Exploring Place and Space With the Center for Interdisciplinary Media Arts

Posted September 10, 2026

The Center for Interdisciplinary Media Arts (IMA) at Georgia Tech recently hosted 13 doctoral students and early-career scholars nationwide for a multi-day, National Science Foundation-funded workshop in spatial scholarship.

Spatial scholarship is a research approach focusing on social and humanistic questions, which foreground place, space, spatial data, and human experience.

Held at the Georgia Tech Library, the Spatial Scholarship Field School brought together researchers from eight top academic institutions, including Carnegie Mellon University, UCLA, NYU, and Georgia Tech, to examine how technology, data, and physical environments shape one another.

Participants shared research, joined in panel discussions with Georgia Tech faculty, and learned interdisciplinary methods such as a variation of body-mapping that uses  wearable environmental sensors to explore how data shaped their felt experience in place.

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"We're really proud to host this Spatial Scholarship Field School — to spend a couple of days together thinking about what it means to take space and place more seriously as part of the scholarship we do," said Yanni Loukissas, an associate professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC) and director of IMA.

Co-led by LMC Assistant Professor Richmond Wong, the event challenged scholars to evaluate how local neighborhoods respond to emerging technologies like self-driving cars and data centers.

“We invited participants to walk around with wearable sensors tracking sound, temperature, light, CO2, and air quality, interpreting readings through colored LEDs,” said Alexandra Teixeira Riggs, who helped facilitate the event. Riggs is a 2026 Ph.D. Digital Media graduate who now works as an assistant professor at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

“This activity asked participants to focus on critical and interpretive approaches to bio and environmental data, situating themselves within campus environments,” Riggs said.

Stephen Yang, a doctoral candidate at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, said the event advanced his thinking on how people experience built environments.

“I’m grateful for the thought-provoking conversations that pushed me to think hard about the taken-for-granted ways built environments are organized,” Yang said. “I left the Field School with many new ideas that I’ll continue to ruminate on.”

IMA is a collaboration between the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and the Library.