Introducing Donovan Dixson: trubel&co Geospatial Justice Fellow, Gephardt Institute Civic Scholar, and Esri-chella enthusiast
This past summer in St. Louis, trubel-making became an intergenerational civic affair. Through a summer partnership with the Civic Scholars Program, a 2-year fellowship within the Gephardt Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, a new member joined trubel&co’s team! Donovan Dixson (he/him), a Fox-Clark Civic Scholar, John B. Ervin Scholar, and student leader with a passion for all things at the nexus of social impact, tech, and St. Louis, is part of a legacy of Civic Scholars sparking trubel,with trubel&co founder Nick Okafor (’16) and development lead Laken Sylvander (’17) Civic Scholars alumni. The Civic Scholars Program provides a rigorous, in-depth curriculum for undergraduate students with an interest and passion for civic leadership. Scholars are selected in a competitive merit-based process and begin the process of learning, skill-building, and co-designing together throughout their junior and senior years.
The following conversation was held in St. Louis between Donovan and fellow St. Louis native Laken, discussing the learning & growth opportunities Donovan has experienced at trubel&co, the impact of mapping place, language & experience, this summer’s Esri User Conference experience in San Diego, and student life & leadership at Washington University in St. Louis.
Laken Sylvander: Hi Donovan!
Donovan Dixson: Hello, hello!
LS: I’m so excited to dive into some of what brought you to trubel and what you’ve been up to this summer.
DD: Thank you! I was onboarded as a Summer Associate of trubel&co as part of the Civic Scholars fellowship experience. Currently my work revolves around geospatial justice, the trubel&co Race, Power and Technology curricula, and St. Louis-specific outreach and advisory!
LS: Right on — so tell me about your background, whether in school or in life, that led you to being interested in geospatial work.
DD: It began with my journey in movement building, informed by different critical lenses on technology. Those insights started with my education as an undergrad at Wash U — understanding the benefits of that education and the drawbacks of what it means. Looking at community structures — from the St. Louis community as a resident here my whole life, to the student community of Wash U, — it’s definitely an interesting experience that means a lot to me in my work. I think developing a leadership style that is motivated by others, inspired by others, but is very human-centered too, is all important background on how I now look at geospatial work. These perspectives really shaped my work now in GIS (Geospatial Information Systems), and I’m channeling that into visualizing things that matter to me.
LS: You mentioned movement building. What sort of movements have you witnessed or been a part of and how have both human-ness and technology been central to them?
DD: Well, as you are already very much aware, St. Louis has been the site of so much movement building, and has been a site for a lot of good trouble.
LS: Hell yeah.
DD: Yes, yes! And coming from my early experiences to now as a young adult, and also in academia, understanding what my role is within movements amongst students with organizing movements outside of campus, and understanding the politics of all those things, has been really formative. I feel like my understanding of technology has always been nuanced, and honestly, I’ve not identified much of a really good place for it yet, at least in the movement building that I’ve been a part of. There’s so much that goes on with surveillance on campus, but I honestly feel like there’s so much more that can be done with technology and movement building — particularly with the ability to map and visualize data. How do you pair these actualities- the way things actually are with where we want things to go?
There’ve been really big pushes on my campus to, for example, disaggregate data and be able to say, “Okay, how do we collect information, and how do we really capture the student experience in so many different ways?” I found that to be very interesting, being able to articulate exactly what belonging means in different places amongst students with different marginalized identities, with data. Because of course we can ask questions about belonging, and push for reform and do all these different things, but what about actually using data to understand questions of whether students feel at home here in ways that, you know, uplift minority identities? If I go to class, and I’m the only black student there, or the only student from St. Louis there, it’s a different experience entirely. There should be a way where we’re able to articulate that information,. How do we identify that with technology in our hands? And not in the hands of, say, campus police on scooters. How are we living with campus as a surveillance state where all your actions are tracked? How do we change the use of technology from a surveillance state like it is on a campus to a tool that we can use to articulate what the actuality is of student life?
