IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Earth and Environmental Systems Institute staff members Francisco Tutella (left) and Tam Rankin converse in the newly renovated space on the second floor of the Earth and Engineering Sciences Building.
GOOD NEWS
Christopher S. Fowler and Linda L. Fowler published the article, “Here’s a different way to fix gerrymandering,” in The Washington Post.
Brian King has been named a co-editor of Human Geography and Nature & Society for The Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
Zachary Goldberg and Anika Rice published the article, “How Jewish Farmers are Divesting from White Supremacy,” in Edge Effects, a digital magazine produced by graduate students at the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE), which is part of the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. It was founded in 2014.
Jodi Vender won the Staff Outstanding Service Award for the 2020–21 academic year.
The department’s 2021 Recognition Reception website is live. Visit to see all the awards for faculty, staff, and students over the past year.
Hannah Perrelli was awarded an Erickson Discovery Grant for her research project, “Weaponizing Water: How Colonial Policy Has Exacerbated the Disproportionate Devastation of COVID 19 in the Navajo Nation.”
Vivian Rodriguez Rocha received an award from the Society for Woman Geographers to support fieldwork leading to her dissertation, “Coutertopographies of Care,” which charts the development of care-activism [activismo de cuidados] in the Movement for Women’s Lives in Mexico.
NEWS
Brian King, professor of geography and associate head for the department’s resident graduate programs, has been appointed head of the Department of Geography. He began on July 1.
King succeeds Cynthia Brewer, who will remain an active member of the faculty after serving as department head since 2014.
Alan Taylor, professor of geography and ecology, will serve as interim director of the Penn State Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI) while director Susan Brantley is on sabbatical. His appointment began July 1.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
Social Reproduction Theory: State of the field and new directions in geography
Rodríguez-Rocha, V.
Geography Compass
https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12586
Interest in social reproduction theory (SRT) has been revived in the in the last ten odd years. This paper positions SRT, and its refraction through a geographic lens, as particularly well placed to address emerging issues in the context of ongoing crises—economic, environmental and of care—which have been enhanced by the Covid-19 pandemic. I present an overview of the Marxist-feminist traditions that constitute the basis for modern SRT. Through a survey of recent literature, I discuss the potential for extending contemporary SRT through intersectionality theory and suggest the need to draw on theoretical insights originating in the global periphery towards a postcolonial, decolonial SRT. Finally, I contextualize social reproduction theories within geography and suggest three emerging areas of scholarship in which combining a geographic and SRT perspective would yield productive understandings of the current moment and signal towards the construction of alternative, livable futures. These areas are debt and the financialization of social reproduction under neoliberalism; a turn towards a socioecological understanding of reproduction; and resistance, transformation and visions of the future through a “conscious appropriation” of life’s work and life sustaining practices at large.
Reference frames and geographic scale: understanding their relationship in environmental learning
Jiayan Zhao, Xiaochuan Ma, Mark Simpson, Pejman Sajjadi, Jan Oliver Wallgrün & Alexander Klippel
Cartography and Geographic Information Science
https://doi.org/10.1080/15230406.2021.1942219
Reference frames provide structure for spatial cognition and support spatial knowledge development across different scales. This study sheds light on the relationship between geographic scale, defined as the spatial extent visually accessible from a single viewpoint, and the preferential use of different reference frames (egocentric vs. allocentric) for environmental learning. Participants learned target locations by teleporting through a virtual maze. Leveraging the flexibility and potential of immersive technologies, we manipulated geographic scale using two perspectives, a ground-level view and a pseudo-aerial view, to examine how reference frame proclivity (determined by an established test) affects spatial learning at each scale. The results of a pointing task show that participants who preferred an allocentric reference frame benefited from the pseudo-aerial perspective, whereas participants who preferred an egocentric reference frame made more efficient use of the ground perspective. A fine-grained behavioral and cognitive analysis provides concrete explanations for differences in task performance and offers evidence for the existence of egocentric survey representations. The results are essential for understanding how immersive technologies change spatial learning.
“It’s not enough:” Local experiences of social grants, economic precarity, and health inequity in Mpumalanga, South Africa
Margaret S. Winchester, Brian King, Andrea Rishworth,
Wellbeing, Space and Society
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wss.2021.100044
South Africa has received international recognition for taking an active role in addressing extreme poverty by establishing a national social grant program. Lauded as one example to alleviate poverty, the operating assumption is that these strategies provide alternatives to mainstream development assistance. Notwithstanding their potential effects, the pathways generating livelihood change and their long-term implications for processes of citizenship formation and state society relations remain unclear. Drawing from an interdisciplinary study of social and economic change in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, we analyze household surveys and qualitative interviews to examine how individuals manage their limited income through a balance of social grants, economic remittances, labor migration and strategic task-shifting. Though more than half of the households receive some form of pension support from the national government, many continue depending on remittances from household members living elsewhere. Social grants additionally interrelate with health maintenance in complicated ways, evidenced by high HIV rates within the study region. We argue that while the distribution of grants helps alleviate financial stress, the structure of assistance programs is more symbolically than materially significant for many families. Despite government assistance, families require social network mobilization and resources to access and secure healthcare and other basic needs.
