digital humanitarian research, we learn that complex social relations, biases and positionality underpin every decision made about the role of digital technologies and how they incorporate knowledge from mapped communities. Meier (2015) has framed crowdsourced mapping, a subset of a larger set of tools and processes that he describes as digital humanitarianism, to be revolutionary and that anyone can take part as a contributor: “All you need is a big heart and access to the internet” (“Digital Humanitarians,” n.d., np). Meier’s perspective on digital humanitarianism is emblematic of popular ideas of technological solutionism: the idea that social (and humanitarian) problems are solvable through computational, technological interventions (Morozov, 2013). Those interventions manifest as calls for bigger, richer datasets to better understand a crisis, and more crowdsourced contributors to digitize and mobilize that data rapidly. This popular perception that technologies revolutionize how we solve social problems creates a greater reliance on bolstering technological development that can then generate concerns about surveillance and knowledge politics.

Digital mapping technologies have facilitated a relational space for making digital citizens and enacting emergent understandings of both informal and formal citizenship (Ash et al., 2018; Hintz et al., 2019; Isin & Ruppert, 2015). Crowdsourcing, which assembles actors across many scales and spaces, has

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16 been presented as a faster, more efficient strategy for crisis response (Burns, 2014; Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, 2018; Ofli et al., 2016). Crowdsourcing and automated processes (like machine learning and artificial intelligence) have also been shown to undermine some epistemologies and amplify others (Burns, 2014), countering democratization efforts and discouraging full inclusivity (Givoni, 2016), presenting ethical challenges of surveillance and the right to privacy (Bergtora et al., 2014; Dencik, Hintz,

& Cable, 2016; Sandvik et al., 2014; Taylor & Broeders, 2015), and leveraging utopian ideas of optimized technologies for efficient response (Burns, 2014; Meier, 2015; Sandvik & Raymond, 2017). In this thesis, I draw on Morozov (2013) – whose work does not focus directly on humanitarian aid or mapping technologies, but rather society’s relationship with technologies – to critique ideas of optimization as assured progress in humanitarian aid work. Morozov (2013) coins a “Silicon mentality” in which society (and Silicon Valley)’s affinity for constant refinement and optimization undermine the need for human imperfection and error as a component of human freedom (p. xi). Crowdsourced mapping projects, drones, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and mobile money transfers are all technologies that exemplify these drives for optimization and endless calls for bigger, better, more efficient technologies as the saving grace of a crisis. Digital technologies, with these developments and uses, shift who is included in making and performing citizenship.

Data-driven decision making processes very often stem from notions of technological solutionism – data are abstracted from individuals to represent and categorize them to suit a social or political purpose (Cheney-Lippold, 2017; Taylor, 2017). In humanitarian crises, categorizations include urgency of need in a humanitarian crisis, type of damage sustained in affected areas, and more (Crawford & Finn, 2014; Givoni, 2016). Platforms like Twitter and SMS have played a large role in crisis response, in which needs are datafied, translated, categorized and represented on a map for first responders (Mulder, Ferguson, Groenewegen, Boersma, & Wolbers, 2016; Zook, Graham, Shelton, & Gorman, 2010). Power relations embedded within software platforms guide the way decisions are made about a crisis, including how

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17 urgently someone requires aid. Both digital communication methods were only as representative of need as the individuals who had the know-how, capacity and access to use such digital platforms – in that sense, the crisis-impacted individuals who were the most connected were those who were most visible (Burns, 2015; Cheong & Cheong, 2011; Crawford & Finn, 2014; Elwood, 2006a).

Digital divides, or uneven access to digital technologies, reinforce inequality and injustice. Van Dijk & Hacker (2003) broadly describe the digital divide as having four facets of which individuals meet one, some or all depending on their own experience. First, a lack of mental access including lack of interest or “computer anxiety”. Second, they outline a lack of material access, or being without material access to a technological device. Third, a lack of skills access or inadequate social support and/or education to learn how to effectively use a device; and usage access, or timely opportunities in which an individual can access those technologies. Individuals on the disadvantaged side of the digital divide are most often members of historically marginalized groups – gendered, racialized and in low socioeconomic positions (Graham, 2014;

Stephens, 2013).

