Human Geography Commons^™

Public Land Revisited: Municipalization And Privatization In Newark And New York City, Samuel Stein, Oksana Mironova

Publications and Research

Public land plays a central role in contemporary urban planning struggles. Using a comparative case study approach focused on the north-eastern US cities of Newark and New York City, we uncover patterns of land acquisition and dispossession that fit five broad and often overlapping periods in planning history: City Beautiful, metropolitan reorganization, deindustrialization, and devaluation, followed by hyper-commodification in New York City and redevelopment amidst disinvestment in Newark. Through this periodization, we find that accumulation and alienation of urban public land has largely taken place through two modes of municipalization (targeted and reactive) and two modes of privatization (community-led and …

Conceptualizing Youth Participation In Children’S Health Research: Insights From A Youth-Driven Process For Developing A Youth Advisory Council, Mohammad El-Bagdady, Krishna Arunkumar, Drew Bowman, Stephanie Coen, Christina Ergler, Jason Gilliland, Ahad Mahmood, Suraj Paul

Geography & Environment Publications

Given the power asymmetries between adults and young people, youth involvement in research is often at risk of tokenism. While many disciplines have seen a shift from conducting research on youth to conducting research with and for youth, engaging children and teens in research remains fraught with conceptual, methodological, and practical challenges. Arnstein’s foundational Ladder of Participation has been adapted in novel ways in youth research, but in this paper, we present a new rendering: a ‘rope ladder.’ This concept came out of our youth-driven planning process to develop a Youth Advisory Council for the Human Environments Analysis Laboratory, an …

Carter Family Tree, Mattison Griffin

History Class Publications

This research paper looks at the family tree of Mattison Griffin following the Cart line. The lineage is traced back centuries and looks at the location of the family and how they traveled from England to Arkansas.

No.03: Devising Urban Food Security Policy For African Cities, James Sgro

Hungry Cities Partnership

■ Informal food services are one of the few options for financially disadvantaged families. Food access policy needs to be created in partnership with informal economy actors to ensure that those who rely on informal systems are not ignored.

■ As household size increases, the likelihood of food insecurity grows exponentially. Adequate social protection programs are required to support household dependants including children and the aged and improve food security.

■ Secondary school completion is a specific milestone that significantly increases one’s food security outlook. Free primary and secondary school policies could return dividends in terms of nation-wide food security, …

Plant Pedagogies, Salmon Nation, And Fire: Settler Colonial Food Utopias And The (Un)Making Of Human-Land Relationships In Coast Salish Territories, Janna L. Lafferty

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As knowledge about the constellating set of environmental and social crises stemming from the neoliberal global food regime becomes more pressing and popularized among US consumers, it has brought Indigenous actors asserting their political sovereignty and treaty rights with regards to their homelands into new collaborations, contestations, and negotiations with settlers in emerging food politics domains. In this dissertation, I examine solidarities and affinities being forged between Coast Salish and settler food actors in Puget Sound, attending specifically to how contested sovereignties are submerged but at play in these relations and how settler desires for belonging on and to stolen …

An Alternative Narrative Of Integration In Germany Through An Ethnographic Exploration Of Cuban Immigration, Ana M. Rusch

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This ethnographic study on Cuban immigrants conducted in Germany explored the dynamics of integration through an understudied immigrant population. Most of the research conducted on integration in Germany has overwhelmingly been on Turkish immigrants, which is Germany’s majority immigrant group. To contribute to Integration Studies, this research focused on a minority and lesser studied immigrant group, Cuban immigrants. Cuban immigrants in Germany not only have a different historical and geopolitical relationship with Germany than its majority group but they also subscribe to different cultural and ethnoreligious categories. Because of these varying circumstances, Cubans act as a counter example to the …

No.01: The Sdgs, Food Security And Urbanization In The Global South, David Celis Parra, Krista Dinsmore, Nicole Fassina, Charlene Keizer

Hungry Cities Partnership

■ Urban food insecurity is distinct from that experienced in rural areas and must be addressed through a different set of policies.

■ While supermarkets are increasingly prevalent in urban centres of the Global South, the informal economy and state food distribution programs continue to play an important role in meeting food security needs of the urban poor.

■ The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, as part of a new in-ternational directive, recommends that governments aim to improve food security and nutrition over the next 15 years in response to the global challenge of fostering sustainability.

■ SDG …

No.02: An Urban Perspective On Food Security In The Global South, Michael Chong, Lucy Hinton, Jeremy Wagner, Amy Zavits

Hungry Cities Partnership

■ Food insecurity challenges in the Global South are changing as a result of rapid urbanization and the globalization of food supply chains.