Advancing equitable health and well-being across urban–rural sustainable infrastructure systems
Pearsall, H., Gutierrez-Velez, V.H., Gilbert, M.R. … Jennifer E. Baka … et al.
npj Urban Sustainability
https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-021-00028-8
Infrastructure systems have direct implications for how health and well-being evolve across urban–rural systems. Scientists, practitioners, and policy-makers use domain-specific methods and tools to characterize sectors of infrastructure, but these approaches do not capture the cascading effects across interrelated infrastructure and governance domains. We argue that the development and management of sustainable urban infrastructure must focus on interactions across urban and rural places to advance equitable health and well-being. We call for a research agenda that focuses on urban–rural infrastructure systems, addressing trade-offs and synergies, decision-making, institutional arrangements, and effective co-production of knowledge across the diverse places connected by infrastructure.
Influence of HMD Type and Spatial Ability on Experiences and Learning in Place-based Education
Sajjadi, J. Zhao, J. O. Wallgrün, P. L. Femina and A. Klippel
2021 7th International Conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN)
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=9459405&isnumber=9459239
With the emergence of different types of Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs), researchers and educators must make informed decisions on what HMDs best support their needs. When performing experiments with relatively large populations, these decisions are largely affected by the sensing-scaling tradeoff between high-end tethered HMDs and lower-end standalone systems. Higher sensing affords a richer experience, but it is also associated with higher costs in terms of the HMD itself and the need for VR-ready computers. These limitations often impede instructors from using high-end HMDs in an efficient way with larger populations. We report on the results of a study in the context of place-based immersive VR (iVR) Geoscience education that compares the experiences and learning of 45 students after going through an immersive virtual field trip, using either a lower-sensing but scalable Oculus Quest or a higher-sensing but tethered HTC Vive Pro. Our results indicate that students who used the Quest reported significantly higher levels of satisfaction but also more simulator sickness (although still a very low number on average) compared to those who used an HTC Vive Pro. Our findings suggest that with content design considerations, standalone HMDs can be a viable replacement for high-end systems in large-scale studies. Furthermore, our results also suggest that in the context of place-based iVR education, the spatial abilities of students (i.e., sense-of-direction) can be a determining factor in their experiences and learning, and therefore an important topic of study for designing effective place-based iVR experiences.
Place-Based Learning Through a Proxy – Variations in the Perceived Benefits of a Virtual Tour
O. Wallgrün, E. Knapp, A. Taylor, A. Klippel, J. Zhao and P. Sajjadi
2021 7th International Conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN)
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=9459380&isnumber=9459239
Place-based and fieldwork learning play a key role in higher education in environmental sciences and other geospatial disciplines. We report on a study in which we evaluated a web-based virtual tour application for teaching natural resource management in fire-prone western forests in two undergraduate classes. The virtual tour uses 360°-image-based virtual scenes and pre-recorded audio commentary by a domain expert to lead participants through the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Experimental Forest where forest treatments were implemented to reduce fire hazard. We present results from assessing students’ overall perception of the virtual tour, their views towards its application in undergraduate education, and their feedback for improving the design of future virtual tours. Furthermore, we discuss the collected data from the perspective of gender differences and differences in familiarity with the topic of the tour.
Virtual strike and dip – Advancing inclusive and accessible field geology
Natalie Bursztyn, Pejman Sajjadi, Hannah Riegel, Jiawei Huang, Jan Oliver Wallgrün, Jiayan Zhao, Bart Masters, Alexander Klippel
Geoscience Communication Discussion
[preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-2021-16, in review
Accessibility and inclusivity in field geology have become increasingly important issues to address in geoscience education and have long been set aside due to the tradition of field geology and the laborious task of making it inclusive to all. Although a popular saying among geologists is “the best geologists see the most rocks”, field trips cost money, time, and are only accessible for those who are physically able to stay outside long hours. With the availability of 3D block diagrams, an onslaught of virtual learning environments is becoming increasingly viable. Strike and dip is at the core of any field geologist’s education and career; learning and practicing these skills is fundamental to making geologic maps and understanding the regional geology of an area. In this paper, we present the Strike and Dip virtual tool (SaD) with the objective of teaching the principles of strike and dip for geologic mapping to introductory geology students. We embedded the SaD tool into an introductory geology course and recruited 147 students to participate in the study. Participants completed two maps using the SaD tool and reported on their experiences through a questionnaire. The SaD tool was overall perceived positively by students. Furthermore, some individual differences among students proved to be important contributing factors to their experiences and subjective assessments of learning. When controlling for participants’ past experience with similar software, our results indicate that students highly familiar with navigating geographical software perceived the virtual environment of the tool to be significantly more realistic and easier to use compared to those with lower levels of familiarity. Our results are corroborated by a qualitative assessment of participants’ feedback to two open-ended questions, highlighting both the overall effectiveness of the SaD tool, and the effect of geographical software familiarity on measures of experience and learning.
Embodied digital twins for environmental applications
Klippel, A., Sajjadi, P., Zhao, J., Wallgrün, J. O., Huang, J., and Bagher, M. M.
ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-V-4-2021-193-2021
The synergies of advances in environmental sensing and modeling and the mainstreaming of immersive technologies lay the foundation for a theoretical grounding of embodied digital twins. Embodied digital twins draw on an established understanding of the importance of place for environmental sciences as well as a paradigmatic shift in the cognitive sciences toward embodied cognition. Nonetheless, the excitement of realizing embodied experiences through immersive technologies such as augmented and virtual reality stands in stark contrast to a lack of consistent terminology and empirical research. In this vision paper, we are proposing to draw more deeply on the theoretical basis of embodied cognition and to establish research frameworks for advancing embodied digital twins. We discuss several examples for turning environmentally sensed and modeled information into high-fidelity immersive experiences and provide a discussion and outlook on critical topics to address.