Coffee hour features UROC | Holdsworth’s new book | Alumnus profiled in Science

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Taylors on horseback in Acadia

For the 2017 season, Alan Taylor (and his horse Rico) were fourth overall for the 25 mile distance in Competitive Trail Riding for the Northeastern Region (Maine to Virginia). The photo shows Alan and Rico (left) and Kristin and Leo in Acadia National Park, Maine.

GOOD NEWS

The Department of Geography launched a new website on March 20, 2018. The URL will be the same as before: www.geog.psu.edu, however any links to pages within the old site will no longer work. Check any links you currently have to our website, and contact geography@psu.edu if you are having trouble linking to the pages or content you seek.

  • Incoming faculty member, Emily Rosenman, won the best dissertation award from the Urban Geography Speciality Group this year.
  • Danielle Oprean, post-doc in ChoroPhronesis, has accepted a position at the University of Missouri in the School of Information and Learning Technologies. She will begin her tenure-track faculty position starting August 2018.
  • Jonathan Nelson passed his PhD proposal defense (on March 13).
  • Aparna Parikh has a chapter titled “Gendered household expectations: Neoliberal policies, graveyard shifts, and women’s responsibilities in Mumbai, India” in the recently published book, Modernity, Space, and Gender.
  • Megan Baumann and Eden Kinkaid are this year’s recipients of the Nancy Brown Community Service Award.
  • Clio Andris won the the 2017-2018 Emerging Scholar Award from the Regional Development and Planning Specialty Group of AAG.
  • Justine Blanford was selected as a member of the inaugural cohort for the TRELIS project, Training and Retaining Leaders in STEM-Geospatial Sciences

COFFEE HOUR

Coffee Hour: Spring 2018 UROC talks

The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Connection (UROC) offers research and professional development opportunities in the Department of Geography. Students who participated in UROC during spring semester 2018 will present short talks on their research and experiences in the program.

Speakers and their presentation titles:

  • Brit Ickes: A Look at Tolima, Columbia’s Waterways Effect on Sustainable Agriculture
  • Clara Miller: India’s Beef Ban: Scientific Expertise, Beef Detection Kits, and Differential Citizenship
  • Stephanie Keyaka: Between Tolerance and Acceptance: Sexuality and Development in the Philippines
  • Lauren Hile: Analyzing Media Coverage: Refugees in a Nontraditional Resettlement Destination
  • Hope Bodenschatz: Digital Timeline of Agricultural Extension in Uganda
  • Joseph Grosso and Ivy Wang: The Neighborhood Connectivity Survey
  • Harman Singh: Struggles of an Indian Farmer
  • Brittany Waltemate: Thematic Mapping of Sri Lanka
  • Love Popli: Three Challenges Facing Indian Farmers

Time and location:

  • 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.
  • Coffee Hour To Go Webcast

NEWS

From Science
Meet Vaclav Smil, the man who has quietly shaped how the world thinks about energy

Alumnus Vaclav Smil (’69g) is profiled
As a teenager in the 1950s, Vaclav Smil spent a lot of time chopping wood. He lived with his family in a remote town in what was then Czechoslovakia, nestled in the mountainous Bohemian Forest. On walks he could see the Hohenbogen, a high ridge in neighboring West Germany; less visible was the minefield designed to prevent Czechs from escaping across the border. Then it was back home, splitting logs every 4 hours to stoke the three stoves in his home, one downstairs and two up. Thunk. With each stroke his body, fueled by goulash and grain, helped free the sun’s energy, transiently captured in the logs. Thunk. It was repetitive and tough work. Thunk. It was clear to Smil that this was hardly an efficient way to live.

From The Guardian
Counter-mapping: cartography that lets the powerless speak

Sara is a 32-year-old mother of four from Honduras. After leaving her children in the care of relatives, she travelled across three state borders on her way to the US, where she hoped to find work and send money home to her family. She was kidnapped in Mexico and held captive for three months, and was finally released when her family paid a ransom of $190.

Her story is not uncommon. The UN estimates that there are 258 million migrants in the world. In Mexico alone, 1,600 migrants are thought to be kidnapped every month. What is unusual is that Sara’s story has been documented in a recent academic paper that includes a map of her journey that she herself drew.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Architectures of Hurry—Mobilities, Cities and Modernity

Mackintosh, P. G., Dennis, R., & Holdsworth, D. W. (Eds.). (2018). Routledge.
‘Hurry’ is an intrinsic component of modernity. It exists not only in tandem with modern constructions of mobility, speed, rhythm, and time-space compression, but also with infrastructures, technologies, practices, and emotions associated with the experience of the ‘mobilizing modern’. ‘Hurry’ is not simply speed. It may result in congestion, slowing-down or inaction in the face of over-stimulus. Speeding-up is often competitive: faster traffic on better roads made it harder for pedestrians to cross, or for horse-drawn vehicles and cyclists to share the carriageway with motorised vehicles. Focussing on the cultural and material manifestations of ‘hurry’, the book’s contributors analyse the complexities, tensions and contradictions inherent in the impulse to higher rates of circulation in modernizing cities.

The collection includes but also goes beyond accounts of new forms of mobility (bicycles, buses, underground trains) and infrastructure (street layouts and surfaces, business exchanges, and hotels) to show how modernity’s ‘architectures of hurry’ have been experienced, represented, and practised since the mid-nineteenth century. Ten case studies explore different expressions of ‘hurry’ across cities and urban regions in Asia, Europe, and North and South America, while substantial introductory and concluding chapters situate ‘hurry’ in the wider context of modernity and mobility studies and reflect on the future of ‘hurry’ in an ever-accelerating world.

This diverse collection will be relevant to researchers, scholars and practitioners in the fields of planning, cultural and historical geography, urban history and urban sociology.

Citizens as Indispensable Sensors During Disasters

Guido Cervone and Carolynne Hultquist
https://populationenvironmentresearch.org/cyberseminars/10516
The release of the seminal work People and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science in 1998 by the National Research Council marked an important milestone in the study of interactions and changes between the Earth and people [7]. The book was based on over 20 years of work with satellite data, primarily Landsat, and multiple observations that characterized human activities and their interaction with the environment. Since the publication, technological advances and population dynamics provided new challenges and opportunities.

Over the 20 years since then, our ability to observe the Earth and our environment has undergone tremendous advances by using multiple high resolution remote sensing instruments and dense networks of ground sensors to improve our collection of data. These observations are often used to initialize or validate numerical simulations, to reconstruct past events, and predict future outcomes at high temporal and spatial resolutions

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