Human Geography Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

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" …

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 …

You Are What You Eat: Gastronomy & Geography Of Southern Spain, Katherine F. Perry

The Catalyst

Using empirical and numeric data, this study explores the use of food as a proxy to understand the cultural-historical geography of southern Spain. After spending three months in Granada, Spain, I compiled the most commonly used thirty-five ingredients from a selection of Spanish cookbooks and contextualized them within the broader history of Spain. The elements of traditional Andalucían cooking fit into three primary chapters of Iberian history: Roman occupation, the Moorish invasion beginning in the 8^th century, and the Columbian exchange, or the exchange of goods that took place between the Americas and Old World following European discovery of …

Nature, Socio-Spatial Divisions And Connections: An Examination Of El Jardín De Guadalupe, Elizabeth Moreno

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Culture is often discussed in the content of social behavior but, how culture is spatially linked to landscapes is often overlooked. Points of social and cultural reproduction is not only tied to landscapes, but there are constantly challenged as new cultures are introduced into a space. Latino culture in the United States has, and continues to, reshape America’s landscapes. For purpose of this thesis, the reshaping of landscapes will be observed in a community. This project examines the perception that Latinos avoid participation in a community garden. This perception is not entirely true, as there was one Latina participating. As …

Mapping As Performing Place, Aslihan Senel

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Mapping is an emerging act in contemporary discourse to understand, criticize, and re-imagine complex cultural, social, and physical relationships in the built environment. Maps are documents nearly as old as the human history in representing the relationships of people to land. Yet, mapping rather than map-making is a newly created concept as an alternative way of thinking about this relationship. Mapping refers less to a representation than a performance, in which the maker, place, and the product redefine, reposition and reproduce each other in the process. Mapping may allow developing an embodied and critical understanding of place, which is continuously …

Festival Connections: People, Place And Social Capital, Bernadette Quinn

Books / Book chapters

To date, while some researchers have investigated the nature of social inter-relationships evident in festival settings, the literature is under-developed. This has prompted some researchers to search for alternative theoretical frameworks. Social capital is emerging as a theory which shows potential. Drawing on the findings of two exploratory studies, this paper considers the diverse sets of social relationships at the heart of festival activity, whilst taking account of the role that place plays in these interactions. Empirically it undertakes a qualitative study of a range of festival actors at the Waterside festival in Milton Keynes, England and the Temple Bar …

Re-Placing Sprawl: Mapping Place In An American Suburb, Ryan M. Cooper

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

In the post-World War II era land development in the United States has largely been focused on the expansion away from urban centers and out into the surrounding suburbs. While the development of suburbs began with utopian ideals of spiritual wholeness, their actual manifestation on the American landscape has been subject to harsh critiques about their long-term economic and environmental feasibility, fostering of social alienation, and general placelessness. In this thesis I address the criticism of suburbs as placeless, asking ―What are the particular practices of place-making in North American suburbs?‖ Examining interviews, cognitive map surveys, participant observation, archival materials, …

“The Bus Stops Here”: Place-Making And Transit Justice Issues In The Twin Cities Public Bus Network, Megan A. Macpherson

Geography Honors Projects

This project engages the formation of place-narratives within the Metro Transit bus system by examining the structural factors and individual agents shaping a passenger’s experience of the bus. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, I bring together the literatures of transportation geography, and cultural/feminist geographies. Major themes from my research include the bus as a theater of performance/theater of conflict, the bus as a gateway to public life for those with limited mobility, and the bus as a relational space for specific passenger groups. Additionally, this project explores the significance of place within transit justice work in the Twin Cities. I …

Dwelling Through Multiple Places: A Case Study Of Second Home Ownership In Ireland., Bernadette Quinn

Books / Book chapters

The literature on second home ownership is by now quite extensive. While it may be also quite disparate, as Kaltenborn (1998) has claimed, identifiable areas within the general second home literature have begun to emerge. This paper focuses on one such area, that which explores the meaning of second home ownership. It re-visits one of the basic questions in the literature by asking why do people have second homes? This question has preoccupied several researchers over the last 20 years (e.g. Clout 1972, Jaakson 1986, Kaltenborn 1998, Chaplin 1999) and the ensuing literature has produced reasonably consistent findings by way …

Religion And Technology: Refiguring Place, Space, Identity And Community, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper reviews the literature on the religion-technology nexus, drawing up a research agenda and offering preliminary empirical insights. Firsts I stress the need to explore the new politics of space as a consequence of technological development, emphasizing questions about the role of religion in effecting a form of religious (neo)imperialism, and uneven access to techno-religious spaces. Second, I highlight the need to examine the politics of identity and community, since cyberspace is not an isotropic surface. Third, I underscore the need to engage with questions about the poetics of religious community as social relations become mediated by technology. Finally, …

Mapping 'New' Geographies Of Religion: Politics And Poetics In Modernity, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article reviews geographical research on religion in the 1990s, and highlights work from neighbouring disciplines where relevant. Contrary to views that the field is incoherent, I suggest that much of the literature pays attention to several key themes, particularly, the politics and poetics of religious place, identity and community. I illustrate the key issues, arguments and conceptualizations in these areas, and suggest various ways forward. These 'new' geographies emphasize different sites of religious practice beyond the 'officially sacred'; different sensuous sacred geographies; different religions in different historical and place-specific contexts; different geographical scales of analysis; different constitutions of population …

A 'New' Cultural Geography? Debates About Invention And Reinvention, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The Remaking Human Geography series critically reviews key journal articles, published in the last ten years, which have become 'citation classics'. Contributors to the series report on the academic debate which followed publication of the original article and assess why the article proved so influential. In this case Kong reviews an article on cultural geography by Cosgrove and Jackson (first published in Area in 1987). Peter Jackson also offers his thoughts on the 'cultural turn' and on future directions in this research field.