■ Urban food insecurity is not distinct from rural food security challenges and policy seeking to address either should adopt a systems approach that strengthens their interdependence. There is an opportunity to increase the effectiveness of rural food security programming while concurrently addressing the growing food security needs of vulnerable urban populations.

■ This brief recommends that food security policy should prioritize intra-urban stages of informal food value chains and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their …

Putting Rooted Networks Into Practice, Alida Cantor, Elizabeth A. Stoddard, Dianne Rocheleau, Jennifer F. Brewer, Robin Roth, Trevor Birkenholtz, Katherine Foo, Padini Nirmal

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Rooted networks provide a conceptual framework that embeds network thinking in nature-society geography in order to investigate socio-ecological relations, while emphasizing the place-specific materiality of these relations. This progress report examines how geographers have put the framework into scholarly practice. The conceptual approach has enabled researchers to: 1) articulate the territoriality and materiality of networks as assemblages, which may be simultaneously rooted and mobile; 2) discern diverse types of power that flow through network connections; and 3) conduct analyses that unearth multiply-situated knowledges within networks. Challenges emerge as we seek to integrate the approach more fully with disciplinary traditions, including …

The Influence Of Tourism And Amenities On Place Attachment And Entrepreneurship In Remote Communities: A Case Study Of Tofino, Bc, Sreya Kumar, Nicole L. Vaugeois

TTRA Canada 2018 Conference

This study was undertaken to provide a better understanding new migrant entrepreneurs and what attracts them to rural and remote communities. Conducted as a case study in Tofino, the study was done using mixed methods including content analysis of place based promotional tools and semi-structured interviews with a sample of new migrant entrepreneurs who had moved to the community within the past 15 years . The study found that although there were no specific place promotion efforts directed at attracting entrepreneurs, businesses were often established as an indirect outcome of promotional efforts aimed at attracting tourists via destination marketing organizations. …

Rural Sense: Value, Heritage, And Sensory Landscapes: Developing A Design-Oriented Approach To Mapping For Healthier Landscapes, Judith Van Der Elst, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Lily Díaz-Kommonen

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Landscape design needs a novel value system centred on human experience of the landscape rather than simply on economic value. Design-oriented research allows us to shift the focus from mechanistic paradigms towards new sensemaking approaches that value both the sensual and the cognitive in human experience. To move in this direction, we investigate cultural and natural aspects of sensory experience in rural landscapes, arguing that: (1) rural (non-urban) regions offer diverse sensory experiences for optimising human health; and (2) spatial interconnectedness between rural and urban areas means that healthy rural regions are critical for urban development. Our key argument is …

Marine Research In Focus: Counteracting The ‘Myth Of Dry Feet’ In Dutch Planning For Flood Defense, Kristen Grant

Maine Sea Grant Publications

Coastal residents and towns need strategies to address climate change and its effects on sea-level rise, shoreline erosion, and coastal flooding. Extreme weather events can cause millions of dollars in damage and threaten coastal ecosystems and local economies. The Building a Resilient Coast project seeks to provide stakeholders with easy access to information to facilitate planning for climate and hazards impacts.

Speculations On The Postnatural: Restoration, Accumulation, And Sacrifice At The Salton Sea, Alida Cantor, Sarah Knuth

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Using a regional political ecology lens, this paper explores emerging geographies and politics of a “postnatural” ecomodernist turn in mainstream environmentalism. We examine the unfolding case of ecological restoration and renewable energy development at Southern California’s Salton Sea. Ambitious proposals to restore the massive, increasingly degraded lake (and finance restoration) by reengineering it as a hub for geothermal energy generation and hightech green industry hinge upon the ambiguity and malleability of restoration in an environment long classified as postnatural. These plans coincide with a broader rush on renewable energy sites in the California desert, and mounting conflicts over water and …

Locating Art Worlds, James W. Harrington Jr.

Conflux

This paper uses a varied literature to define “art” as literary, musical, or visual creations, and theatrical, dance, or musical performances that: are not motivated by utility; play some role in interpreting a culture or place; and are recognized as art by some number of audiences, vendors, producers, and critics. Thus, art benefits cultures and places through its interpretive value.

