IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Kale anyone? Claire Byrnes is a senior majoring in anthropology and geography and executive director of the student farm club. She and two other geography students work at the farm. Credit: Claire Byrnes.
GOOD NEWS
Norman Ornelas, Harman Singh and Shuyu Chang have accepted positions as graduate representatives for 2022. They will succeed Jacklyn Weir, Bradley Hinger, and Gillian Prater-Lee.
Lilly Zeitler passed her qualifying exam.
Chanel Lange-Maney passed her comprehensive exam.
Chris Fowler was interviewed by WHTM/ABC27 News about the Pennsylvania redistricting process.
NEWS
Geographers see EMS Student Council as a way to connect and give back
Two geography majors are serving as College of Earth and Mineral Sciences’ Undergraduate Student Council (StuCo) officers and as EMS ambassadors. Senior Hannah Perrelli is president and sophomore Emily Shiels is secretary.
Two geographers receive NSF fellowships to study climate change in icy regions
Two incoming graduate students in the Department of Geography were awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships (GRFPs) for 2021. Both want to improve climate change modeling; one in the Arctic, the other in the Antarctic.
Geography undergraduates find connection and context working at the Student Farm
Three undergraduate students in geography are active at the Dr. Keiko Miwa Ross Student Farm at Penn State. They each came to the farm for different reasons, but all perceive a strong connection between farming and geography.
First student to graduate from spatial data science master’s program
Every summer, there are reports of sharks lurking off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Karen Dedinsky, a graduate student at Penn State, was wondering if she could use publicly available data about the sharks to predict where they might show up. She took on that project, creating statistical models and geographic visualizations for the final course of her online master’s degree program.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
Reimagining geographies of public finance
August, M., Cohen, D., Danyluk, M., Kass, A., Ponder, C., & Rosenman, E.
Progress in Human Geography
https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325211054963
The study of public finance—the role of government in the economy—has faded in geography as attention to private finance has grown. Disrupting the tendency to fetishize private financial power, this article proposes an expanded conception of public finance that emphasizes its role in shaping geographies of inequality. We conceptualize the relationship between public and private finance as a dynamic interface characterized today by asymmetrical power relations, path-dependent policy solutions, the depoliticization of markets, and uneven distributional effects. A reimagined theory and praxis of public finance can contribute to building abolitionist futures, and geographers are well positioned to advance this project.
Infectious addictions: Geographies of colliding epidemics
King, B., & Rishworth, A.
Progress in Human Geography
https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325211052040
Medical geography and health geography have made significant contributions to studies of human health by addressing the spatial patterns of disease exposure, location of health care services, and place-specific processes producing health and wellbeing. Human geography and human-environment geography have also contributed with emerging attention to the body, uncertainty, and health and environment interactions. What remains understudied are the co-occurrence of multiple disease patterns, including the relationships between infectious disease and addiction. We review geographic research on infectious disease and addiction to advance a theoretical framework that emphasizes the centrality of complexity, uncertainty, difference, and care in shaping human health.