Interviewed for “Mental Maps & the Neuroscience of Neighborhood Blight” in Pacific Standard
I was recently quoted in Rick Paulas’ “Mental Maps and the Neuroscience of Neighborhood Blight” for Pacific Standard. It’s incredibly exciting to see critical geographic work in the public eye.
I excerpt the selections where I was interviewed from the end of the article below:
For a contemporary example of this phenomenon, check out the media’s portrayal of the Black Lives Matter movement. Protests become riots, protestors become thugs, dramatic images of broken windows and burning cars are beamed to white, middle-class viewers who have never been inside the neighborhoods being covered. “[Viewers] presume the neighborhoods are violent,” says Jack Jen Gieseking, a postdoctoral fellow in New Media and Data Visualization at Bowdoin College. “And blame the people within them rather than thinking about how those neighborhoods got that way.” …
Racist practices like redlining, used from the 1930s through the ’60s to deny loans, insurance, supermarkets, and health coverage …