The central objective of this thesis is to explore how sophisticated information and communication technologies (ICTs) impact Mexico-US migration. In particular, it attends to those ICTs that enable Mexican immigrants in the United States to stay “in touch” with their loved ones in Mexico. Rather than pursue the impacts of these technologies through a singular methodology or theoretical framework, this study employs an array of approaches in order to examine the geography transnational communication across multiple scales. At the level of the individual, I examine how Mexican immigrants living in Austin, TX, incorporate communication technologies into their daily lives. Informed by a series of semi-structured and in-depth interviews, I argue that cellular phone calls, text messaging, and social media platforms enable a passive, routinized transnationalism that allows migrants to maintain a degree of presence both “here” and “there.” I subsequently scale up my analysis in order to trace the emergence of digital social media—Facebook, in particular—as a communication tool for dispersed Mexican immigrant communities, and I interrogate the ways in which digital social media engender transnational social networks. Using place as a guiding conceptual theme, I demonstrate how senses of and attachments to place form the basis of communal social interactions online, and I identify the many different places, both in the US and Mexico, that are involved in particular transnational social networks and migration flows. This study concludes by drawing on recent critical GIS scholarship and volunteered geographic information (VGI) in order to visualize the digital, place-to-place connections between Mexican migrants living in United States and their friends and family members living in Mexico and elsewhere. / text

The use of geospatial technologies, including radio telemetry, GPS collars, and mapping software, has proliferated in wildlife conservation. In addition to being tools for research, though, tracking devices are increasingly used to control animals that have been reintroduced to natural areas. Animals with radio or GPS collars can be tracked, and when considered necessary, trapped and relocated or removed to captivity, a common practice in projects to reintroduce and conserve endangered carnivores. The assumption is that such actions will help to defuse conflicts over wildlife between wildlife managers and land users. Conservation has come to mean surveillance and control, a situation recently made possible by technology. This dissertation examines the role of geospatial technology in conservation through an examination of the Mexican Wolf Reintroduction Project taking place in Arizona and New Mexico. Major findings include: 1. Policies to monitor and control Mexican wolves represent a deferral of the struggle over priority uses of public lands; 2. State and local government agencies seized on the discourse of adaptive management to gain control over the reintroduction project and expand their institutional authority. Rather than a practice of "learning by doing" and collaboration, however, the adaptive management program that was implemented only operated smoothly when it held together a prior political consensus and fell apart when external factors worked to dissolve that consensus; 3. The policies of controlling "problem wolves" rest on a series of assumptions about human and wolf behavior that are unsubstantiated and likely false; 4. The embodied production of geospatial data about Mexican wolves is erased in project-authored maps, which privilege a partial perspective on Mexican wolf distribution and territory; and 5. The practices of Mexican wolf monitoring and control are best understood as political technologies of governance that constitute Mexican wolves as individualized, domesticated and, I argue, racialized subjects. The policies and practices governing the Mexican wolf reintroduction project, this dissertation shows, have relied on technological surveillance and control, with complex and contradictory results for people-wolf relations and the politics of conservation.

Participatory Action Mapping (PAM) as a methodology strives to fill the gaps created by participatory and critical mapping methodologies. Public participatory GIS (PPGIS), which often fails to elicit a bottom up approach to mapping, and community mapping, which typically produces critical mappings that often fail to be taken seriously by decision makers both fall short in offering members of the public meaningful opportunities to make claims about particular places. Through the implementation of a critical mapping methodology that utilizes professional cartography techniques, PAM offers community organizations the ability to assert their claims through maps. Using a critical cartography lens, this case study focuses on PAM with a community-based organization in west Atlanta and reveals how this methodology can be successful in engaging professional mapping practices to communicate the truths of, and subsequently inspire action among, community members.

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This thesis is an exploration of gendered daily mobilities amongst local women in Rosengård since the inauguration of the new train station and railway service into the district. Implementing a feminist, qualitative and explorative approach to mobilities, the research poses three principal questions: how women are using public transport in their daily mobilities; what restrictions they are facing in these mobilities; and finally, the extent to which the new Rosengård train station is working towards social cohesion in Malmö. Integrating a theoretical framework of mobility justice with the methodological praxis of time-space geography, the research conducts in-depth travel itinerary diaries with five participating women which are subsequently visualised through a feminist application of qualitative GIS. What results is an examination and visualisation of the participants’ relationships with diverse mobilities throughout Malmö, and ultimately the heavy dependencies these women have on the public transport system to pursue activities and opportunities as part of a happy, fulfilling life. A critical application of space-time geography theory is illustrated within three critical considerations of gendered daily mobilities: temporal, spatial, and those relating to wider concerns of social exclusion. To quote Törsten Hägerstrand (1970), these considerations together formulate an intricate “net of constraints” that capture the life paths of women in their daily mobilities. Ultimately, the research suggests that Station Rosengård has yet to radically expand the mobility opportunities of women in the district, and thus its objective of regional social cohesion – and a step towards reducing wider inequity in public health - in the form of heightened connectivity has been challenged and problematised.

This thesis uses flooding driven by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and a history of inundation in Houston, Texas to critique the systems of floodplain mapping through the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). The role of Geographic Information Systems becomes a subject of interest in the context of U.S governance and the role of property as a driving force in urban development. The shortcomings of existing systems of mitigation are examined through mappings that bring measures of risk, damage, and recovery into contrast with each other. Racial and economic inequality are integrated into the analysis through a deeper consideration of the NFIP as the main form of federal protection against losses. Seeing that the NFIP has not protected the true status quo of urban life, it is argued that public perceptions of risk are formed contrary to the logic of home insurance, leading to observable inequalities in preparation and recovery