Title Card: Creator: Parisa Setayesh | Level: Intermediate | Category: Literacy: Visual and Critical Literacy

Why this matters
Critical literacy includes learning to see absence, exclusion, and uneven representation. GCDI’s Geochicas: beyond map making highlights Geochicas as a collective producing geodata from a feminist perspective, organizing mapathons and pedagogical spaces, and working to reduce the gender gap. GCDI’s Rethinking Participatory Mapping as a Justice-Oriented Practice adds that maps shape who is visible, prioritized, and excluded.

Key ideas
These ideas draw on critical cartography, feminist mapping, and participatory data resources.

• Map literacy includes asking who is represented and who is missing.
• Inclusion is not only about who can read maps, but who gets to make them.
• Feminist and participatory mapping broaden what counts as valid spatial knowledge.
• A just map is not simply accurate; it is also accountable to the people and places it represents.

Lesson
Traditional map literacy often stops at legibility: can the reader understand the symbols, scale, and pattern? Critical literacy goes further. It asks whose categories organize the map, whose priorities shaped the data, and whether some people or experiences were never recorded in the first place. Critical cartography makes this move explicit by linking mapping to power, while participatory and feminist mapping traditions show that different people can produce different geographies of the same place.

This is where Geochicas is especially useful. The project demonstrates that representation is not abstract; gendered absences in data and mapping communities can influence what gets mapped and what gets ignored. Similarly, participatory approaches to open data stress that consent, privacy, situated knowledge, and collaboration all matter. This is an important literacy lesson for Mapping Commons: to read maps well is to notice not only what is present, but also what forms of life and experience remain harder to see.

Example Project or GCDI resource
Use Geochicas: beyond map making and Rethinking Participatory Mapping as a Justice-Oriented Practice together. They make a strong pair because one foregrounds feminist mapping practice and the other explicitly frames visibility and exclusion as central political questions in mapmaking.

Open reading / resource
For external resources, I’d pair the OpenStreetMap Wiki page on GeoChicas with Participatory Methods in Open Data. Together they help connect feminist mapping, open data, pedagogy, and consent in a way that fits your project extremely well.

Reflection / mini activity
Pick one map about housing, transit, public safety, health, or urban amenities. Write 5–6 sentences answering:

• Who seems to be centered in this map?
• What kinds of users or experiences might be missing?
• What additional knowledge would make the map more just or more useful?
• Who should be involved in revising it?