Sarah Elwood

About

Professor and Chair of the UW Department of Geography, co-founder of the Relational Poverty Network (with Vicky Lawson), past editor of Progress in Human Geography (2013- 2018). Proud teacher and advisor to 2+ decades of undergrad and grad students at DePaul University, University of Arizona, and University of Washington. Winner of UW Distinguished Teaching Award and Richard Morrill Public Outreach Award. Top 3 list: Family & friends, riding my bike, pie for breakfast. Research and teaching: Urban geography, relational poverty studies, digital geographies, visual methods.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Law
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Aesthetics
• Geography
• Philosophy
• Political economy

Selected publications

• Feminist digital geographies

  Gender Place & Culture · 2018-05-04 · 247 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  At a moment when disciplinary attentions are turning to the digital as a subject and object of geographic inquiry, we consider enduring contours and new directions in feminist digital geographies scholarship. We revisit the centrality of feminist critiques of Science to critical digital geographies and their predecessors, identifying axes of scholarly engagement that have emerged from feminist theory and praxis. Simultaneously, we acknowledge the resounding whiteness and heteronormativity of the…

  PublisherDOI

• Digital geographies, feminist relationality, Black and queer code studies: Thriving otherwise

  Progress in Human Geography · 2020 · 220 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Digitality is deeply implicated in sociospatial processes of exclusion, adverse incorporation, impoverishment and enrichment. Theorizing digital practices of life and thriving is politically and epistemologically urgent, and more robustly intersectional theory in digital geographies scholarship offers crucial pathways. I argue for theorizing digital geographies at the intersection of feminist relationality and Black, queer and feminist code studies. I demonstrate these theoretical horizons throu…

  PublisherDOI

• Glitch epistemologies for computational cities

  Dialogues in Human Geography · 2022 · 123 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  This intervention advances glitches as epistemological vectors for apprehending and engaging the significance of digitally-mediated spatialities that appear nonperformative against normative scripts of urban computational paradigms. Drawing on two strands of contemporary thinking about glitches as systemic design features of digital systems and as generative fissures within them, we mobilize a queer orientation that stays with the generative tensions of urban spatialities that present as idiosyn…

  PublisherDOI

• Critical GIS pedagogies beyond ‘Week 10: Ethics’

  International Journal of Geographical Information Systems · 2017-05-31 · 40 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Over two decades after the scholarly interventions that coalesced into ‘critical GIS’ as a field within GIScience, critical GIS remains underdeveloped in conversations on teaching and learning. The literature on GIScience education has emphasized content more than pedagogies – what to teach versus how to teach to move students toward particular learning objectives. This emphasis is reflected in dominant curricular approaches to critical GIS, in which questions around the complicated origins and…

  PublisherDOI

• Re‐Politicising Poverty: Relational Re‐conceptualisations of Impoverishment

  Antipode · 2020 · 19 citations

  Abstract This collection of essays extends cross‐disciplinary conversations between co‐authors that began as part of a podcast series by the Relational Poverty Network, “New Poverty Politics for Changing Times”. The authors engage impoverishment as a relation, as an outcome of intersecting political projects of racialised oppression, political‐economic injustice and socio‐legal control. Across various sites, the collection’s essays trace poverty politics, providing conjunctural and multi‐scalar…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Transforming the Politics of Place: GIS, Knowledge Production, and Community-Based Organizations in Urban Governance

  NSF · $181k · 2006–2010

• Collaborative Research: A GIScience Approach for Assessing the Quality, Potential Applications, and Impact of Volunteered Geographic Information

  NSF · $167k · 2009–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Victoria Lawson

  21 shared

• Katharyne Mitchell

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  13 shared

• Noel Castree

  6 shared

• Agnieszka Leszczynski

  Western University

  6 shared

• Meghan Cope

  5 shared

• Helga Leitner

  5 shared

• Robert McMaster

  University of Toronto

  4 shared

• Eric Sheppard

  University of California, Los Angeles

  4 shared

Education

• PhD, Geography

  University of Minnesota System

  2000

• MA, Geography

  University of Minnesota

  1996

• BA, Geography

  Macalester College

  1994

Awards & honors

• UW Distinguished Teaching Award
• Richard Morrill Public Outreach Award

Similar researchers at University of Washington

• Jen Rose Smithh-62
• Michael Brownh-39
• Mark Ellish-37