This is central to understanding why digital technologies, including openly editable mapping platforms, are never neutral and always embedded with values, norms and situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988). Not everyone accesses technology in order to represent themselves and places on platforms like OpenStreetMap. In many humanitarian and advocacy mapping cases, places of social and cultural importance like medical facilities, schools, safe spaces for marginalized groups may not be mapped with the full engagement and agency of the residents from those communities, and the technologies’ design can reinforce this (Stephens, 2013; Zook et al., 2010). When individuals from advantaged socioeconomic, gendered, and racial positions datafy a crisis or an unmapped community, their knowledge becomes the knowledge through which those places and people are known. Concurrently, other forms of knowledge do not get the same attention, undermining them and influencing agency within citizen-making processes.

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18 Building on the idea that representation matters in digital technologies, technologies and society are co-constitutive. Purposes of technologies, their designs and internal/external processes begin from situated ideas, morals, values, lived experiences, cultures and more (Haraway, 1988; Pinch & Bijker, 1984).

This is important to recognize because situated knowledge can also include biases, historic discriminatory practices, colonial and racialized histories. The technologies designed from these situated knowledges then influence our perceptions, political ideologies, thoughts, and actions. Digital technologies influence the way we feel about social norms and processes and encourage us to take actions on them and engage in social issues differently. This includes using technologies and algorithms to define who may meet criteria to be formally considered a citizen, and who participates in citizen-making processes in particular spaces.

Data colonialism is a way of examining the extractive practices the private sector deploys to intervene in humanitarian action and potential citizen-making processes. Data are widely considered one of the most valuable resources – they are a form of capital and have been widely described as “the new oil” (Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Couldry & Powell, 2014). As any resource, data must be extracted, processed, and used to drive capital accumulation. As any resource, there are uneven effects and impacts: resources are harvested or mined through extractive processes, taking many types of data to make decisions about individuals and market new products to them (Couldry & Mejias, 2018, 2019; Dalton, Taylor, & Thatcher, 2016; Thatcher et al., 2016). In mapping projects that I examine, organizations’ mandates revolve around collecting and datafying spatial information about previously unmapped (or under-mapped) spaces such as informal settlements. This mapping is done through a blend of participatory and remotely volunteered projects, involving many actors from the planning stages, to data collection/creation stages, to validation stages. Some directly involve private sector, for-profit actors such as Microsoft and Google, raising concerns about data ownership, privacy, reinforced stigma and more. Participatory methods can be a way of maintaining agency and can in that sense be considered at least one component in citizen-making for

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19 invisibilized groups. When for-profits are directly involved, they contribute to the formation of the digital methods by which mapped individuals are represented – and residents may not have the same agency or sense of self-representation as they would with grassroots participatory projects.

Abstraction from a person’s lived experience is an exercise of power. The data double, one way of understanding abstraction, is the notion of data as abstractions of people and places for the purposes of digital representation (Dalton et al., 2016; Haggerty & Ericson, 2000). Dalton et al (2016) importantly describe that the analyst influences how the double is constructed, what is included and omitted, and what kinds of action it is shaped to facilitate – in other words, the analyst holds power in what is being digitally represented and how. In digital mapping contexts, the mapper produces information about a place and people in order to represent it in a way that can be acted upon for emergency response or infrastructure development, and when the mapping is done by crowdsourced contributors, they influence the representation of that community.

Categorization schemes are also embedded with a politics. Data tend to be reductionist for the sake of making data actionable. Data schema must draw lines of purported similarity and difference, in the interest of prioritizing certain information so that others may act on those data. Martin & Lynch (2009) and Bowker & Star (1999) have all critiqued the process of categorization and its taken-for-granted acceptance in many contexts. Martin & Lynch (2009) described categorical judgments as determinants of what counts, or what matters in the context of a given issue. Burns (2014) critiqued categorization processes in digital humanitarian aid work, describing it as a mechanism by which uneven and often dangerous knowledge politics function in humanitarian contexts. Crowdsourced volunteers are often made responsible for sorting phenomena into categories in order to frame how the phenomena should be interpreted.

