Events

Before You Are Here, and other critical cartographic interventions

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 17:19:17 +0000

Before You Are Here, and other critical cartographic interventions Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/21/2024 - 11:19

Dr. Clancy Wilcott
Assistant Professor
University of California, Berkeley

Abstract:

This talk discusses a series of critical cartographic interventions undertaken in collaboration between local Indigenous, activist and community groups, and studio.geo?, a cartographic research and teaching studio based at UC Berkeley. It centers on Before You Are Here, one of a series of ongoing collaborative research projects making maps with the Sogorea Te�� Land Trust (STLT) an Indigenous, Urban, Women-Led organization seeking to rematriate the land in East Bay, California. This series of works reimagines cartography, a historically colonial tool of territorialization, for telling stories of Indigeneity, sovereignty and multiplicity in Sogorea Te��s view of the Ohlone Bay Area. Together, we asked: what would it mean to decolonise at the level of the fundamentals of cartography itself and produce a map that depicts a cosmography, rather than a cartography, a living world rather than abstracted data, a map that wrenches open notions of universality and standardization to represent the landscape of the Bay as a series of seasonal space-times through which communities of people live and move, a space uncomputable rather than a fixed fact: an ��Indigenous depth of place�� (Pierce and Louis, 2007)?

Speaker Bio:

Clancy Wilmott (PhD) is Assistant Professor of Critical Cartography, Geovisualization and Design in the Department of Geography and the Berkeley Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on intricacies of power inherent in spatial representations, including mapping, cartography and GIS from an anti-colonial perspective.

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Indigenous geographies, law, and the Piikani Water rights case

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 17:16:43 +0000

Indigenous geographies, law, and the Piikani Water rights case Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/14/2024 - 11:16

Dr. Michael Fabris
Blackfoot Scholar
Assistant Professor
University of British Columbia

Abstract:

In this presentation, I analyze the Piikani Nation��s attempts to halt the construction of the Oldman River Dam, as this struggle highlights the challenges Indigenous communities can face in attempting to assert our own forms of jurisdiction within the confines of Canadian law. Completed in 1991, the Dam faced multiple forms of opposition by Piikani members, including lawsuits, interventions within the Federal Environmental Review Process, and an attempt by community activists to divert the river around an existing irrigation weir. For this presentation, I focus on the Piikani water rights case, wherein the Piikani Nation attempted to creatively draw from the US Winters Doctrine as a means to establish a legal claim to the Oldman River rooted in treaty rights.

This presentation draws from my current research on Piikani/Blackfoot water relationships, which seeks to answer: how are Indigenous forms of jurisdiction enacted within and beyond reserve boundaries? And how do they articulate with Canadian legal systems, such as the reserve and band council systems? To answer these questions, I draw from both critical political economy and Indigenous legal scholarship, as I argue that in struggles against the capitalist reterritorialization of Indigenous places, it is through the assertions of competing legal jurisdictions that these struggles tend to find their most profound expression. Here, I draw from, and extend, the Marxian concept of articulation, suggesting this concept might be a generative reframing ��legal pluralism�� frameworks that are often used by scholars to examine how Indigenous legal orders interact with settler law.

Bio:

Michael Fabris (he/they) is a Blackfoot scholar and Assistant Professor in the UBC Department of Geography. His current research focuses on Piikani challenges to the construction of the Oldman River Dam, Piikani water rights, and articulations between Indigenous and settler forms of law.

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Geography Hosted its First Dumpling Making Party

Anonymous — Fri, 10 May 2024 17:02:55 +0000

Geography Hosted its First Dumpling Making Party Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/10/2024 - 11:02

Xiaoling Chen

On February 9, 2024, the Department of Geography held a Dumpling Making Party to celebrate two cultural events: the Chinese Spring Festival (�� ch��nji��) and Tibetan New Year (Losar). Both cultures follow their own calendars for festivals and holidays. This year, these two holidays coincided with February 10 marking the first day of their respective new years. Geography faculty, staff, and students, along with their families and friends, participated in the party.

We were getting ready to make dumplings.

We were having fun!

And it was the first time that many of us made dumplings��

Many thanks to our fellows and friends for their help with the party, including bringing their steamers, wrapping the red envelopes, chopping vegetables, setting up the table, and cooking and serving the dumplings. Special thanks to Hauqingjia (Palchengyal) from the Department of Religious Studies; Aleksander Berg, Drolma Gadou, Annika Hirmke, Shruthi Jagadeesh, Alaric Akhil Kothapally, Michele Lissoni, Taneesha Mohan, Briana Prado, Nic Tarasewicz, Neda Shaban and Gabriella Subia Smith from the Geography department.

