IMAGE OF THE WEEK
The map shows the current boundaries for Pennsylvania’s 18 congressional districts. Starting in the 2022 midterms, per the 2020 United States census, Pennsylvania will lose one congressional seat and have 17 districts. Penn State faculty Christopher Fowler and Lee Ann Banaszak have been named by Governor Tom Wolf to the newly formed Pennsylvania Redistricting Advisory Council to provide guidance to the governor when he reviews the forthcoming Pennsylvania redistricting plan.
GOOD NEWS
EMS faculty, staff, and students walk-in photoshoots will take place outside the main entrance to the Deike Building that faces Burrowes Road. Sessions will take less than five minutes. No appointment needed. If you have questions, contact David Kubarek. Sessions are scheduled for the following dates:
- Wednesday, Oct. 6: 2 –4 p.m.
- Thursday, Oct. 7: 11 a.m.–1 p.m.
Caitlin Flanagan passed her comprehensive exam.
Maureen Feinman, Don Fisher, and Melissa Wright received an award under Dean Kump’s Postdoctoral Collaboration Program for, “Decolonizing the 40th Parallel: A contextual co-curriculum for Geosciences field camp.”
The Belonging, Dignity and Justice (BDJ) committee (formerly the DEI committee) is organizing a “Campus Adventure” to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day on October 11. Visit this site for more details on how to participate.
Penn State GIS Day will be held virtually on Tuesday, Nov. 16. If you are interested in giving a lightening talk, contact Tara L. Anthony by October 6.
COFFEE HOUR
Junjun Yin on Spatial Networks: The synergy of computational geography and geospatial Big Data for uncovering geo-complexity in human-urban environment interactions
Understanding detailed spatial and temporal human activity patterns concerning how citizens interact with their surrounding urban environments is of great importance to urban planning and its applications. This presentation illustrates how we can utilize computational geography approaches and geospatial social media Big Data to model and uncover unique human activity patterns in navigating through the urban spaces. By utilizing complex network theory and methods, coupling with large-scale mobility data, people’s activities in interacting with the urban environments can be represented as spatial networks. Two case studies are introduced in this presentation.
- 4 p.m., Friday, Oct. 8, 2021
- 112 Walker Building
- Coffee Hour to Go on Zoom
NEWS
Schuckman named American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing executive
Karen Schuckman, associate teaching professor of geography and lead faculty for the certificate program in Remote Sensing and Earth Observation, was appointed as the executive director of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS), starting Aug. 1, 2021.
Two Penn State faculty members named to Gov. Wolf’s redistricting council
Lee Ann Banaszak, head of the Department of Political Science and professor of political science and women’s, gender and sexuality studies, and Christopher Fowler, associate professor of geography and director of the Peter R. Gould Center for Geography Education and Outreach, have been named by Governor Tom Wolf to the newly formed Pennsylvania Redistricting Advisory Council.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
“We Spray So We Can Live”: Agrochemical Kinship, Mystery Kidney Disease, and Struggles for Health in Dry Zone Sri Lanka
Nari Senanayake
Annals of the American Association of Geographers
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24694452.2021.1956295
In March 2015, Sri Lanka’s then-President Maithripala Sirisena launched the Toxic Free Nation Movement as a long-term solution to a mysterious form of kidney disease (CKDu) now endemic in the island’s dry zone. As part of this strategy, in 2016 the movement worked with farmers in north-central Sri Lanka to cultivate indigenous rice varieties without agrochemicals. Yet, within a year, 80 percent of farmers who experimented with indigenous and organic rice farming had switched back to some form of agrochemically intensive cultivation. In this article, I examine farmers’ narratives of why this happened, demonstrating how the movement’s conceptualization of agricultural harm often missed the forms of accounting most salient for residents themselves. Instead, through their testimonies, residents track how polyvalent relationships with agrarian toxicity mediate (1) vulnerabilities to simple reproduction squeezes, (2) reliance on grain fungibility, and (3) strong but bittersweet attachments to dry zone agrarian landscapes. As a consequence, I document how residents respatialize their knotted relationships to agrarian toxicity to include moments of what I call “agrichemical kinship.” I argue that this optic helps us grasp the ways in which agrochemicals simultaneously erode and enable modes of social reproduction against a backdrop of rural stagnation. Following feminist scholars of toxicity, this article not only reveals intimate, yet undertheorized, connections between the field of toxic geographies and the concept of social reproduction but also dashes hopes of any simple equation between banning agrichemical inputs and enacting health in the wake of CKDu.