The Making Abolition in Geography Collective

The Beyond Esri Resource Guide is an output of the Antipode Foundation “Right to the Discipline” funded project “Beyond Esri: Moving Toward Abolition in Geography”. This Resource Guide was compiled by members of the Making Abolition in Geography Collective, an interdisciplinary group of spatial thinkers contributing to radical geography. While Esri is the “industry standard” in the majority of GIS training programs in geography departments throughout North America and globally, it also develops mapping and geo-spatial analysis services for police departments across Canada and the USA. The Resource Guide is for geography educators and students—it consists of open source and low cost alternatives to Esri, as well as links to projects and publications that challenge Esri’s hegemony and the carceral logics that pervade geospatial analytics. We created the Resource Guide to encourage geographers to divest from the creation of carceral spaces by moving beyond Esri, and to work in solidarity with abolitionist movements around the world. While we highlight Esri as a company that profits from selling geospatial tools for carceral geographies, we believe that if Esri were not involved in policing, another GIS platform could and would take up that role. Though it might seem difficult to change our approaches to the technologies we use, we posit the first step towards this goal is developing an alternative pedagogy that refuses the carceral practices common to geospatial technologies.

If you use the Resource Guide in your research, studies, or teaching, please let us know. And we welcome feedback and additions to the guide. Contact us at [email protected]