Eric Robsky Huntley, PhD

Eric Robsky Huntley is a Lecturer in Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, a Visiting Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a 2020-2021 Fellow of the New England Regional Fellowship Consorium (NERFC).

Huntley is a GIScientist, geographer, and designer who builds mapping tools in collaboration with and alongside movements for social justice. They received an Antipode Foundation Scholar-Activist Grant in collaboration with Graphe, the Toronto-based Mining Injustice Solidarity Network, and Beyond Extraction to design citizen science workshops investigating the economic geography of the Canadian extractive industries. They are also building software tools to support tenant organizing in Greater Boston. In addition to mapping work, they examine histories of cities and science using methods drawn from the digital humanities and spatial history. With the support of a fellowship from NERFC, they are working with partners from libraries and historical Societies in New England to archive and extract features from historical planning documents.

A dedicated teacher, they were a 2018 recipient of the Teaching with Digital Technologies Award from MIT Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor. They teach courses centered on GIS, spatial database design, spatial statistics, web mapping, and history and theory. Their research has been published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers and the American Journal of Epidemiology. Their design work has been exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Museum of Design (a project with Sarah Williams’s Civic Data Design Lab), the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan.

They hold a PhD in Geography from the University of Kentucky, a Master of Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Michigan, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Performing Arts Technology, with a concentration in Media Arts and Engineering. They are also co-director of Graphe, a collective of critical scholars, practitioners, and teachers who understand maps as interventions in support of movements for justice.