LS: What kind of data would you think one might capture in looking to articulate the student experience, centering student perspectives from minority identities especially?
DD: Disaggregated demographic data would definitely be of use to students. Understanding what students are here, what their experiences are, and seeing the differences between experiences are all stories we can back with data. Through admissions you bring in students from all these disparate backgrounds and everything, but as soon as you enter the campus climate, it’s all mixed, so the question becomes: is the institution interested in understanding the actual differences in our perspectives, or would rather just have a dialogue? It’s clear how a lot of programs are catering to resourced students, leading to circumstances where you do see less opportunity for the diversity of the student body.
LS: That’s really essential insight and I hope that there’s more opportunities for students to work directly with Student Affairs to raise this perspective on data and experience specifically.
I’d love to hear about the scope of your Civic Scholars project.
DD: My work encompasses a lot of ecosystem mapping of St. Louis for trubel&co, and breaks down into 3 main buckets.
- Developing trubel&co’s St. Louis partnerships and approaching the question: how can mapping these stakeholders inform how we determine the best lane for impact? Based on this map, what is the best decision that we can make regarding the delivery of Mapping Justice for introductory workshops and the full summer program next year?
- Supporting the San Francisco Human Rights Commission’s Reparations Committee through the creation of a public app that details equity snapshots for the city. This introduces opportunities for building maps and research/advisory potential for St. It’s very pertinent to St. Louis’s development right now I feel, particularly with the new reparations commission here, I’m watching this happen here in St. Louis while being involved with it happening elsewhere at the same time, which I think is really valuable.
- Building a Race, Power & Technology workshop series that focuses on placemaking, collectivism, and community. It’s been rewarding to weave so many of the resources and skills I’m learning through my adjacent work this summer into the workshops as well.
LS: Tell me more about the workshop series! Your vision for it, what you’re building off of, and what you’re building towards.
DD: For sure. I’m starting with the foundation of the Race, Power & Technology series from trubel&co’s portfolio and expanding from there — I really imagine it being a combination of key pieces of learning that has really benefited my journey with civics with race. It’s a five-part series, delivered online, and is going to focus on some questions like: What does community mean to you? How has technology shaped what community actually is in everyday life? Where do you see the benefits and harms of technology? How do you utilize technology to create new meanings for place?
LS: These critical questions must be asked when technology is so omnipresent -we don’t think we shape as much as we have the capacity to as users of any technologies. The instructors of a workshop are pulling from their lived experiences, which is what sets this apart from other ethics of technology dialogue.Placemaking being such a big part of that is such a crucial addition and really I think will bring your workshops to the next level. I’m so jazzed about the workshops and particularly how you’ve woven in some books we’ve looked at together — especially Braiding Sweetgrass and notions of place-making inspired by reciprocity.
Do you remember your first experience with mapping technology and your lightbulb moment of understanding what potential it holds?
DD: Yeah! My first experience with mapping technology was actually with language research, specifically in Kiswahili. Professor Mutonya at Wash U, who’s been a really supportive mentor, introduced me to GIS skills and articulating how language can form a narrative on a broader scale. Learning how you can put that in the context of maps has been fun and super interesting.
LS: What work were you doing that led you to be mapping language?
DD: We were building story maps, meaning we were creating visual narratives about language use and new language elements, then mapping them onto stories. Understanding the social histories of new language elements while learning Kiswahili and spatially understanding those evolutions was an incredible way to learn a language.
LS: I had no idea that language learning classes were incorporating mapping!
DD: I know! It’s interesting that that was my first year of undergrad when I was already pursuing engineering, but I was learning this hard skillset totally outside of engineering.
LS: Do you remember key insights you got to, or observations from those maps?
DD: When you actually map language, it’s completely different than you might expect with, say, demographics, because Kiswahili is a relatively new language. It’s formed from different language structures that already existed, and when you get into it, all the languages that inform it exist across several different countries, not just Kenya. This could obviously get into a whole thing about state politics and the formation of nation states, and understanding those as constructs — because when you’re looking into languages and the groups that speak those languages, and when a new language is formed, such as Sheng — which is like AAVE in the US and is used more by urban youth — you can look at how that overlaps with social class, of course, and geographies. It makes me think it’d be interesting to map AAVE in the US — I wonder what that would be like.
