Digital Commons Network^™

Introduction To Gis Using Open Source Software, 1st Ed, Frank Donnelly

Open Educational Resources

This tutorial was created to accompany the GIS Practicum, a day-long workshop offered by the Newman Library at Baruch College CUNY that introduces participants to geographic information systems (GIS) using the open source software QGIS. The practicum introduces GIS as a concept for envisioning information and as a tool for conducting geographic analyses and creating maps. Participants learn how to navigate a GIS interface, how to prepare layers and conduct a basic geographic analysis, and how to create thematic maps. This tutorial was written using QGIS version 1.5 "Tethys", a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) desktop GIS software package.

A History Of Resilience Is A History Of Resistance, Melissa Ooten

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

As an historian, I’m struck by the emphasis this documentary places on non-humans – be it animals, plants, soil, or mountains – although as a native of Appalachia, that doesn’t surprise me. The film is billed as “America’s first environmental history series: and as such, it gives us a bold, unique template of how to talk holistically about the concept of place and the specific place of Appalachia. While it may be particularly prescient to talk about the broader concept of place through ecology and other facets when analyzing the history of Appalachia, surely it is no less important when …

Foreword, From Holy Places And Pilgrimages: Essays On India, Robert H. Stoddard

Geography Program: Faculty Publications

This collection of twelve articles continues a long and rich body of information about pilgrimages. Written materials in the form of pamphlets, guidebooks, manuals, itineraries, and treatises about pilgrimages date from antiquity (see, e.g. the discussion in this volume by Rana Singh about ancient epics, pp. 15-20). Travelling to places regarded by worshippers as having extraordinary spiritual power is a phenomenon permeating all religious traditions so it is logical that it appears in various literary forms.

Our Theories, Ourselves: Hierarchies Of Place And Status In U.S. Academia, Karen M. Morin, Tamar Rothenberg

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

The Geography Of Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Within Urban Areas Of India, Jochen Albrecht, Peter Marcotullio, Andrea Sarzynski

Publications and Research

This paper examines the patterns of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from urban areas in India—a rapidly growing and urbanizing nation. It uses a new dataset, Emission Dataset for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) to estimate the urban share of national GHG emissions. It presents a geographic picture of emission variation by urban form (urban population size, area size, density, and growth rate), and economic (GDP and GDP per capita), geographic (location of emissions released: 20, 40, and 80 km from urban areas), and biophysical (ecosystem and climate: cooling degree days) characteristics. Dependent variables include emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), …

Environmental Imaginaries Of The Middle East And North Africa, Diana K. Davis, Edmund Burke Iii

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of misuse. It is precisely such orientalist environmental imaginaries, increasingly undermined by contemporary ecological data, that the eleven authors in this volume question. This is the first volume to critically examine culturally constructed views of the environmental history of the Middle …

El Atlas De Oregón Para Estudiantes, Teresa L. Bulman, Gwenda H. Rice, Center For Spatial Analysis And Research. Portland State University, David Banis, Anamaria Esparza

Instructional Materials

Un atlas para los estudiantes de primaria y secundaria

Theorizing Practice In Economic Geography: Foundations, Challenges, And Possibilities, Andrew Jones, James T. Murphy

Geography

Over the last decade or so there has been an identifiable shift in the interests of many economic geographers towards a concern with practices: stabilized, routinized, or improvised social actions that constitute and reproduce economic space, and through and within which socioeconomic actors and communities embed knowledge, organize production activities, and interpret and derive meaning from the world. Although this shift has gained significant momentum its general theoretical significance remains somewhat unclear and the concept is vulnerable to criticisms that it is incoherent, too 'micro-scale' in emphasis, unable to provide valid links between everyday practices and higher-order phenomena (eg, institutions, …

Nongovernmental Organizations And Sex Work In Cambodia: Development Perspectives And Feminist Agendas, Jessica Catherine Schmid

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

This project focuses on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Cambodia that deal, either directly or indirectly, with sex work and sex workers. The NGOs outlined in this study have goals ranging from preventing Cambodian women from entering the commercial sex industry to empowering Cambodian sex workers through the formation of sex worker unions. Through the textual analysis of documents and web materials disseminated by these NGOs and from interviews with representatives from the NGOs, I seek to analyze how underlying assumptions about development and about the commercial sex industry shape the ways in which the personnel leading these NGOs think and …

The Ingredients Of Change: A Political Ecology Approach To Diabetes In The Somali Community Of Minnesota, Mina Tehrani

Geography Capstone Projects

In the early 1990’s, due to political circumstances at home, Somali immigrants and refugees began arriving in the state of Minnesota in large numbers. Over the past two decades, Somali immigrants have come to comprise one of the most populous ethnic groups in the Twin Cities, and are the largest Somali population in the world outside of Eastern Africa. Although quantitative data is unavailable, qualitative evidence and testimonies of healthcare professionals support the conclusion that Somali immigrants in Minnesota suffer from higher rates of diabetes than non-immigrant groups and than they likely did before migration. Why might this be the …

‘‘The Map Proves It’’: Map Use By The American Woman Suffrage Movement, Christina E. Dando

