I am Lecturer at University of Washington Bothell, a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society, a ‘23-24 AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow, and I retain a position of Associate Professor at University of Calgary. My research interests are in the social, institutional, and urban transformations of big and open data, smart cities, digital humanitarianism, and related digital spatial phenomena. My research program interrogates the social and institutional struggles around knowledge production emerging in the context of these new spatial-technological developments. At the current moment I’m most interested in the digitalization of labor in the oil and gas industry, and how greater control over ever-distant geographies shifts urban labor markets, urban politics, smart cities, and Indigenous communities. In the past I have also looked at digital humanitarianism and geocomputational tools like the Self-organizing Map. I am Associate Editor for GeoJournal and currently sit on the Editorial Boards of Digital Geography and Society, Frontiers in Big Data, and ACME. Over the last few years I have become more involved in AI policy, sitting on the US National Institute of Standards and Technology Working Group on Generative AI, participating in the United Nations University Global AI Network, and being an affiliate of the Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law and Society.
I am a “public scholar”, which for me means two things. First, I communicate my research results across multiple audiences. That is, in addition to collaborating with civil society organizations, I find it equally important to inform policymakers and the general public, as it is to contribute to scholarly conversations. Second, public scholarship means I consider my pedagogy and research to be a form of activism. I make this claim because in my research and teaching I open up taken-for-granted ideas/concepts to critique. In other words, I uncover the origins and limitations of technologies and concepts, in order to imagine and foster different, more socially-just, worlds. In this I borrow from Seyla Benhabib, when she says, “The task of the critic is not to juxtapose an ideal, eternal standard to the existent, but through a ‘ruthless critique of the existent’ to reveal that what is, already contains within itself what ‘ought’ to be as a possibility.” Cocretely, last year as AAAS STP Fellow, I worked with the National Science Foundation’s National AI Research Institutes, helping to set federal-level policy on AI research funding.
Before coming to UW, I worked for 8 years at University of Calgary, and prior to that a year as a visiting professor at the wonderful Temple University, teaching courses in web mapping and GIScience. My Ph.D. is from University of Washington, where I worked with Sarah Elwood, Mark Ellis, Vicky Lawson, and Jin-Kyu Jung. I did my master’s degree research in Geography at San Diego State University (2009), where I worked with André Skupin to visualize people’s perceptions of San Diego neighborhoods. Going even further back, in 2006 I graduated Magna Cum Laude from Eastern Kentucky University with an honors B.A. in Geography.
But most importantly, I am more than my academic interests. In the past I was a music reviewer for The Sights and Sounds, specializing in ambient, experimental, and minimal electronic music. I run a lot - I am currently training for the Seattle Marathon, and have run several ultramarathons (races over 26.2 miles). I have read a good number of the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels, and I’m still working my way through it. I love backpacking, tea, technology, and photography. I would like to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro before the permanent snow melts. If I could go back in history to meet someone, I wouldn’t go far - probably mid-1920s and meet ee cummings.
gmail:
burnsr77[at]gmail[dot]com
social & scholarly media:
