No Coffee Hour | From the Head | First-gen geog student

☘️ IMAGE OF THE WEEK

working in LEAPS lab

Erica Smithwick (center) and graduate students Jamie Peeler (left) and Susan Kotikot (right) analyzed soil nutrient concentrations from soils following wildfire in the Landscape Ecology at Penn State (LEAPS) Lab. See the related story, Trailblazers: Erica Smithwick Rethinks Fire in the Forest, in this issue.

☘️ GOOD NEWS

Chris Forest will deliver the March 23 EarthTalks seminar online. His presentation is titled “Embracing uncertainty in Earth system modeling to assess climate change risks” You can join via Zoom.

Joshua Inwood wrote an article for The Conversation titled, “Closing polling places is the 21st century’s version of a poll tax.”

Angela Rogers wrote an article for Training Industry, titled, “Diversity Training: You’re Doing It Wrong.”

Alumnus Jack Swab, currently at the University of Kentucky, was elected Student Councilor for AAG.

Internship opportunity: The Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, the official Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for the ten-county region including the City of Pittsburgh, is seeking interns (May-August) for various transportation planning projects including traffic counting, GIS, transport modeling, data collection, database development-data analysis and related activities. For more information, visit http://www.spcregion.org. Email response preferred. Send letter of interest and resume in confidence to hr@spcregion.org

Job opportunity: Cartographer job opportunity at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for recent graduates.

☘️ COFFEE HOUR

Coffee Hour talks cancelled

The Speakers Committee has postponed the planned Coffee Hour talks by Julie Reed and Debanuj Dasgupta and hopes to reschedule them for fall semester. The spring UROC talks are cancelled. The  Miller Lecture and book launch with Laurence Smith, scheduled for April 24has been cancelled.  UPDATED MARCH 20, 2020.

☘️ NEWS

From the Head: Spring Break note

Spring break took on an urgent feel as geographer’s national AAG conference in April was cancelled and EMS leaders gathered by Zoom from cabins and field sites to plan and ask questions after the University announced the shift to remote learning and working. Some of our trips were truncated, and others extended to stay with family. In either situation, conversations often focused on the many other events that were being cancelled. Since I was up in Canada, we pondered hockey being suspended and whether the border would close—I scooted home.

In the Department of Geography, we are shifting to Zoom meetings, asynchronous Canvas (learning management system) and email communications among our faculty, staff, grads, and undergrads. We are being proactive about what students can do from remote locations—given that some technologies don’t run on their laptops—and reworking due dates and modes of learning. Our adult professional students in online geospatial programs don’t have a change of mode, but do face changes in responsibilities as their own workplaces shift format. And some faculty, staff, and students have their own children at home with other schools being closed. Our town is very quiet, and we miss our colleagues.

Penn State has been good at communicating with us about staying off campus, changing to online teaching, Zooming for grad exams, cancelling events, staff working from home, lab safety, and many other topics. Our dean Lee Kump and the EMS associate and assistant deans are also giving us useful updates and strategies.

For those of you away, the crocuses are blooming in State College.

Staff are working from home

Department staff are working from home starting on Monday, March 16 until further notice. Contact information and areas of responsibility for all staff are on the Staff Directory webpage.

Cancellations and postponements

Geospatial intelligence helps emergency management teams make better maps

As Hurricane Dorian made landfall on Grand Bahama Island in 2019 and bushfires engulfed Australia in 2020, emergency teams were busy creating plans to best respond and provide relief to those affected by the disasters.

First-generation student pursues passion for geography

First-generation college student Sara Maholland is not afraid to take a leap into the unknown.

“I used to be afraid, but now I ask, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’, and usually it’s that someone says ‘no,’” she explains.

Trailblazers: Erica Smithwick Rethinks Fire in the Forest

Erica Smithwick is a fire ecologist. As the director of Penn State’s Ecology Institute, she hopes to protect forests and stave off the effects of climate change and insect infestation through controlled forest fires. “A lot of my work has been out west working on wildfire recovery,” she said, “particularly in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. I still have a graduate student, Jamie Peeler, who is continuing some of that work.”

☘️ RECENTLY PUBLISHED

The evolving borderland of energy geographies

Baka, J, Vaishnava, S.
Geography Compass
https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12493
Energy geographers have characterized energy as a borderland topic because of its ability to straddle and interconnect different geographic concepts and debates. In this review, we evaluate how the borderland of energy geographies has been emerging in recent years by analyzing scholarship on energy published in top geography journals and a leading energy studies journal, Energy Research & Social Science. In part 1 of our review, we evaluate how the borderland of energy geographies is evolving by mapping the geographic range of empirical studies, the processes and types of energy systems being researched and the key geographic concepts/theories engaged across the four main sub‐fields of geography. We find that energy geographies scholarship has primarily centered on the Global North, remains focused on the extractive and production phase of energy development and is evolving across and within three of the four sub‐fields of geography. Energy transitions, governance, justice, space, and landscape are key topics and concepts examined. Notable underrepresentations include a relative lack of energy geographies scholarship within physical geography, as well as limited studies that engage geographic concepts to study the transportation sector, unconventional energy development and the food‐energy‐water nexus. In part 2, we identify three broad research themes to expand the frontier of energy geographies: (a) geographies of energy knowledge production, particularly indigenous knowledge; (b) materializing energy, especially through engaging political‐industrial ecology; and (c) advancing geographic thought by critically assessing how studying energy advances/challenges/transforms core geographic concepts and debates. Collectively, our review demonstrates that energy geographies have established firm footing within and across geography. Deepening engagement with emerging trends elsewhere in geography and the social sciences will not only help to better conceptualize what a geographic perspective on energy means but will also help to make clearer sense of the rapid economic, social, environmental, and political transformations currently underway within the global energy system.

Comments are closed.


Skip to toolbar