What is GOOSE?

The Guelph Observatory of Our Socio-Environment. We are students and researchers based in the Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics at the University of Guelph. We are interested in using data technologies alongside other material to build place-based understandings of society and nature.

• Guelph? We are based in Guelph, Ontario, on the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, and long stewarded under the Dish with One Spoon Covenant. Our work often reaches to places beyond Guelph, but our place-centred approach means we pay special attention to it.
• Observatory? We’re not astronomers. We also don’t kid ourselves into thinking we can observe society or nature as if we aren’t a part of them. Instead, we’re inspired by Scottish geographer Patrick Geddes’s late 19th century "outlook" tower in Edinburgh. You can read more about it in this Places article by Shannon Mattern. As Mattern argues, in contrast to the rather superficial data dashboards we have about the places we live, Geddes’s work shows us the importance of regional and historical context, as well as embodied experience, in understanding a place.
• Of Our? We collectively share this simultaneously social and environmental space that we know as Guelph. But we recognize that not everyone has the same experience of it – such experiences cleaving along racialized, classed, and gendered lines.
• Socio-Environment? For us, it doesn’t make any sense to think of society and environment as separate. We can’t understand changes to our environment without recognizing the (changing) structures of society, and we can’t understand our social world without recognizing how nature supports or imperils it.