Geography Commons^™

To Protect The Sky From Falling, Charles Lambert

Theses and Dissertations

Using ceramic, found objects, metal and wood, my practice is a meditation and questioning of care, efficiency, repair, structure and place. Architectural elements of support rendered in clay are the initial point of entry to give a soft, lived-in quality to a built environment that is often devoid of the mark of the hand and body. Imprints of the hand are left, and the objects are often deformed in ways to subvert the perceived functionality. The focus on ceramics centers around a play with the binary of soft and hard and the external changes that create its transformation. The work …

Place And Cultural Identity Among Guatemalan Indians: "The Fragility Of Goodness", Edward Davis

The Geographical Bulletin

Place experience may be more important to culture groups in war-torn and impoverished countries than to those in stable, developed regions. There is evidence from diverse sources that place experiences are directly relevant to the distinct Indian identities found within Guatemala's western highlands. Individual municipios often are distinct in their clothing, language and attachment to the land. A rereading of ethnographies gathered during the last few decades, along with new survey data, suggest that place and identity are strongly linked, possibly in part as a response to a history of violence and oppression in the region.

Flags As Symbols Of Place: Unpacking Geographic Meaning And Identity In Student Flag Designs, Carlos A. Morales-Ramirez

West Chester University Doctoral Projects

Flags have been around for centuries; however, vexillology, the study of flags, was not officially coined until the 1960s. Despite this, there is still a need for more scientific and empirical research. Using qualitative arts-based research (ABR) methodology, this study investigates the creative journey of students in an undergraduate geography course as they design a flag for a place of their choosing. Students were asked to interpret the concept of ‘place’ through their flag designs while also incorporating flag design principles. The results showed that participants selected places tied to themes such as hometown, family, love, memories, and culture often …

Workable Seams, Jackson Mills Smith

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In Jackson Mills Smith’s Workable Seams, readers encounter the stories, landscapes, and lives of rural Knox County, Indiana, from the oscillating vantage of a Hoosier boy raised with a Cajun sensibility. After relocating from Louisiana to the river bottoms of the crossroad state at a young age, the speaker gradually uncovers a local history only previously understood in fragmentary shards and fading glimpses.

Alternating between semi-lyrical embodied experiences and memories, documentary pieces in conversation with the state’s historical archive, and the retelling of exaggerated local yarns, poetry is a means of inquiry in Workable Seams. Topics range from …

Creating Skateboarding Spaces Or Corralling Skaters? The Rise Of Public Skateparks In Rural Northeast Alabama, Stephen G. Tsikalas, Mark Allen Jones, Jr.

The Geographical Bulletin

The construction of a series of public skateboarding parks (skateparks) in rural areas in northeast Alabama came about between 2005 and 2007. Skateparks are expensive projects for rural Alabama city governments to undergo; yet, numerous parks have been built within the last decade. Our research explores why these parks were built, where space was allocated for the park, who funded them, and how the space is regulated. The majority of our data come from interviewing city authorities or parties that had a role in funding or campaigning for a skatepark. We have found the establishment of these parks had mix …

Performance Art And Pedestrian Experience: Creating A Sense Of Place On The Third Street Promenade, Kalli F. Doubleday

The Geographical Bulletin

It is well attested that wherever people gather, acrobats, poets, musicians, dancers, and tricksters also appear and perform. Although street performers can be found throughout the entire world, they are curiously shunned in New York City, while Plovidiv, Bulgaria in March 2015 decided to follow other European cities in having auditions or qualifiers for performers in public places. This research adds to scholarship on performance art as a beneficial element in developing a sense of place in urban environments, particularly pedestrian malls. A hundred surveys were collected from Promenade visitors to highlight these connections in a case study of street …

Growing Local Food Movements: Farmers’ Markets As Nodes For Products And Community, Martin Aucoin, Matthew Fry

The Geographical Bulletin

Throughout the United States, there is a fast growing movement centered on locally produced food . Consumers, farmers, and farmers’ markets are central components of this local food movement . In this study, we examine the local food movement in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex (DFW) and use farmers’ markets to understand DFW’s developing local food system and foodsheds . We also analyze how notions of place and community are manifest in DFW’s local food system . Research methods include interviews with farmers, customers, and farmers’ market coordinators and an analysis of the spatial distribution of three farmers’ market networks in …

