IMAGE OF THE WEEK
“Nothing says ‘spring’ more than a sink full of wild spring greens (here: garlic mustard, wild onion and wild garlic),” said Bronwen Powell who shared this image. “I use garlic mustard in spanakopita (half and half with spinach or other leafy vegetables), I think it makes the taste and texture better. Traditionally spanakopita would have been made with mixed greens, not just spinach. I also eat garlic mustard with a poached egg in the morning: sauté an onion in olive oil, add garlic mustard, salt, pepper and lots of cumin and maybe a spoonful of water. You can mix it up by adding a (peeled) tomato, or turn it into shakshouka by adding half a jar of tomato sauce and poaching the eggs directly in the pan with the mix. Garlic mustard is an invasive plant, it’s literally everywhere, so there is no need to worry about sustainable harvesting. More info here: https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/united-states/indiana/stories-in-indiana/garlic-mustard/
GOOD NEWS
Emily Rosenman received an IEE seed grant for the project, “Energy retrofit policy and programs in low-income housing markets: Implications for energy equity in Cleveland, Ohio.” Her co-PI is Esther Obonyo, in the College of Engineering.
Alexandra Lister won first place in the Undergraduate Student Affinity Group Poster Competition at AAG. The poster, “Rattlesnake Safety on the Black Forest Trail” was based on her final project in GEOG 260 last semester.
April 13 at 6:30 p.m. EDT, Centre Region COG will hold a virtual forum on “Understanding and Preparing for Climate Impacts in the Centre Region.” Visit this link for more information and to register for the forum.
April 14, 2021, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences Celebration of Undergraduate Engagement (CUE) Student presentations and talks will take place throughout the day. This PDF has the CUE Agenda and Zoom Links. Jamie Peeler is a session host.
- Michael Hermann (Alumnus and founder of Purple Lizard Maps) is giving a plenary talk entitled “The Power of Maps in Storytelling.” The plenary talk is 12:30—1:30 p.m. EDT.
- Harman Singh (Geography undergraduate) is presenting a poster, “Examining the Complex Nature of Flash Flooding through a Mixed Method Approach: A Case from Kerala, India.” The poster presentation is 2:30–2:45 p.m. EDT.
- Hannah Perrelli (Geography undergraduate) is presenting a poster, “Understanding the Power Dynamics and Spatial Patterns of Water Insecurity in the Navajo Nation.” The poster presentation is 2:45–3 p.m. EDT.
April 14, 2021, 6 p. m. EDT, Joshua Inwood will give a talk about “Geographies of white supremacy and settler colonialism” at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee meeting of the BLMxBLM monthly discussion group. Visit this link for more information and to join the Zoom session.
April 22, 2021, The Esri-MUG is holding a one-day virtual meeting. Visit this link to register for this meeting.
COFFEE HOUR
No Coffee Hour this week. Visit our Coffee Hour channel to see previous talks you missed. And plan to attend the UROC Showcase on Friday, April 23, 2021 at 4 p.m. EDT.
NEWS
Activism and Academia Series: Bridging the gap between theory and praxis
Graduate students in the Department of Geography (GSDoGs) and Supporting Women in Geography (SWIG) welcome students, faculty, and community organizers to this virtual series on Tuesdays at noon. It is open to the public and registration is required. This series will feature local and national work at the intersection of activism and scholarship for the purpose of enlightening the audience on how to use their expertise to contribute to a more just and equitable world.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
Titling as a Contested Process: Conditional Land Rights and Subaltern Citizenship in South India
Jonnalagadda, I., Stock, R. and Misquitta, K.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13002
Drawing on multi‐sited fieldwork and discourse analysis of government orders, we investigate land‐titling programmes that distribute marginal public land to the poor in both urban and rural South India. We suggest understanding this type of distribution as a process of creating a subaltern category of land ownership to facilitate governance of lands and people entangled in de facto land tenures. Although these titling initiatives have been largely ignored or dismissed as failures in the existing literature, we argue that they have had significant socio‐political effects. First, we argue that, despite the attempt to create a differentiated property regime, titling engenders a complex juridico‐legal terrain where the bounds of ‘subaltern citizenship’ are contested and negotiated. Second, we show that titling is better understood as a process that creates new social relations and new expectations of the normative relationship between state and citizen. Finally, we suggest that the practices and discourses of the land bureaucracy are a window into the production of spatial relations based on pressures from above and below. In sum, we show how a history of iterative titling has resulted in the entanglement of struggles over possession, personhood and citizenship for marginalized groups in the region.
Settler Rural Imaginaries of MichFest: Connecting Settler Legacies and Cis Fear
Jacklyn Weier
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1948
Thinking through scholarship at the intersections of anarcha-feminism, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy, this paper uses the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MichFest) as a case study to examine how settler rural imaginaries are mobilized to reify settler and cis hierarchies. The two imaginaries of interest – “safety in the woods” and “Nature is [cis] female” – rely on settler legacies: the first is derived from the emptiness created by settler state violence and Indigenous displacement, and the second is a reproduction of settler sexuality. To understand how these imaginaries surfaced at MichFest, I analyze online media created around the time of MichFest’s closing. Given the blame of MichFest’s closing was often placed on the issue of trans-exclusion, blog posts and opinion pieces around this time serve as a small sample of the trans-exclusionary rhetoric found at MichFest that reproduced these imaginaries. Most of the texts address concerns about trans-inclusion leading to sexual assault, creating an implicit connection between women’s fears and cis fears. The discourse around this time reproduced the wilderness of MichFest as a cis women’s landscape, constructing the land as a cis woman. In using these two imaginaries, women at MichFest are producing a cis women’s landscape that relies on the exclusion of both Indigenous and trans people, reproducing settler and cis dominance.