Geography and Geology Faculty Publications

In the early twentieth century, American suffragists used ‘‘a suffrage map’’ showing the spread of women’s suffrage on posters, pamphlets, and broadsides. The map was part of a shift in tactics used by the suffrage movement: leaving the parlours and taking to the streets, the suffragettes were claiming public space. This article explores the verbal and graphic rhetoric of these persuasive maps, as well as the politics of their placement, exploring how suffragettes moulded and used these traditionally masculinist ways of knowing to advance their cause while simultaneously marginalizing women of colour. Their adoption of maps represents an early example …

Global Demographic Challenges: Case Study Women, Madeline Fox

Social Sciences

Half of the world lives on less than $2 a day. Everywhere men, women and children live in extreme poverty and suffer. Anthropogenic climate change has intensified famines, droughts, floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters. Modern civilization has altered nature and nature has responded to these alterations. Every year approximately 80 million people are added to the
planet, increasing pressure on the land. These added numbers of people require increased food and land resources and produce more pollution. While populations grow, arable lands with high yields do not. It is essential to reduce global consumption of all commodities and reduce …

Global Shifts, Theoretical Shifts: Changing Geographies Of Religion, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The paper evaluates the burst in geographical research on religion in the last decade. It examines: (1) the relative emphases and silences in analyses of different sites of religious practice, sensuous geographies, population constituents, religions, geographies and scales of analyses; (2) the rise in the discourse of postsecularization; and (3) four contemporary global shifts (growing urbanization and social inequality, deteriorating environments, ageing populations, and increasing human mobilities), the ways in which religion shapes human response to them, and the implications for new research agendas. © 2010 The Author(s).

Introduction: Culture, Economy, Policy: Trends And Developments, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The important nexus between culture and economy is by no means a recent development nor a novel inclusion on the social science agenda. As Harvey pointed out in his foreword to Zukin's (1988)Loft Living, the artist, as one `representative' of the cultural class, has always shared a position in the market system, whether as artisans or as “cultural producers working to the command of hegemonic class interest”. In the last two to three decades, in the US and more lately, in western Europe, cultural activities have become increasingly significant in the economic regeneration strategies in many cities. Geographers, however, have …

Accumulation, Excess, Childhood: Toward A Countertopography Of Risk And Waste, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

This piece grows out of my on-going project, ‘Childhood as Spectacle’, and my enduring concern with social reproduction and what it does for and to Marxist and other critical political-economic analyses. After more than 30 years of Marxist-feminist interventions around these issues, symptomatic silences around social reproduction remain all too common in analyses of capitalism. Working through these issues and their occlusion, I offer what I hope is a useful and vibrant theoretical framework for examining geographies of children, youth, and families. Building this framework calls into play three overlapping issues; neoliberal capitalism in crisis and David Harvey’s notion of …

Money, Power And Landscapes Of Consumption, Ana Miscolta-Cameron

Geography Capstone Projects

This paper explores the phenomenon of national parks and reserves in Tanzania as a product of early colonial ideology and the evolution of that ideology into a post-independence capitalist enterprise. Serengeti National Park, Selous Game Reserve and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area are examined as historically contested sites in which indigenous people have been denied customary use rights by successive regimes of power keen on profiting through resource exploitation and tourism. Though this paper’s focus is Tanzania, it attempts to reveal a pattern of colonial and neo-colonial environmentalism widespread throughout the developing world.

Norumbega News, No.15 (Fall 2010), Osher Library Associates

Friends of OML, Occasional Publications

Issue No.15, Fall 2010

Osher Map Library and the Smith Center for Cartographic Education

Portland, Maine

La ‘Paradoxe Marocaine’ Moroccan-Dutch Citizens In Transnational Social Space, Deva-Dee Siliee

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Human mobility has existed in countless forms for many centuries. Yet in our modern world of sovereign territorially defined nation-states, both policy makers and national publics increasingly see human mobility across national boundaries as alarming. The rising movement of people, culture and capital across borders is suggested to pose a direct challenge to the nation-state as the organizing unit around which many areas of human activity revolve. In the age of globalization, academics and politicans are investigating how to understand the question of individuals and entire communities, intent on maintaining strong economic, cultural and social ties across state borders. This …

Demographic, Economic And Social Transformations In Bronx Community District 4: High Bridge, Concourse And Mount Eden, 1990 - 2008, Astrid S. Rodríguez

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction: This report analyzes demographic and socioeconomic characteristics among the five largest Latino nationality groups during 1990-2008 in the NYC Community District 4 of the borough of the Bronx, which comprises the neighborhoods of High Bridge, Concourse and Mount Eden.

Methods: Data on Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa. Cases in the dataset were weighted and analyzed to produce population estimates.

Results: Dominicans are the largest Latino subgroup in the Bronx’s Community District 4, accounting for over 30% …

The Tibetan Jewish Youth Exchange: The Importance Of Youth In Exile And Diaspora Communities, Jade Sank

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

How is the identity of a people living in diaspora maintained? The people of Tibet have been living in exile since the Chinese occupation began in 1959. As a result the Tibetan people have been working to find ways to maintain their identity, religion and culture. In Many ways the current Tibetan plight can be compared to the experiences of the Jewish people in exile and diaspora.