LS: Sounds like a future project to keep in mind!
DD: For sure — there’s a lot of potential and capacity for mapping to transform our understanding of language. And of course how language is co-opted. How is language part of movements, and how does that travel.
LS: Yeah, this has me thinking about analysis that started to arise of white folks online co-opting a lot of AAVE — it’s important that we use technology to map the impact of technology in shaping language.
DD: Definitely — I love that. Really getting into my linguistics bag — it’s a small bag, but I carry it with me.
LS: Had you heard of GIS prior to that class?
DD: I’d heard of it, but had not actually applied it to date.
LS: What’s your major, by the way?
DD: Chemical engineering! *laughs*
LS: Amazing, amazing. Multitudes!
So tell me about the Esri user conference — Esri being the industry leader for GIS technology, that we leverage at trubel&co in our Mapping Justice program.
DD: I had a great time at Esri-chella. I’ve had conference experiences in the past with the National Society of Black Engineers, and I think I’m really starting to get a lot out of conventions and those experiences. The connections you’re able to make there are really so valuable. I think the most inspiring part of it for me was a dashboard that was created by Lauren Bennett, a spatial statistician at Esri. The dashboard illustrated women’s health care center access, pre- and post-Dobbs decision in which the Supreme Court ruled to take away the constitutional right to abortion. The map made such a clear argument so succinctly. It addressed travel times and estimated population counts of people that have access to maybe only this one women’s health care center. There are maybe three women’s health care centers in Wichita, Kansas, that are now servicing easily 5 million people. And it inspired so many potential research questions for me and highlighted policy impact to a degree that is so crazy. To me, it was such an impactful use of data, and using it for the purpose of doing good or making good trouble. So yes, I made some very cool insights just over the course of the presentation, which is the goal.
LS: Right — ’cause when massive, human rights Supreme Court decisions come out, we know it’s bad and going to be bad, right? But it feels abstract — like we won’t know the impacts for a long time. The visualization of these real manifestations goes so, so far for public understanding of how many people these decisions affect, and when and where, which is one of the beautiful things about mapping.
DD: Those were my thoughts exactly. When the Dobbs decision came out, I remember thinking ‘this is going to be crazy.’ Then there’s the awful suspense of when are you going to hear about a family member, or a close friend, or yourself , being deeply impacted by that decision and not knowing when that could happen. Just seeing the widespread impact is so important and more available to us than ever. Honestly mobilizing GIS and geospatial in that way makes for a better understanding of seeing mostly negative things -
LS: — which is an important component of GIS!
DD: Exactly! But it really puts it in perspective when it can otherwise feel so abstract.
LS: And of course, any time I’m looking at a map I’m asking questions about who sourced the data and who is map-making, how was data sourced. Because a map looks undeniable, right? And even then you have to investigate everything about sourcing that got us to this visual.
DD: That’s something we spoke about at the conference! Mappers have so much power to influence policy and so much power to influence decisions that are based on geospatial data. Maps can be read and analyzed in so many ways where you might arrive at a conclusion that’s similar to the cartographer’s intention, but you might not necessarily be applying pressure to the areas that most need it, which is what I think mapping surely has the potential to do. It starts with contextualizing questions like “who are our cartographers?”
LS: Any other cool conversations from the conference you had worth touching on?
DD: Oh, yes. There was a presentation by Jesus Garcia from Bakersfield, California, and he was presenting on deaths due to police custody and police chases: looking at where they happen, what are the proximities, and looking at it from a systems perspective. The statistic that I came out with was that 1% of census tracts experience an extremely, extremely disproportionate amount of police deaths or deaths in police custody. And in fact, most police deaths don’t even come from police chases, they happen in custody, so that makes you pause to consider the methods that are making that the case. And these aren’t morbidities, these are fatalities. It was a very thorough methodology and the takeaways really, really made me think. It also lends to the idea that police violence is a location and proximity issue. A lot of people don’t experience police violence in their communities, but for those that do, it’s extreme.
