IMAGE OF THE WEEK
This photo shows a raised peat bog near Lubec, Maine. It started forming after the glacier retreated from the area about 15,000 years ago. Photo: Andrew Carleton. The Department of Geography invites applicants for a tenure-track assistant professor position in Climate Science. Research emphases could include: hydro-climatology, climate variability and change, paleo-climate, climatic hazards, physical climatology. We encourage applicants with facility in approaches to climate analysis such as: proxy data, field climatology and instrumentation, remote sensing, GIS, statistical and/or dynamical modeling, attribution and regional-scale information applied to climate-change scenarios. For more information and to apply
GOOD NEWS
• Where is Wayne? Alumnus Wayne Brew (’81), assistant professor of geography at Montgomery County Community College, was granted a sabbatical for fall 2017. He has been on a long road trip. Follow his travels and see daily Instagram updates here: https://www.mc3.edu/academics/faculty/highlights/wayne-brew
• Brian King was interviewed on “The Academic Minute” about food scarcity and the treatment of HIV.
NEWS
Coffee Hour is the Critical Geography Conference Keynote with Minelle Mahtani
Toxic geographies: absences in critical race thought and practice in social and cultural geography
In this talk, I suggest that social and cultural geography as a discipline and pedagogical stream needs to pay more detailed attention to the ongoing production of what I call toxic geographies, or emotionally toxic material spaces, for geographers of colour. I use the term “toxic” deliberately. I recognize that the word is a loaded one. Toxicity is often referred to as the degree to which a substance can destroy an organism. In geography, toxicity has sustaining, long-term implications not only for the lives of scholars of colour, but it also impacts the scholarship on race and difference.
- Learn more about the Critical Geography Conference
- 3:30 to 5:00 p.m.: Refreshments are offered in 319 Walker Building at 3:30 p.m.; the lecture begins in 112 Walker Building at 4:00 p.m.
- Watch the webcast on Mediasite
Cultivating the connections between people and their environment
Geography graduate student Megan Baumann has been spending the last few summers in Nicaragua learning from farmers how they manage their land and crops. As the recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, she hopes to continue her research in this area.
Sea-level rise, not stronger storm surge, will cause future NYC flooding
Rising sea levels caused by a warming climate threaten greater future storm damage to New York City, but the paths of stronger future storms may shift offshore, changing the coastal risk for the city, according to a team of climate scientists.
PUBLISHED RECENTLY/PRESENTLY
Against the Evils of Democracy: Fighting Forced Disappearance and Neoliberal Terror in Mexico
By Melissa W. Wright
In Annals of the American Association of Geographers
Access http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1365584
On 26 September 2014, Mexican police forces in Iguala, Guerrero, attacked and abducted four dozen students known as normalistas (student teachers); some were killed on the spot and the rest were never seen again. Within and beyond Mexico, rights activists immediately raised the alarm that the normalistas had joined the country’s growing population of “the disappeared,” now numbering more than 28,000 over the last decade. In this article, I draw from a growing scholarship within and beyond critical geography that explores forced disappearance as a set of governing practices that shed insight into contemporary democracies and into struggles for constructing more just worlds. Specifically, I explore how an activist representation of Mexico’s normalistas as “missing students” opens up new political possibilities and spatial strategies for fighting state terror and expanding the Mexican public within a repressive neoliberal and global order. I argue that this activism brings to life a counterpublic as protestors declare that if disappearance is “compatible” with democracy, as it appears to be within Mexico, then disappeared subjects demand new spaces of political action. They demand a countertopography where the disappeared citizens of Mexico make their voices heard. Activists demonstrate such connections as they compose countertopographies for counterpublics across the Americas landscape of mass graves, prisons, and draconian political economies, mostly constructed in the name of democracy and on behalf of securing citizens. Understanding how Mexico’s activists confront the intransigent problems of state terror, spanning from dictatorships to democracies, offers vital insights for struggles against policies for detaining and disappearing peoples there and elsewhere in these neoliberal times.
State-level changes in US racial and ethnic diversity, 1980 to 2015: A universal trend?
By Barrett A. Lee, Michael J.R. Martin, Stephen A. Matthews, Chad R. Farrell
In Demographic Research
Access DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2017.37.33
BACKGROUND: Few studies have examined long-term changes in ethnoracial diversity for US states despite the potential social, economic, and political ramifications of such changes at the state level.
OBJECTIVE: We describe shifts in diversity magnitude and structure from 1980 through 2015 to determine if states are following a universal upward path.
METHODS: Decennial census data for 1980‒2010 and American Community Survey data for 2015 are used to compute entropy index (E) and Simpson index (S) measures of diversity magnitude based on five panethnic populations. A typology characterizes the racial/ethnic structure of states.
RESULTS: While initial diversity level and subsequent pace of change vary widely, every state has increased in diversity magnitude since 1980. A dramatic decline in the number of predominantly white states has been accompanied by the rise of states with multigroup structures that include Hispanics. These diverse states are concentrated along the coasts and across the southern tier of the country. Differences in panethnic population growth (especially rapid Hispanic and Asian growth coupled with white stability) drive the