Heather Rosenfeld

Geography Research Analyst at MGGG Redistricting Lab
Lecturer for Science, Technology, and Society Program
Email: Heather dot Rosenfeld at tufts dot edu

Curriculum Vitae

Current research

I am a human geographer and cartographer interested in the coproduction of scientific knowledge, political economy, and the meaning of representation. This focus has led me in a few fairly different directions, all of which are united by commitments to social justice.

Here at the Redistricting Lab I work on the political geography of elections, contributing to geodata collection, processing, and analysis, and mapping. I also do grounded theoretical work on topics such as the geography of communities and how concepts travel between geography, mathematics, and statistics.

My dissertation was on farmed animal sanctuaries. This project traced the rise of chicken sanctuary movements and explored how sanctuaries challenge the status of chickens and other agricultural animals as resources – both conceptually and through creating medical knowledge. I am currently writing and drawing (cartooning) from this work.

My teaching is undergirded by a commitment to intersectional feminist pedagogy, which has also become a research area. I am currently thinking and writing about teaching in the age of the dual pandemics of Covid-19 and anti-Black racism in the United States.

Past projects

I have a longstanding interest in technology and environmental politics. My master’s research traced controversies around the social and environmental benefits of digital “smart grid” technologies. From 2014-2019 I also worked on an interdisciplinary team analyzing transnational environmental (in)justice in the North American hazardous waste trade. You can read more about this work here.

Teaching information

My pedagogy is informed by active learning, intersectional feminist praxis, and Paolo Freire’s work on liberatory education. Courses I have recently taught include Theory and Technology of Maps (Tufts), Globalization (Bentley University), Geography of Wisconsin (University of Wisconsin–Madison), and Introduction to Cartography (University of Wisconsin–Madison).

I am currently (fall 2020) teaching a Classification Reading Lab with Moon Duchin here at Tufts University. In the spring (2021), I will be teaching Companion Cyborgs and Beyond, on the work of Donna Haraway.

I welcome inquiries about my upcoming class or about teaching in general!

Selected publications

Please contact me for copies of any of these should you find yourself behind a paywall.

Sarah A. Moore, Robert E. Roth, Eric Nost, Heather Rosenfeld, and Kristen Vincent. 2018. Undermining methodological nationalism: Cosmopolitan analysis and visualization of the North American hazardous waste trade. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.

Sarah A. Moore, Mohammed Rafi Arefin, and Heather Rosenfeld. 2018. Generating anxiety, short-circuiting desire: Battery waste and the capitalist phantasy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

Heather Rosenfeld, Sarah A. Moore, Robert E. Roth, Eric Nost, and Kristen Vincent. 2018. Hazardous aesthetics: A “merely interesting” toxic tour of waste management data. Geohumanities.

Heather Rosenfeld. 2017. Plug into choice? The trouble with common-sense participation in a smart electric grid. Capitalism Nature Socialism.

Sarah A. Moore, Robert E. Roth, Heather Rosenfeld, Eric Nost, Kristen Vincent, Mohammed Rafi Arefin, and Tanya M.A. Buckingham. 2017. Undisciplining environmental justice research with visual storytelling. Geoforum.

The Roestone Collective (pen name for Elsa Noterman and Heather Rosenfeld). 2014. Safe space: Towards a reconceptualization. Antipode.