The production and dissemination of artistic creations requires a constellation of materials, standards, techniques, producers, and vendors that is called an “art world” relevant to that type of art. Though the impulse to create art is universal, art worlds are …

Subjectivity And Methodology In The Arch'i'Ve, Elizabeth J. Vincelette

English Faculty Publications

This article explores methodologies from the fields of library archival science, human geography, composition and rhetoric, and established editorial practices in English studies. By elaborating on the role of a researcher’s subjectivity in archival creation, this work expands the conversation regarding methodology and archives, especially how archives present us with new ways of seeing and making narratives during the editorial decision-making involved in their creation. Writing about my own experience, I privilege the researcher’s point of view with a narrative about my construction of a digital archive. With archival research, we should promote the revelation of methods and methodology to …

Cultural Politics Of Community-Based Conservation In The Buffer Zone Of Chitwan National Park, Nepal, Yogesh Dongol

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation research examines the socio-economic and political effects of community-based conservation initiatives within the Bagmara buffer zone community forests of Chitwan National Park, Nepal. In particular, the study investigates the role of buffer zones creation in structuring the way rural property rights have been defined, negotiated, and contested, in reinforcing or reducing patterns of ethnic dominance and exclusion, and in influencing how cultural identities are constituted and renegotiated. Using a political ecology framework with a specific focus on theoretical concepts of environmentality and territorialization, I conducted 12 months ethnographic and quantitative survey field research in the buffer zone communities …

Engineering Colonialism: Race, Class, And The Social History Of Flood Control In Guyana, Joshua Mullenite

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Overabundance and scarcity of water are global concerns. Across the world’s low-lying coastal plains, flooding brought on by sea level rise acts as an existential threat for a multitude of people and cultures while in desert (and increasingly non-desert) regions intensifying drought cycles do the same. In the decades to come, how people manage these threats will have important implications not only for individual and cultural survival, but also for questions of justice. Recent research on flooding and flood management probes the histories of survival, and adaptation in flood threatened regions for insights into emergent flood-related crises. However, scholars have …

Destination Place-Making Through The Sensuous Stories Of Travel Books, Kelley A. Mcclinchey Dr.

TTRA Canada 2018 Conference

No abstract provided.

Election Administration Within The Sphere Of Politics: How Bureaucracy Can Facilitate Democracy With Policy Decisions, Nicholas S. Martinez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Public bureaucracy finds itself in a strange place at the intersection of political science and public administration. Political science finds that, within representative democracy, discretion granted to bureaucrats threatens the nature of democracy by subverting politicians who represent the will of the people – bureaucracy vs democracy. At the same time, public administration holds that, in the interest of promoting democracy, bureaucracy should be objective in its implementation of policy in a way that eliminates the influence of politics from decision-making – politics vs bureaucracy. Those positions are seemingly contradictory in nature. From one perspective, bureaucracy is undemocratic because it …

Visitor Learning: In The Polar Bear Capital Of The World, Jill Bueddefeld, Christine Van Winkle, Mary Benbow

TTRA Canada 2018 Conference

This paper will discuss the visitor experience, design, and measurement when comparing in-situ and ex-situ nature-based tourism case studies. Particularly, this presentation will address the methods used to learn more about the social dynamics that help facilitate visitor learning and how to plan for particular types of visitor experiences. This research will also discuss the effect of place, authenticity and the importance of sustainable and responsible tourism in experiential visitor learning.

Tourism to ecologically sensitive areas, such as the Canadian Arctic, is often regarded as a way for people to learn about environmental issues such as climate change, as well …

"From The Neighborhood Up!": Neighborhood Sustainability Certification Frameworks And The New Urban Politics Of Scale, Alex J. Ramiller

Geography Honors Projects

Urban sustainability goals are closely tied to the current political context, in which the imperative to attract highly mobile global capital frequently steers the objectives of local government. In this paper, I argue for the incorporation of the neighborhood scale into contemporary understandings of “local” or “urban” sustainability policy, emphasizing the potential for multi-scalar certification frameworks to subvert the predominant global-local relationship. By shifting the conceptualization and implementation of sustainability from globally dependent urban regimes to a diverse array of discrete urban communities, neighborhood-scale initiatives are able to draw greater attention to issues of social equity, environmental justice, and spatially …

Congressional Redistricting: Keeping Communities Together?, Kalyn M. Rossiter, David W. S. Wong, Paul L. Delamater

Geography Faculty Scholarship

The process of congressional redistricting, delineating boundaries for districts in which voters elect members to the U.S. House of Representatives, has always been an expensive and controversial process. Congressional districts (CDs) are redrawn due to changes in population reflected by the decennial census to ensure equal representation. Laws and regulations literature identifies eight criteria that may be considered when determining the boundaries of CDs and this article focuses on one of those criteria, maintaining communities of interest (COIs). This criterion requires states to preserve these boundaries when delineating CDs but fails to define a COI. This research proposes and evaluates …