Making Space For Yeast: Toward A Zymurpolitics, Walter W. Furness

The Geographical Bulletin

Geographic scholarship on craft brewing has characteristically fixated on place as a lens through which to understand and valuate ostensibly “local” beer, wherein fermentation acts as an alchemistic shorthand, transmuting far-flung ingredients into a product emphatically rooted in a particular location. However, yeast tends to receive little attention in this literature, even though it is a primary agent (alongside humans) in acting on raw materials to produce beer. Defying the notion of “hyperlocal,” yeast is frequently sourced from distant laboratories, though some breweries maintain their own cultures in-house. This paper draws on existing literature, observation, and interviews with brewers to …

Grounding History Instruction: Engaging Place And Scale Through Iterative Local Inquiry Design, Megan Vangorder

The Councilor: A National Journal of the Social Studies

Teaching local history is often an afterthought in the high school history classroom. It is difficult to find enough instructional time to incorporate local stories and there are often gaps in resource development and approach from a local lens. This article seeks to help teachers articulate a locally driven inquiry approach. Using Illinois as the local framework and the C3 Inquiry Design Model as the tool, teachers can begin to map out how to implement the competing mandates to promote disciplinary skill development, demonstrate content expertise using state mandated units of study, drive student-oriented history, and foster civic competence all …

Collapsing Spaces, Colliding Places: Leveraging Constructs From Humanistic Geography To Explore Mathematics Classes, Valentin A. B. Küchle, Shiv S. Karunakaran, Mariana Levin, John P. Smith Iii, Sarah Castle, Jihye Hwang, Yaomingxin Lu, Robert A. Elmore

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Humanistic geographers distinguish between space and place: “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (Tuan, 1977, page 6). In this essay, we seek to demonstrate how mathematics education researchers and mathematics instructors may find space and place illuminating for understanding important aspects of students’ learning experiences during the coronavirus pandemic—and possibly beyond. Specifically, after introducing the terms and relating them to the context of a university mathematics class, we exemplify how home and class places collided for three undergraduate mathematics students forced to deal with the abrupt …

Cannabis, Communities, And Place: (Re)Constructing Humboldt’S Post-Prohibition Present, Josh Meisel, Dominic Corva, Ara Pachmayer

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

Since 1990, many Cal Poly Humboldt faculty and students have made cannabis the focus of scholarship and learning. This work has been shaped by the political, economic, and cultural legacies of cannabis in Humboldt County. Scholarly interest spans multiple dimensions of cannabis cultivation, commerce, consumption, and related social issues. As a multidisciplinary team of scholars, Cal Poly Humboldt faculty affiliated with the Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research (HIIMR) have also shaped the Bachelor of Arts in Cannabis Studies that will launch in Fall 2023. This is the first social science degree program in the United States with this orientation. …

Disorientations, Noah Greene-Lowe

MFA in Visual Art

The materials that make up the ordinary and mundane in the United States also reinforce and normalize a white spatial imaginary. Conventions of mapping, imaging of land and landscape, and elements of the built environment continue to orient us in a logic of space as property. In my sculptural work, I employ strategies of disorientation and creative repair, or reconstruction, to unsettle the spatial practices of whiteness and structures of power embedded in the mundane, the familiar, and the domestic. I consider the planned cohousing community where I grew up as an influence on my work, and my whiteness. By …

Tales From A Placeholder: A Relational Journey With Land, Place, People And Self, Kalle O. Fox

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The proposed thesis is a collection of place-based, long- and-short-form creative nonfiction essays. The places of interest are where the author spent different amounts of time in during her twenties, including Iceland, Miami and Seaside, Florida, Butte and Missoula, Montana, and a series of National Parks on the western side of the Continental Divide. This thesis is informed what cultural geographer Yi Fu Tuan coined as topophilia: the affective bond between people and place. “Place” and “sense of place,” while each having their own array of definitions in environmental scholarship, are considered interchangeable in the context of my work. A …

Politics Of Belonging: Identity, Integration, And Spatial Practices Of Algerian Immigrants And Their Descendants In Paris, France, Elizabeth Nelson