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20

Chapter Three: Research Design and Methodology

My project aims to understand how digital mapping projects geared toward supporting vulnerable populations are influenced by actors outside those populations. In 2017 I was a volunteer and intern for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and worked primarily on two campaigns: one to digitize spatial data on female genital mutilation and a malaria elimination campaign. These were based in places to which I’d neither been, nor had a great deal of knowledge of, but it was simple to contribute my mapping skills. From this experience, I had concerns about what my role was doing to, or for, mapped community members, why my knowledge mattered for a place with which I was unfamiliar, and the impacts my mapping contributions would have for local residents and aid workers. I learned that citizenship is a term and concept commonly used to evoke feelings of unity, membership, and responsibility in both humanitarian and experiential learning contexts. I chose to take a closer examination of what it meant for digital mapping projects developed to support crisis-impacted and invisibilized communities to have individuals in different positions, knowledges, senses of responsibility and motivations contributing to putting a place on a map. It’s important to recognize that there are multiple conceptions of citizenship at work in mapping projects, stemming from the multiple positions from which individuals experience and influence it – organizations involved in developing a mapping project, platform design and development staff, mapping contributors, and the community members being mapped. My overarching research question, informed by my personal experience and gaps in scholarly literature about different mapping processes and notions of citizenship, is:

What models of local, global, and digital citizenship are conceptualized, operationalized, and reproduced within remote digital humanitarian volunteer mapping projects, in contrast to local engagement-based mapping projects?

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21 This question acknowledges and highlights the need to understand the dynamics of citizenship that are constantly redefined and renegotiated in shifting social, political, and spatial contexts. Citizenship is socially constructed and contingent on many processes. Local, global, and digital citizenship are three dominant conceptualizations that are particularly relevant in digital mapping projects. I seek, in this thesis, to bridge connections between local and global citizenship via digital technologies and to examine the role of digital citizenship in the kind of agency different actors express throughout the mapping process.

To underscore the purpose of examining this, my sub-questions are:

i. How does the proliferation of digital technologies shift meanings and uses of citizenship?

ii. How do informal settlement residents experience citizenship when it is mediated through digitally produced relations?

iii. How do technologically mediated relations between volunteer and resident influence infrastructural changes in informal settlements?

In the first sub-question, I acknowledge that citizenship shifts in meaning when social relations change (such as the relations imagined and deployed in digital volunteer-driven platforms like HOT’s). Through this, I aim to examine how citizenship is conceptualized during a time of massive shifts towards digital technology use for engaging in many aspects of society, including automated processes. The second sub- question highlights that the experiences of informal settlement residents are central to the project’s goal to demonstrate formalization processes and other relational shifts that occur. The third-sub-question targets the relationship between volunteer and resident, both in a local engagement context and through remote volunteerism, as facilitated by organizations and their underlying principles. It will help to uncover power relations that are present within those structures.

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22

Methodological Framework

I used Burawoy’s (1998) extended case method as a framework for my research. The extended case method approach aims for ongoing theory development and is abductive (neither purely deductive nor inductive). I leveraged a great amount of theory going into my fieldwork component of the project, but without a full commitment to it: I sought to acknowledge the theory that guided how I thought about and developed my research questions and primary objectives but remained receptive to new theory emerging from my findings. For my project, taking an abductive approach meant elaborating Young’s (2011) structural injustice, Staeheli’s (1999) scales of citizenship, and emerging critical theorizations of digital citizenship (Couldry et al., 2014; Hintz et al., 2019; Isin & Ruppert, 2015; Mossberger, Tolbert, &

McNeal, 2008). I use these multiple theorizations to explore power relations present in, and implications of, datafication in informal settlements and under-represented communities. In turn, I connect my case study findings to macro-structural forces such as globalized flows of knowledge, the neoliberal economic regime, again, informed by Burawoy’s extended case method approach.

Burawoy (1998) outlines three goals of the extended case method:

1. Extending the observer to the participant,

2. Extending observations over both space and time, and 3. Extending out from process to force.

Burawoy’s first goal, extending the observer to the participant, manifested in my participant observation techniques. When conducting fieldwork, I sought first-hand, direct participation with my research subjects whenever possible. Burawoy describes this goal as reflexive in that it’s just as important to observe and understand the tensions between ‘entering’ and ‘leaving’ the field, as it is to make observations of phenomena while already ‘in’ the field. I acknowledge that my entering the field included being treated as a contextually and linguistically removed researcher, with participants making efforts to help bring

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23 context to the issues I will note in my findings. For Burawoy, “a social order reveals itself in the way it responds to pressure” (p. 17). I felt that using this method made me better aware of informational gatekeepers, related to vulnerable populations and controversial civic decisions that affect them. This was particularly notable at the beginning of my fieldwork in Buenos Aires when establishing rapport with the target organizations. It also helped me understand the structures within the organizations, the agency of different actors throughout decision-making processes affecting citizenship at varied scales.