LS: Regarding the ethos of the conference, Esri is really engaging with its role as a tool for racial justice, for community healing, and more. So I’m curious what your more explicit takeaways were on that front having attended the conference for the powerhouse of producing that technology.
DD: Right, so to that point, I’m really glad I attended the user conference, the people who have really worked with the data in this context. From my interpretation, racial justice and being able to map those sorts of things has not always been the technology’s objective or priority. In fact, of course there are users and organizations like trubel&co that are still pushing to get the recognition for data and technology to be seen and used as a tool for social impact. This is balanced against the fact that geospatial has for a long time been used for surveillance, then used for national defense, and these technologies are still being developed. There’s still different pathways that are going to be made for tech and geospatial to be all different types of things. But I do think that there is a push, like you’re saying — there’s a recognizable push, so this isn’t some user-driven desire that’s quiet by any means.
I do think there is some more transparency that can be had. Some of the presentations could have been preceded with a touch more of an analytical stance by the mapmaker, to the effect of, “this is what we’re going to be talking about today, because this is why X is important to X communities.” Not everyone has the confidence to say what the map is really saying.
LS: Interesting. We assume that a visual can be so powerful that everyone walks away with the same understanding. And yet, cartographers do hold a lot of power. It’s one thing to say, “Here’s a map, you interpret it.” And it’s another to say, “I collected and sat with the data extensively in a way that you as a first-time viewer likely have not. And the conclusion is this.” That’s something I love about anthropology — and I think cartography has this too — where you have to think about the human at the center of it. We are not blank slates collecting data, and experience is going to shape all of our interpretations. I like to think that cartography is growing in that direction.
DD: I think you’re onto something with that too. It’s funny that a fellow Civic Scholar studying anthro was talking about GIS, because both of our summers are actually leaning in more of a GIS direction. There was so much talk about — I think GIS was their idea for the summer and I was inspired by it, so this is my second major encounter with GIS.
LS: How do you feel like your GIS skills have grown through this summer?
DD: Let me tell you, I can make a compelling story map. Now I’m actually mapping; there’s been so much growth in my technical understanding, data analysis and visualization. Just being able to tell a story with data in tech — I think that’s something that I really want to pursue, becoming a tech storyteller.
LS: Of course you haven’t finalized your work, but so far, what would you say the story is based on the map you’re building for San Francisco?
DD: The story is, if you break it down by numbers, if you look at the places you know or don’t know, if you look at your community, if you walk down the street in person, you’ll see different manifestations of the policy of the history of San Francisco. You see the history of urban renewal intersect with so many perspectives on the history of San Francisco as a “cosmopolitan” city. When you look at this dashboard, you take your lived experience and look through it, but you also have access to others in a pretty incredible way. You see that in one case, or several cases, there are so many comparisons you can make to your neighbor across the street, or the person down the block, or who’s living across from you, who is just not experiencing the same lived experiences you at all from several different data standpoints and several different equity lenses. For example, you might look at what it means to go from one place to another. What are the demographic advantages? Are there disadvantages? Are you traversing the city by just commuting? Data can illustrate so many hidden aspects to living: what are the places where you spend time and how are they being experienced from multiple perspectives? It offers such important insights into the life that you’re living in place. Hopefully the community members will be able to see that. I know for certain that for me, if I saw St. Louis on the map with all these different elements, I’d be able to point to where I live and see that when you really zoom in on this place, you can visualize pockets of racialized experience, of economic experience. And in the future, I think these maps will be really important over time. It’s so important to look at who is entering, leaving, and staying in your community.
LS: I think that’s a perfect note to end on. That’s beautiful — and then tying it all back to St. Louis? You are a storyteller.
DD: Amen, amen.
Stay tuned and subscribe to trubel&co on Medium or LinkedIn for future updates on Donovan’s work in Geospatial Justice, a deeper dive on geospatial reparations work, & more!