International Nurse Migration From India And The Philippines: The Challenge Of Meeting The Sustainable Development Goals In Training, Orderly Migration, And Healthcare Worker Retention, Maddy Thompson, Margaret Walton-Roberts

Global Nurse Migration Pathways: A Comparative Project

This paper examines nurse migration from India and the Philippines through the lens of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) 4.3 (access to training), 10.7 (orderly and responsible migration) and 3.c (retention of health workers). The international migration of health workers has increasingly featured on the agenda of global health agencies. Ameliorating the negative impact of international nurse emigration from low-income nations has been addressed by several western governments with the adoption of ethical recruitment guidelines, one element of an orderly migration framework. One of the challenges in creating such guidelines is to understand how the emigration of trained nurses influences …

Events, Social Connections, Place Identities And Extended Families, Bernadette Quinn, Theresa Ryan

Articles

The study reported here investigates the role that planned social gatherings play in shaping social connections, forging group identity and re-affirming connections with significant ‘home’ places within families where relationships extend across space. Empirically, it draws on a study of the Gathering, a 2013 national tourism initiative that encouraged people in Ireland to organise ‘gatherings’ to attract ‘home’ family members scattered across the globe. It reports data generated using mixed methods administered in two Irish counties. The findings demonstrate the profound meanings that the gatherings had for participating family members. The events served to strengthen existing family ties and to …

Assessing Land Deformation And Sea Encroachment In The Nile Delta, Egypt, Esayas Gebremichael

Research and Creative Activities Poster Day

Persistent scatterer interferometric analyses were conducted on a stack of 84 Envisat ASAR scenes spanning 7 years (2004 to 2010) over the entire Nile Delta of Egypt and surroundings to monitor the ongoing spatial and temporal land deformation, identify the factors controlling the deformation, and model the interplay between sea level rise and land subsidence to identify areas and populations threatened by sea encroachment by the end of the 21st century. Findings include: (1) general patterns of subsidence in the northern delta, near-steady (none) subsidence in the southern delta, separated by a previously mapped flexure zone undergoing uplift; (2) high …

"Homosexuals Are Revolting": Stonewall, 1969, Erin Siodmak

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Truffles Have Never Been Modern: An Actor-Network Theorization Of 150 Years Of French Trufficulture, Eric Van Vleet

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary scholars seeking to increase Tuber Melanosporum truffle production rely almost exclusively on technological advancements to increase yields, while failing to place the cultivation of truffles, trufficulture, in its historical or local landscape contexts. In this dissertation, I describe how truffle scholars’ conceptualization of trufficulture and landscapes has changed over 150 years in France, while focusing on the French département of Lot. I examine changing relations between humans and nonhumans and how they impact truffle harvests. I analyzed the history of French trufficulture through a close reading of historic truffle manuals, archival research and the classification of remotely sensed …

Where Does Public Land Come From? Municipalization And Privatization Debates, Oksana Mironova, Samuel Stein

Publications and Research

This article illuminates contemporary land-use and disposition struggles in New York City by tracing the history of land’s passage between the private and public realms. The authors contend that government and community-controlled nonprofit organizations should govern the disposition of the city’s remaining public land supply, deliberately deploying this scarce resource to promote the well-being of the people and neighborhoods most at risk in a speculation-fueled real-estate environment.

Wdph 2017 Summer Internship Report, Lauren Meininger

Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise

In the spring of 2014, the Worcester Division of Public Health, UMass Memorial Health Care, and Clark University’s Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise joined forces to begin developing a partnership that would combine academic resources, student input, and public health needs in the City of Worcester. Founders of this program were motivated to seek and implement innovative interventions for public health issues while simultaneously inspiring a new generation of public health professionals.

Each year, the Academic Health Collaborative of Worcester (AHCW) brings in student interns to work on the pressing public health issues of the moment. Interns work alongside epidemiologists, …

New Yorkers On The Move: Recent Migration Trends For The City And Metro Area, Frank Donnelly, Anastasia Clark, Janine Billadello

Publications and Research

1. The population of New York City and the New York Metropolitan Area increased significantly between 2010 and 2016, but annually growth has slowed due to greater domestic out-migration.

2. Compared to other US cities and metro areas, New York's population growth depends heavily on foreign immigration and natural increase (the difference between births and deaths) to offset losses from domestic out-migration.

3. Between 2011 and 2015 the city had few relationships where it was a net receiver of migrants (receiving more migrants that it sends) from other large counties. The New York metro area had no net-receiver relationships with …