Burawoy’s second goal, extending observations over both space and time, was a greater challenge for my fieldwork. I left the field a month earlier than planned in the advent of COVID-19 border closures and newly enforced social restrictions, and prior to this, I knew that I would only have two months in Buenos Aires to establish rapport, note observations, participate in community events and conduct interviews. Burawoy argues that “situations involve relations of copresence, providing the conditions for practices that reproduce relations” (p. 18), and in my fieldwork, I interpreted his second goal as a useful way to look at macro-scale processes of globalization and neoliberalism as global structures that reinforce datafication and increased surveillance of marginalized groups in multiple contexts and across varied times and spaces. Because I understand datafication as one of many symptoms of the neoliberal project’s transformation of data into a form of capital (Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Sadowski, 2019; Taylor & Broeders, 2015), I also understand processes of datafication in digital mapping projects as those which uphold exploitative, extractive practices of capital accumulation. In that sense, I use Burawoy’s second goal as a way to connect processes within the crowdsourced mapping practices of digital humanitarianism to neoliberalism, which occur across space and time, not only as an isolated event or process.

I interpret Burawoy’s third goal, extending from process to force, as building on his second. This goal prioritizes connecting the observations made of a process, based on case study observations, to macro-scale forces. Observations made of processes can be indicative of much broader-scale processes occurring. The neoliberal project and widespread policies geared toward freeing of markets, privatization,

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24 and rollback of the state, which had global reaches, influenced the adoption of digital technologies and reinforced (often intensified) inequalities. This became a force which influenced co-optation of the private sector in humanitarian aid initiatives.

My study focuses on HOT’s crowdsourced volunteer strategies, priorities, and community engagement. I contrast their operational strategies to La Asociación Civil por la Igualdad y la Justicia (I herein refer to them as ACIJ)’s local engagement and activism-based strategies to understand what contextual removal from a mapping project might mean in terms of the power relations influencing mapped community impacts. To achieve this, I conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with members of each organization in different levels of authority, a document analysis and participant observation.

Methods and Data Sources

My primary data source is semi-structured interviews, which are a valuable way of examining experiences, relationships and perceptions of phenomena (Hay, 2016). I used an interview guide to achieve particular goals for coding themes, but left flexibility for organic, narrative responses as they were most appropriate for understanding senses of citizenship and experiences throughout the mapping projects (Haraway, 1988; Lawson, 2010). Perceptions and experiences are both crucial to linking power structures to citizenship and social recognition. This is because the project actors’ own knowledge and experience determine what kind of advocacy work is done and what factors help to build recognition of marginalized groups (England, 1994; Lawson, 2010).

I collected data from interviews, documents, a communication channel, and digital platforms. I collected policies, organizational guiding principles, annual reports, and training documents where I was able to secure them. I also compiled news briefs from CityLab, United Nations’ partnerships platform, HOT, ACIJ, La Nación and others. I extracted information about villa urbanization projects from the city of Buenos Aires’ government website. Additionally, I used social media content: from Twitter, I reviewed

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25 public posts on the accounts of Buenos Aires’s mayor, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, and on Reddit, I reviewed widely used threads, or subreddits (particularly r/UrbanHell), and examined them as indicators of how informal settlements, or “slums”, are viewed, stigmatized, fetishized and socially framed through digital platforms. Seeing how digital platform users frame informal settlements can indicate broader ideas about the stigmatization that makes social integration, and some types of citizenship, challenging for residents.

Research Participants

My research participants were organizational representatives at different levels of authority and engagement with ACIJ and HOT’s respective projects, volunteers, and residents of mapped communities.

