“The Social is Spatial”

As a sociologist, I strongly believe in the use of geospatial analyses to teach the sociological imagination. For well over a decade, I’ve been using online mapping tools, like PolicyMap, in my introductory and upper-level courses to show how social, economic, health, and a slew of other outcomes unfold, in patterns, in geographic spaces. As PolicyMap expands in its data availability and analytical capabilities, it proves ever more useful as a teaching and learning tool for new social science students (students find it to be a relatively simple, yet powerful, interface for creating maps and writing about them).