Theses and Dissertations

Using a geographic framework, this dissertation explores how Algerian immigrants and their descendants perform identity and negotiate belonging in French society. Bringing together critical theorizations of race, identity, space, and place, this work investigates what it means to be a racialized minority in a postcolonial context and to learn and experience the boundaries of ‘Frenchness.’ It is based on the narratives of Algerian immigrants who have migrated to Paris, France, and their French-born children. The empirical evidence of the case studies highlights the myriad ways in which Algerian immigrants and their descendants encounter and structure their interactions with French society, …

The Dancing Between Two Worlds Project: Background, Methodology And Learning To Approach Community In Place, Anindita Banerjee, Shaun Mcleod, Gretel Taylor, Patrick L. West

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This article recounts the history to date of the Dancing Between Two Worlds (DBTW) project, which was initiated by a team of artist-scholars at Deakin University in 2018. DBTW’s brief was to engage the Indian community living in the western fringes of Melbourne in a project on civic belonging, cross-cultural artistic identity, and the performance of outer-suburban Indian diaspora. Working with the creative and community energies that are activated at the intersection of the creative arts and demographically inflected place, the Deakin researchers collaborated with local artists with an Indian background on a major performance in late 2019: …

On The Acceptance Of Urban Beavers In Martinez, California, Zane A. Eddy

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

As ecosystem engineers, beavers construct complex riparian and wetland habitats that benefit many other species, including endangered salmonids. Through their landscape alterations, beavers also promote increased groundwater recharge and provide refugia during wildfires and high flow events by impounding water and allowing it to spread across the landscape. Prior to the North American colonial fur trapping campaigns, there were between 60 and 400 million beavers in North America. By the beginning of the 20th century, beavers were extirpated from many parts of the continent, however through human efforts, their population has since rebounded to between 10 and 15 million. The …

Mapping Flat, Deep, And Slow: On The 'Spirit Of Place' In New Cinema History, Jeffrey Klenotic

Faculty Publications

This essay engages in a creative, heuristic, and reflexive consideration of the ‘localities’ of cinema audiences by exploring New Cinema History as a place. New Cinema History is conceptualised as a place continually produced in and through its interactions with the heterogeneous multiplicities of situated audiences and experiences of cinema that form the topoi of its landscape of inquiry. In reflecting on how this placialised landscape has been and might be represented, I argue that New Cinema History’s ‘spirit of place’ is most productive when rendered within a ‘splatial’ framework that draws upon practices of flat, deep, and slow mapping …

Geographies Of Transition—From Topical Concerns To Theoretical Engagement: A Commentary On The Transitions Research Agenda, Christian Binz, Lars Coenen, James T. Murphy, Bernhard Truffer

Geography

This viewpoint takes stock with the ‘geography of sustainability transitions’ (GOST) as it is presented in the transitions research agenda. GOST has been a relatively recent addition to transition theorizing, addressing the need for greater sensitivity and attention to the scales, spatialities, and context-specific factors that shape transitions. In our view, the agenda represents a rather narrow perspective on GOST, which is geared to two empirical themes, namely urban transitions and transitions in developing countries. While these are relevant and topical issues, the section lacks sufficient acknowledgement of the increasing engagement of geographers with transitions studies and the theoretical approaches …

Living Rivers, Cosmopolitan Activism, And Environmental Justice In The Bengal Delta, Daniel Adel

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This thesis explores the social movements and civil society activism to protect the rivers that flow through Bangladesh—the cradle and terminal delta floodplain of the transboundary Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna river systems—, as well as ways to build regional cooperation and watershed democracy in South Asia. The research drew on four overarching fields of study: environmental justice, southern environmentalism, ecological nationalism, and environmental governance. These four bodies of scholarship helped address the overarching question: how are civil society organizations analyzing and responding to the water diversions and degradation of Bangladesh’s transboundary rivers? Semi-structured interviews were conducted with civil society organizations …

Environmentally Responsible Land Use, Spring/Summer 2010, Issue 22

Sustain Magazine

No abstract provided.

Repurposed Spaces In Berlin And Johannesburg, Rebecca Kukla

Theses and Dissertations

Berlin and Johannesburg are repurposed cities, which were spatially designed to enforce a defunct social order, and which now must be used in new ways by new residents. Through a reading of several sites in each city, I examine how repurposed urban spaces and their inhabitants shape one another.