The organizational representatives I engaged are those who are directly involved with facilitating, designing, or organizing in some way a humanitarian or advocacy mapping project. They also have knowledge of the terms on which local populations are brought into the organizations’ discursive field. I interviewed volunteers of both organizations who described their experiences contributing to a mapping project. I recorded their motivations, training opportunities, perceptions of their contributions. These interviews highlighted how the organizations guide the projects and the values being communicated. Last, a target demographic was community residents who have been involved in mapping projects with my target organization. COVID-19 restrictions limited my access to villa residents in Buenos Aires. I did, however, interview individuals who were concurrently volunteers and members of some mapped communities, and this provided some resident-based perspectives. My intention, by including residents of mapped communities, was to describe the noted impacts of the mapping project on their communities, what it meant to become visible and represented digitally, and what kinds (if any) of social integration or infrastructural changes have happened since their community had been mapped. A breakdown of my interview participants is as follows, and a table of their pseudonyms in Table 2:

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26 1. Four staff members at ACIJ, including two directors of the Right to the City program, a program

facilitator for workshops in Villa 31, and a former staff who facilitated program operations 2. Two staff members at HOT, one of whom is from a HOT-mapped community

3. Three volunteers at HOT, one who is also a campaign manager and co-founder of Crowd2Map – an organization that leverages the work of HOT in its mapping efforts. Another volunteer developed a project to support their own community.

HOT Representatives ACIJ Representatives

Robert, staff member Elena, director

Daniel, staff member, volunteer, and community resident

Arturo, director

Rosie, volunteer (local) and project coordinator Paula, volunteer

Olivia, volunteer (remote) and non-profit partner Zoe, workshop coordinator John, volunteer (remote)

Table 2: Research participants by organization (pseudonymized)

In-person data collection in Buenos Aires was curtailed by rapid structural changes due to COVID-19.

Despite these unexpected changes, the most important part of qualitative interviews are the insights that come from those whom the researcher does contact, and all participants helped me to address my research questions meaningfully. I was able to richly interpret my interviewees responses and triangulate the findings to produce purposeful, rich findings.

I used a snowball sampling technique: to recruit my research participants, I initially reached out to a director of ACIJ and an engagement coordinator of HOT. Through these initial connections, I was able to network and recruit participants who had knowledge most relevant to my research objectives. I worked with my host supervisor, Dr. Mónica Farías, who is from the greater region of my in-person fieldwork study area and had connections to members of ACIJ. I sought to be an engaged, connected researcher by

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27 establishing trust with my research participants and by building meaningful connections within participants’ social and political networks (England, 1994; Lawson, 2010).

Research Data

I conducted interviews with a total of 9 participants throughout the course of my fieldwork using a semi-structured format, drawing on Hay’s (2016) interviewing techniques. My questions, using an interview guide as a loose structure, were context-specific and contingent on the position and experience of each individual. Find the interview guides in Appendices A, B and C.

I used multiple venues to recruit interviewees. Of all potential research subjects, I had the greatest ease of access to organizational representatives from each organization. Because I am an existing (though dormant) member of the HOT community, I had access to their online communications channels on a popular co-working platform, Slack. I reached out to community members by posting a recruitment message in a pre-established group made for sharing research by reaching out to a community engagement coordinator with whom I’d been in contact prior to my fieldwork. I recruited 3 participants using this method, and 2 via email. For ACIJ, my initial contact was with a director of ACIJ. From there, I was able to use a snowball sampling method to contact three other individuals directly associated with ACIJ. I hired an interpreter for two of the interviews. All interviewees, with the exception of Olivia, were not native English speakers.

Some of these recruitment platforms likewise served as useful secondary data sources. These data helped my understanding of local contexts, how and where mapping project actors communicate with one another, and the ways that digital technologies reproduce ideas of informal settlements (and their residents) (Table 3). First, I made observations of the digital platforms that were part of the case study:

ACIJ’s Caminos de la Villa (colloquially, Caminos) and HOT’s tasking manager which hosts all projects. I used the aforementioned Slack communication channel to extract communications between HOT’s users

Models of Citizenship: A Comparative Analysis of Crowdsourced and Local Mapping Projects

Models of Citizenship: A Comparative Analysis of Crowdsourced and Local Mapping Projects

Ambrose, Angela Diane

Abstract

Contents

Figures

Tables

Acknowledgments

Acronyms & Terms

Chapter One: Introduction

Chapter Two: Literature Review, Definitions & Concepts

Conceptions of Belonging: Local, Global and Digital Citizenship

Representational power: Digital Divides, Datafication and Data Colonialism

Chapter Three: Research Design and Methodology

Methodological Framework

Methods and Data Sources

Research Participants

Research Data