Special thanks also to Karen Weingarten, Gabriela Sales, and Brandon Brown for putting together the lovely, festive d��cor at the Guggenheim Building, and to Sean Dunn for coordinating the food purchase.

After the party, participants were gifted a red envelope (�� h��ngb��o) containing one brand-new Chinese one-dollar bill (Ԫ yu��n, approximately $0.14 USD). This bill is known as ��ѹ��Ǯ y��su��qi��n,�� literally meaning money to suppress a demon named ��Su��.�� During the Chinese Spring Festival, it is a tradition to gift red envelops to friends and family. According to the Chinese legend, Su�� terrorized children while they slept on Spring Festival Eve. The red envelope is believed to dispel this demon, symbolizing good wishes and prosperity for the new year ahead. Karen kindly added a lucky node (ͬ�Ľ� t��ngx��nji��) to each envelope to double up the good luck and prosperity people brought to their homes.

This event was part of a departmental effort, spearheaded by department Chair Jennifer Fluri, to recognize diverse groups and cultures on our ��Ƶ campus, promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Losar Tashi Delek to our Tibetan friends, and �� (X��nni��n Ku��il��) to our Chinese communities

Organizer and editor

Xiaoling Chen, Research Assistant and Ph.D. Candidate in Geography

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Geography PhD Theses Presentations

Anonymous — Fri, 26 Apr 2019 16:30:34 +0000

Geography PhD Theses Presentations Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/26/2019 - 10:30

April 26 is the last colloquium of the semester. It features three different graduating PhD students doing short presentations of their theses.

Spaces of Diaspora Policy
by Aaron Malone

This paper examines the transnational / translocal landscapes of migrant organizing and state diaspora policies. Examining early diaspora engagement practices, Smith and Guarnizo (1998) debated transnationalism from above and from below. With diaspora policies rapidly spreading, I examine what kinds of spaces are being created and how this transnationalism from above interacts with grassroots and informal patterns from below. I build from the critical development literature, which argues that participatory programs create ��invited spaces�� that mostly reinforce the status quo, in contrast to the rarer autonomous spaces of radical challenge or grassroots alternatives. Focusing on Mexico��s famous diaspora policy, the 3x1 Program, I go a step further to argue that the institutionalized interactions between the state, migrant organizations, and migrants have created a landscape of autonomous, invited, and ��simulated�� spaces �C the final category recognizing that the financial resources made available through the diaspora program have motivated attempts to fabricate and falsify trans-local migrant organizations. These ��phantom�� or simulated migrant organizations further complicate the transnational landscape, raising important questions about participation, agency, and the dynamics between states and migrant organizations in the era of diaspora policy.

Land grabbing at the legal crux: Forced displacement and land restitution in Colombia
by Max Counter

Colombia��s armed conflict has entailed industrial-scale land theft, foreshadowing the Inter-American Court of Human Rights historic 2005 judicial designation of ��land grabbing�� as a human rights violation. ��Land grabbing��, as the violent dispossession of rural, afro-descendent and indigenous populations�� land for agro-industrial and mining use, has served as a central heuristic for understanding Colombia��s armed conflict. Against this background, and focused on Colombia��s 2011 ��Victims�� and Land Restitution Law��,this paper looks ��beyond�� land-grabbing in two facets. First, it examines land restitution as a means of undoing violent patterns of land grabbing. Secondly, it questions how violent patterns of displacement might be legally rectified without presupposing that those who currently own dispossessed land necessarily obtained property through land grabbing processes. Examining land restitution in Colombia��s Magdalena Medio, I detail the legal measures used to prosecute legacies of land grabbing, as well as the controversy arising when those powerful legal measures are trained upon relatively small, ��good faith�� owners of once-dispossessed land. This paper approaches land restitution as an important means of undoing violent patterns of land concentration, yet cautions against presupposing that all patterns of violent displacement can be understood through a land-grabbing analytic. Land may be dispossessed using overt, coercive violence or, following critical scholarship from Diana Ojeda and others, through subtle forms of ��everyday dispossession�� (despojo cotidiano). How land restitution programs detect and manage these distinctions bears upon post-conflict legal land regimes�� precarious capacity to either ameliorate, or potentially exacerbate, violent legacies of forced displacement.

