USC Dornsife Spatial Sciences Institute

Elisabeth J. Sedano

Elisabeth J. Sedano

Assistant Professor (Teaching) of Spatial Sciences

  • 2014: Ph.D., Geography, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California
  • 1998: J.D., University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law, Berkeley, California
  • 1993: A.B., Social Anthropology, Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Elisabeth Sedano, Ph.D., is an assistant professor (teaching) of spatial sciences at the Spatial Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Sedano’s research interests include outdoor advertising, crowdsourced mapping and geographic information science (GIS). Her analytical product is situated in the literatures of urban geography, public space and volunteered geographic information (VGI). Her current work engages community members using mobile applications in a counter-mapping project of outdoor advertising and street art in Los Angeles.

She teaches students of all levels in the Spatial Sciences Institute academic programs. The undergraduate courses she teaches include SSCI 265: The Water Planet and SSCI 301: Maps and Spatial Reasoning. At the master’s level, the courses she teaches and has taught include SSCI 581: Concepts in Spatial Thinking, SSCI 583: Spatial Analysis and Modeling and SSCI 591: Web GIS. At the doctoral level, Sedano teaches SSCI 601b: Population, Health and Place Research Practicum.

Sedano serves as the faculty advisor for SC Mappers, the USC student organization.


Selected Works and Presentations

Fleming, S.D., Sedano, E., Carlin, M., Tracy, R.W., Walker, J., The Ethics of Volunteered Geographic Information for GEOINT Use. In 2018 State and Future of GEOINT Report (pp. 27-30). Reston, VA: United State Geospatial intelligence Foundation, 2018.

Sedano, E., Teaching Critical Physical Geography in a General Education Setting: The Case of the Water Planet. Paper presented at the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers Annual Meeting, Chico, CA, 2017.

Sedano, E., Public, Political, and Ephemeral: The Possibility of Changing the Urban Landscape By Engaging Urbanites With Mobile Mapping of Art and Ads. Paper presented at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, 2017.

Sedano, E.J., Sensor’ship and spatial data quality: Lessons from VGI on the landscape of advertising in Los Angeles. Urban Planning, 1 (2) 75-87, 2016, doi:10.17645/up.v1i2.608.

Sedano, E., Advertising, information, and space: Considering the informal regulation of the Los Angeles landscape. Environment and Planning A. 48(2) 223-238, 2016, doi:10.1177/0308518X15607482.

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