Culture, a religion, a people and an identity in exile and diaspora is both maintained and changed. The youth are the future and bonds that hold everything together, they are the carriers of …

Introduction: Contested Landscapes, Asian Cities, Lily Kong, Lisa Law

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

A decade and a half after Cosgrove and Jackson (1987) wrote their seminal piece on ‘new’ cultural geography, the discipline of geography has experienced a ‘cultural’ turn. Economic geography, for instance, has been infleected through perspectives that take on board cultural retheorisations (see Thrift and Olds, 1996; Thrift, 2000). Within urban studies, the acknowledgement of culture’s powers is not new (see, for example, Agnew et al., 1984). Yet, geographers scrutinising urban landscapes have moved the field, using some of the retheorised perspectives that Cosgrove and Jackson (1987) encapsulated. Of most pertinence to this volume is the retheorised notion of culture …

China And Geography In The 21st Century: A Cultural (Geographical) Revolution?, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

A noted Singapore-based cultural geographer and specialist on Asia reviews the recent emergence of cultural geographic research on and within China and the implications of China's rise for the study of 21st century cultural geography more broadly. She identifies six major issues modern China is confronting that, when addressed from a cultural geographical perspective, may both enhance an understanding of the country and reshape the practice of cultural geography as a subdiscipline: agricultural reform, economic reform, urban change, rural-urban migration and related social inequalities, the changing family structure, and environmental change. The author argues that if China's cultural geography is …

Places For Races: The White Supremacist Movement Imagines U.S. Geography, Barbara Perry, Randy Blazak

Sociology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Increasingly, scholars are acknowledging that racial and other forms of animus assume a spatial dimension. Not only does intercultural hostility take different forms depending on location, but so, too, does the concomitant bias-motivated violence imply “places for races.” The very intent and motive of hate crimes are grounded in the perceived need of perpetrators to defend carefully crafted boundaries. While these boundaries are largely cultural, they may also take on a real, physical form, at least from the perpetrator’s perspective. Nowhere is this more evident than in the geographical imagination of the White Supremacist movement. This paper will trace the …

'The Edge Of The Island': Neighborhood Identity And Evolving Community In 'Liminal Places', Gordon Douglas

Faculty Publications, Urban and Regional Planning

This paper examines the contemporary processes at work in urban areas without clear spatial identities that are simultaneously facing the challenges of cultural change and gentrification. I do so through the close analysis of one such ‘liminal place’ on Chicago’s West Side. I use the phrase ‘a community on the edge of the island’ to describe the area, inspired by an interview subject who referred to the tenuous search for a sort of ideal bohemian hipness as the need to stay as “close to the edge of the island” as possible without actually leaving it. Making use of ethnographic and …

Beragam Islam, Beragam Ekspresi: Islam Indonesia Dalam Praktik, Oki Rahadianto Sutopo

Masyarakat: Jurnal Sosiologi

No abstract provided.

Pluralisme Dan Masyarakat Pasca-Politik, Fransisca Sse Seda

Masyarakat: Jurnal Sosiologi

No abstract provided.

Preservation Ethics In The Case Of Nebraska's Nationally Registered Historic Properties, Darren Michael Adams

Department of Geography: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation focuses on the National Register of Historic Places and considers the geographical implications of valuing particular historic sites over others. Certain historical sites will either gain or lose desirability from one era to the next, this dissertation identifies and explains three unique preservation ethical eras, and it maps the sites which were selected during those eras. These eras are the Settlement Era (1966–1975), the Commercial Architecture Era (1976–1991), and the Progressive Planning Era (1992–2010). The findings show that transformations in the program included an early phase when state authorities listed historical resources pertaining to the settlement of the …

Beyul Khumbu: Sherpa Constructions Of A Sacred Landscape, Lindsay Ann Skog

Dissertations and Theses

Khumbu, part of Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park in eastern Nepal and an UNESCO World Heritage site, is home to the Sherpa people, ethnic Tibetan Buddhists who migrated to the region more than 500 years ago. Sherpas animate the landscape with localized water, tree, rock, and land spirits, identify sacred mountains, mainly associated with the Bönpo and Tibetan yullha traditions, and some view the landscape as a beyul, a sacred place and hidden valley protecting Buddhist people and beliefs in times of turmoil and need. These beliefs protect the natural environment through religious practices and taboos against environmentally harmful …

Variations In Vulnerability To Climate Change In Southeast Asia, Kelsey Margaret Allard

Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Australian Geography Unit, Daniel Scarbrough

Social Sciences

These lesson plans are designed for American students to learn about Australian Geography in a exciting and fun way. It will cover both physical and cultural geography aspects and this unit is designed for 9th grade geography and social science classes. The lesson plans consist of lecture portion and activities. This variety of teaching styles will cater to students of all learning styles (audio, verbal, and kinesthetic) and be enjoyable and informative.