Ph.D., Geography, State University of New York at Buffalo

M.U.P, Urban Planning, State University of New York at Buffalo

B.A., Urban Engineering, Pusan National University, South Korea

• BCORE 104&107 Heads in the Cloud: Mapping and Imagining (Co-taught with Dr. Ted Hiebert)
• BDATA 200 Introduction to Data Studies
• BIS 218 The Power of Maps
• BIS 314 Creative Geovisualization: Geography, Arts, and Humanities
• BIS 342 Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
• BIS 343 Geographic Visualization
• BIS 352 Mapping Communities
• BIS 406/BPOLST593 Urban Planning and Geography
• BIS 489 Exploration Seminar: Environmental Studies in the Ecuadorian Mainland and the Galapagos Islands (Co-led with Dr. Santiago Lopez)
• BIS 490 Advanced Seminar: Smart City Seattle
• BISGST497/GEOG498 Smart Cities South Korea: Communities, Technologies, and Climate Resiliency (Co-led with Dr. Gunwha Oh)
• BPOLST 513 Practicum in Policy Studies
• HONORS 394 The Geographic Imaginary: Critical and Creative Approaches to Mapping and Visualization

I still feel as much a student as a teacher, and I don’t think it will change, at least soon. Being a teacher is too big a shoe to fill in for me, as my other roles are as a father of three girls, husband, son, friend, and so on… However, one thing I believe is important is to maintain a lively, engaging, and fairly challenging teaching atmosphere in the classroom. Yes, it is true that teaching always brings new challenges and opportunities. In all my classes, I emphasize a solid grounding in both theoretical approaches and practical methodologies, in active student-oriented learning, and promote a community-engaged teaching and learning with my given interests in experiential learning and the critical urban and GIS framework.

I also support student diversity in the classroom by structuring my courses to reach diverse interests, experiences, and embodiments, and by mentoring students in and outside of class. In my pedagogy, as in my research, I am committed to optimizing the presence and participation of those most likely to be absent or silenced in critical space. This also leads me to my particular interest in community-engaged learning and research (CELR) and participatory engaged research and teaching. Students can have transformative learning experiences when their ‘school’ knowledge is connected to the real-world people and places—experiential and interpretative knowledge production. Teachers, students, and communities should teach and learn from each other, and always need to have mutual respect. I am particularly committed to providing and promoting this high-level engaged learning and research, and to enhancing a critical, spatial, and visual interdisciplinary perspective and practices in my class.

I am an urban geographer/planner whose interdisciplinary research focuses on developing new ways of critical, qualitative, and creative possibilities of Geographic Information Sciences (GIS) and geographic visualization in understanding socio-spatial processes and politics of urban space and community. My epistemological and methodological innovations in digital technologies integrate forms of data/evidence, representation, and analysis often seen as incompatible: qualitative and quantitative, visuality and numeracy, texts and maps, and artistic and scientific. My research on perceptions of community, representations of urban precarity and inequality, urban regeneration, and smart city planning demonstrates how this integrated approach generates deeper and more nuanced geographical insights than are possible within singular epistemological and methodological frameworks.

I believe critical and creative engagements with GIS/geovisualization open up ways to think about understandings, experiences, and feelings of space, value creative practices for their ability to question conventional norms and meanings, and reveal hidden meanings, experiences, and relationships in urban space. Much of these works have drawn on research I conducted in inner city Buffalo, NY, Seattle, WA, and, more recently, from community-based engaged research in South Korea. Recently, I have been interested in addressing the need for inclusive, equitable, and participatory community- and people-sensitive smart city planning and smart urbanism—smart engagement and smart commons.