Uneven State Territorialization: Governance, Inequality, and Survivance in Xinjiang, China
by Sarah Tynen

Ideological and material state power result in the experience of uneven state power that affects people��s lives, especially at the scale of the body, household, market, and neighborhood. State power is both repressive and uneven, as well as ideological and material, in working at the level of the neighborhood and everyday life. The strikingly visible aspects of Chinese state power in Xinjiang overlook the invisible and nefarious aspects of the everyday violence of the nation-state. I use long-term ethnographic fieldwork to study some of the more invisible aspects of state power at the scale of the body, home, and market, such as the community (shequ) bureaucracy and development discourses. In drawing on observations of tight state control, I ask the question: How does a government rule with coercion or consent, and how do people respond? In exploring this question, I provide a examples from Xinjiang to show how state building and dispossession occurs in China and the effects that this has on everyday life for ethnic minority and majority groups. Specifically, I look at the effects of state power, especially how the multiplicity and complexity of state power is experienced when it comes to people��s daily tasks. I examine how individuals create social space in heavily regulated and securitized state space. State control permeates people��s lives in disruptive ways, which shows the everyday violence of the cultural politics of the nation-state. Meanwhile, Uyghur cultural performances at scales of the body and household reflect affiliation with the Muslim world that disrupt the national Chinese imaginary and the false assumption of territorial control as an all-encompassing static container.

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The Implementation and Effectiveness of GIS in Education

Anonymous — Fri, 31 Aug 2018 16:48:14 +0000

The Implementation and Effectiveness of GIS in Education Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 08/31/2018 - 10:48

How is Geographic Information Systems (GIS) taught in formal and informal educational institutions? How should it be taught? Due to the advent of web GIS, the open data movement, citizen science, mobile field apps, maps as a storytelling medium, and other forces, spatial thinking through geotechnologies is being increasingly valued in geography, business, health, and other disciplines in primary, secondary, university, museums, libraries, and lifelong learning organizations.

Join geographer and ��Ƶ alum Joseph Kerski as we explore research and development of GIS in education and how you can take advantage of these developments in your own career pathway.

Joseph J. Kerski, Ph.D., GISP
Education Manager, ESRI

Hosted by Colleen Reid

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Geography Department Alumni Event

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 18:38:58 +0000

Geography Department Alumni Event Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/07/2017 - 12:38

Rediscover and Reconnect with ��Ƶ Boulder Geography

Come back to Boulder during Homecoming 2017 to celebrate and reconnect with your friends from ��Ƶ! In addition to the reunion tailgate on Saturday October 28, which you can register for here, we are also holding a special event to feature and celebrate the work of the Geography department on Friday Oct 27, 5:00 - 8:00 pm in IBS 155 (Institute of Behavioral Science - map).

Dr. Waleed Abdalati, Professor of Geography at ��Ƶ Boulder, alumnus of the department (PhD 1996) and former Chief Scientist at NASA will be giving a lecture on ��Earth from space.�� In addition to a reception to reconnect with current faculty, students, and other alumni, a number of current graduate students will also giving exciting IGNITE talks about their research.

We are required by university policy to have a guest list for this event. Registration is now closed. If you already registered, we will see you tonight!

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Dr. Mark Serreze: Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 06:00:00 +0000

Dr. Mark Serreze: Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/01/2017 - 00:00

Mark Serreze

As recently as the 1980s, the Arctic was largely the same Arctic that had enchanted humankind for centuries. But over the next decade, scientists began to notice changes. There were hints that the floating sea-ice cover at summer��s end was receding, accompanied by shifts in ocean circulation.

Air temperatures over some parts of the Arctic were distinctly rising, although other areas were cooling, attended by puzzling changes in weather patterns. Permafrost showed signs of warming. Although it had long been recognized that the human imprint on climate would likely appear first in the Arctic, much of what was happening had the look of a natural climate cycle. Still, the changes kept coming. Through a largely self-organizing process, scientists from around the world began to find the answers. There were remarkable discoveries, periods of confusion, and controversy. Through their efforts, by the second decade of the 21st century, the picture had cleared. We were well on our way toward a warmer and profoundly different North, essentially free of summer sea ice, with effects on climate and human systems potentially spanning the globe.

Hosted by Suzanne Anderson. See a video of the talk.

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Events

Before You Are Here, and other critical cartographic interventions

Abstract:

Speaker Bio:

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Indigenous geographies, law, and the Piikani Water rights case

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Geography Hosted its First Dumpling Making Party

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Geography PhD Theses Presentations

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The Implementation and Effectiveness of GIS in Education

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Geography Department Alumni Event

Rediscover and Reconnect with ��������Ƶ Boulder Geography

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Dr. Mark Serreze: Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North

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Rediscover and Reconnect with ��Ƶ Boulder Geography