Doug Specht
Doctoral Researcher
University of Westminster
United Kingdom

Biography
Doug Specht is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Westminster where he is exploring how digital media and GIS are used in legitimizing and codifying local knowledge within the context of International Development. He is also the Director of VOZ, a PGIS platform that supports human and environmental rights through community mapping.

Abstract
Community Mapping as a Human Rights Tool

Maps have been shown to be an incredibly important resource, especially in the environmental sector, but the costs are often prohibitive to their creation. This research is examining how publicly created online maps, rather than social media, are able to support human rights and environmental justice. It questions how we open up mapping products to enable the worlds poor and grassroots movements to be able to create maps that support their causes, and thus giving them a bigger voice. Using document and theoretical analysis, interviews, surveys, GIS and content analysis from social media, this study examines the role of social media and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in protest movements and to what extent increased digital connectivity can help spread knowledge about human rights and environmental issues. Results show that the use of both social media and online mapping is still embryonic and hindered by strong hierarchical power structures within social movements, meaning its effect on political mobilisation is often limited, or negative. Furthermore it is suggested that social media does not spontaneously produce non-hierarchical knowledge structures, and that social movement organisations need to further develop their knowledge dissemination strategies. The study goes on to ask whether it is then publically created online maps rather than the much lauded social media that will help legitimize knowledge around human rights and environmental abuses in a way that moves beyond documenting abuses and towards holding those responsible to account.