“‘The Strata Of My History’: Reading The Ecological Chronotope In Wendell Berry’S That Distant Land”, Ellen M. Bayer

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This article examines Wendell Berry’s short story collection, That Distant Land (2004) through the lens of the ecological chronotope. Berry’s characters cultivate an intimate relationship with their physical environment, and the land, in turn, inscribes their history within it. Furthermore, it is through a shared sense of responsibility to the land that the characters foster a sense of community, shared history, and timeless connection with each other. My analysis of Berry’s fiction employs the notion of the ecological chronotope as a lens for understanding the environmental implications encountered at the intersection between time and place in That Distant Land. …

The Place In Displacement: Stories Of Loss From The Chan-75 Dam, Patrick Daniel Mckenzie

Senior Theses

In 2008, AES (a U.S.-based, Fortune 500 power company) began construction on the Chan-75 dam in Nance del Risco, Panama. This dam flooded and displaced four indigenous Ngobe communities. However, this displacement represents more than just a relocation of people; it represents a fracturing of families and communities. While some impacts of displacement are obvious, other aspects of day-to-day loss are often ignored. Changes in family relations and sense of control, for example, cannot possibly be compensated by a corporation. This thesis examines both the history of the Chan-75 dam and the impacts its construction has had on one family.

The Larger Conversation: Contemplation And Place By Tim Lilburn, Emory Shaw

The Goose

Review of Tim Lilburn's The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place.

Place, Memory, And Archive: An Interview With Karen Till, Karen Till, Emily Kaufman, Christine L. Woodward

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Dr. Karen Till is Professor of Cultural Geography at Maynooth University, director of the Space & Place Research Collaborative (Ireland), and founding co-Convener of the Mapping Spectral Traces international network of artists, practitioners, and scholars. Till’s 2005 book, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place, explores German memory and modernity, showing how places and spaces exemplify the contradictions and tensions of social memory and national identity. Her current book in progress, Wounded Cities, is based upon geo-ethnographic research in Berlin, Bogotá, Cape Town, Dublin, Minneapolis, and Roanoke. It highlights the significance of placebased memory work and ethical forms of care …

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 …

Becoming Human In The Land: An Introduction To The Special Issue Of Heritage: Landscapes, Drew Hubbell

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This introduction to the special issue of Landscapes theorizes the questions suggested by the theme, "Landscape: Heritage." Weaving personal narrative with literary criticism, cultural studies, human geography, and ecology, the essay examines the way humans become human by developing complex relationships with landscapes over time. As landscapes contain the physical traces of human habitation and development, certain narratives of human inhabitants are written and memorialized in and by those landscapes. The monumentalization of specific heritages leads to contests between human groups who require certain heritages to be memorialized, but not others. Greater awareness of one's humanity requires recovery of polyphonic …

Temporary Places : The Balkan Refugee Route, Eric Martin

Sponsored Events -- List

Disasters, terrorist activities, wars, and other factors trigger large streams of people fleeing crisis and seeking refuge. These flows reached record levels in Europe from 2015 to 2017, when many refugees took "the Balkan route," through Greece, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Serbia, to reach north-western Europe. A massive response, one of the largest humanitarian actions in Europe since the Balkan Wars in the 1990s, included volunteers and organizations from the public and nonprofit-sector. Due to complexities and national variations in policy making, this crisis response consisted of five different, though somewhat overlapping phases, in which the "place" …

The Terranauts By T.C. Boyle And The Addlands By Tom Bullough, Carly E. Thomas

The Goose

Review of T.C. Boyle's The Terranauts and Tom Bullough's The Addlands.

Implications Of Unmanned Aircraft Systems And Sense Of Place: A Case Study In The Mono Basin, Sara Elizabeth Matthews

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This paper contributes to an understanding of the social implications of using UAS in natural resource areas; specifically, the ways in which these tools impact human constructed sense of place. This paper draws on in-depth interviews and document analysis to (a) develop an understanding of place meanings held among Mono Basin stakeholders and (b) define the ways in which increased UAS presence may interact with these visions of place.

In short, this research shows that sense of place in this rural area is influential in the way that UAS are received by local stakeholders. The changing nature of place meanings …