Weaving perspectives in environmental justice and socio-spatial mapping tools: using key-informant interviews and an arts-integrated approach

Abstract

Environmental justice (EJ) is an ever-evolving term with multiple definitions, applications, and practices across geographies and disciplines. With a strong history in the United States, it is a growing field in Canada in legislation, research, and policy. A central, historical, and current dimension to environmental justice are socio-spatial tools and data applications, which is a term that refers to digital tools, including maps, that integrate spatial data to assess, visualize, and understand negative and inequitable cumulative impacts experienced by communities and ultimately guide action and decision-making. However, given an overemphasis on distributive justice in research, policies, and socio-spatial tools, scholars assert that more fulsome and simultaneous engagements of three dimensions of justice ‒ distributive, representational, and recognitional ‒ are necessary. As the EJ landscape grows in Canada, this thesis project explores how researchers and practitioners who develop and use integrative socio-spatial mapping tools implement and engage with environmental justice in their work. The author of this thesis conducted key-informant, semi-structured interviews with eight researchers and practitioners from across Canada who play a crucial role in developing or supporting integrative socio-spatial mapping tools and use a range of data sources through their work across various sectors within Canada. These interviews were coded and distilled into themes using a thematic analysis approach concurrently with an artsintegrated methodology. The emergent arts-integrated methodology used weaving as a modality to support data analysis and knowledge translation to explore, visualize, and make visible tacit dimensions of participants’ experiences while making the researchers’ role in shaping the research more tangible. Core findings and discussion of this thesis articulate critical conceptions, practices, and processes that are vital to consider at the individual, institutional, and collective levels while seeking more wholistic applications of dimensions of EJ in operationalizing socio-spatial tools in research, community engagements, and policy spaces. This research and application of an artsintegrated methodology offers novel contributions to interdisciplinary fields of the academic literature of environmental justice, health sciences, and arts-related research.