The content of sexual education within public schools in the United States varies significantly by location due to differences in state laws and funding. The study identifies the spatial variation of adolescent health outcomes as a result of variations within the content of sexual education in public schools in the states of California and Texas. As the scale of the study includes two states containing large population sizes, the methodology employs secondary data collection and analysis from enacted state legislation as well as a variety of sources such as the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, the American Community Survey, and the U.S. Census among others. Data has been collected for the individual years of 2010 and 2020 in order to examine changes that have emerged over the past decade. Historically, California and Texas have had contrasting policies in regard to sexual education, and the preliminary results have indicated this as well. The study analyzes the possible correlation between abstinence-only sexual education and health outcomes for adolescents including increased rates of teen pregnancy, rates of sexually transmitted infections, and risky sexual behaviors, and whether there are disparities geographically as a result of these variations in state laws. Understanding how spatial variation impacts sexual education, which in turn, may relate to adverse health outcomes, is crucial in terms of targeted intervention and improving access to resources and knowledge for at-risk youth across the nation.

The project aims to explore and experiment, through critical and creative geovisualization practice and pedagogy, innovative ways to embody, imagine, and represent the more nuanced social and spatial understanding of the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP). Specifically, we plan to implement qualitative forms of representation and analysis into the CHOP digital geographical archive as new data and layers. It involves analyzing individual graffiti, the messages, and patterns of speech, memories shared in the interactive map, as well as data collected from the field visit and interviews/conversations with the participants of the CHOP through the transformation of various modes of data and analysis that value representation in different ways. It draws on disruptive approaches from black digital geographies and critical and socially-relevant GIS to challenge how meaning is made from digital data. Yet, the project’s objective is not just to map these data and representation in/of the CHOP, but the opposite—remaking and even re-imagining through a process of humanistic sense of place-making. We engaged in multiple conversations with both direct and indirect stakeholders, fostering a comprehensive understanding of the diverse perspectives surrounding the CHOP. Direct stakeholders included individuals who had lived and experienced similar conflicts in Seattle’s history with the WTO protests, which provided invaluable insights that allowed for direct comparisons to the circumstances within the CHOP. Indirect stakeholders include individuals who contributed greatly by offering their perspectives on approaching potential challenges of the project. We put forward critical and creative geovisual processes that can draw connections between local community-based participatory and policy work, and how these diverse evolutions of critical GIS and geovisualization tell a more complex and nuanced story about the CHOP by relating to social, political, and cultural practices and as a way of engaged knowledge production.

Though Seattle’s reputation is for economic and technological prosperity, some Seattle high schools do not nurture students with the academic and professional rigor needed to partake in their local economy. This project examines the relationship between poverty and income in the City of Seattle and secondary education outcomes in Seattle Public Schools (SPS). The project puts forward the concept and practice of community mapping and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) for representation and visualization. Conducting a mixed-methods research using both qualitative and secondary research analyses, we uncover education narratives and outcomes in SPS while considering socioeconomic and political influences. SPS and state government online databases provided relevant information such as school graduation rate, college-readiness index, census tract poverty percentage, average annual income, and income inequality. We also conducted an online survey on SPS counselors, inquiring about their perception and input behind local socioeconomic contributions to the SPS curriculum and school life. In visualizing our research data, we utilized ArcGIS Pro, sectioning Seattle by SPS school zones and census tract, organizing our data by poverty percentage and income level through bivariate analysis, and juxtaposing them with education outcomes in SPS. Altogether, employing a social community investigation in conjunction with our mapping process allows for a deeper geospatial analysis that can be used as a tool to highlight socio-economic issues. In light of the socio-economic problems in Seattle, SPS counselors infer that other variables such as rich community sentiment, domestic and scholastic support, extracurricular involvement, and an overall meaningful life balance can contribute to successful education. Though our work establishes the relationship between high poverty percentage, low income, and poor education outcomes, we found that specific education metrics such as graduation rates do not necessarily entail success beyond secondary education. We proposed to use other metrics, such as the college readiness index, to infer education outcomes more accurately.