Fellowships

Caroline Chen, Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

Research: Dancing in the Streets in Contemporary Beijing: Improvised Uses of Space by Niu Yangge Fan-Dancers within the Urban system

Research: Edible schoolyards (projects that teach students the benefits of eating local food through a series of lesson in the classroom, cafeteria and school garden

Research: Projecting changing spaces: management and development of World Heritage cities—a comparative study of Guanajuato, Morelia, and Oaxaca, Mexico

Sara Smith, Department of Geography and Regional Development, University of Arizona

Research: Embodied Histories: Women, Religion and Family Decisions in Leh, Ladakh, India

Erika Wise, Department of Geography and Regional Development, University of Arizona

Research: Multi-Scale Investigation of a Unique Hydroclimatic Transition Zone in the Western U.S.A.

Research: The use of maps and symbols in the first responder community during emergencies

Research: Relationship between vegetation distribution, local environmental conditions, and fire in the Sub-arctic Forest-Tundra Ecotone

Research: Made in Brazil, consumed in Japan: A look into the consumption patterns of Japanese-Brazilian immigrants

My name is Mamata Kumari Akella and I am honored to have been chosen as one of this year’s recipients of the Evelyn Pruitt Minority Fellowship. I am currently a second year Master’s student in the Department of Geography at The Pennsylvania State University. Prior to attending Penn State, I completed my undergraduate degree in Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Cartography has always fascinated me and I knew this was the avenue I wanted to pursue in graduate school.

My Master’s research is focused on map symbology for emergency responders. I am exploring how human factors research and testing methods can be used by cartographers to improve the design, effectiveness and comprehension of pictographic symbol sets. In 2004, the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Homeland Security Working Group (HSWG) developed a set of pictographic symbols for use by the emergency management and first responder communities. In 2006, the symbol set became an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard. I will examine the comprehension level of the proposed FGDC HSWG Emergency and Hazard Management Mapping Standard – Point Symbology using the ANSI recommended open-ended testing method. This testing method is typically used in human factors research to test the comprehension of common day hazard warning signs and symbols placed on consumer products. Applying the open-ended testing method to emergency map symbology will be an interesting application because both emergency map symbols and common day hazard signs and symbols need to be interpreted quickly, often times under pressure, by the end user.

Cartographic principles aid us in the design process, but there is no required comprehension testing method that has been developed for the usability of the symbols that we design and place on our maps for use by the general public. As a result, misinterpretation of symbols that appear on maps is likely to happen more often than we realize. In terms of map use in a crisis situation, map elements have to be easily understood and interpreted at a glance. There have been many studies conducted on how map design and/or human cognitive processes affect the reading and comprehension of maps, but few studies have approached the subject of the design and usability of pictographic map symbols.

There is little understanding of how first responders actually use maps and symbols while engaging in response activities. There is also little understanding of whether or not pictographic symbols are indeed the best choice for this user community. Conducting open-ended testing will offer concrete answers to these questions, provide practical design solutions as well as contribute to cartography literature on symbol design, map use and testing methods.

Fall semester has been very productive in terms of my research. In October I went to the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) meeting in St. Louis, Missouri and presented a poster on my research. It was a great experience to meet other cartographers, share my research ideas and get some feedback. In October I also defended my thesis proposal and this December I will begin conducting open-ended testing with fire fighters. I will also continue testing into Spring semester. Recently, the FGDC HSWG symbology subgroup decided to reconvene and make improvements to the standard. I have been in contact with two members of the subgroup and they are interested in considering both the testing method and my results as ways to improve their symbol standard.

I am a fourth year PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. My decision to return to graduate school was sparked by a desire to connect geographically focused academic inquiry with on the ground action through teaching and participatory research. I am committed to producing work that is methodologically rigorous and theoretically relevant, while at the same time engaging research questions with direct social change implications. I would like to take the opportunity of this interim report to sincerely thank the Society of Woman Geographers for its support in my pursuit of these goals.

My academic interests have been shaped by a commitment to social and economic justice and by my experiences living and working on California’s Central Coast, first in the nonprofit sector and later on a unionized organic farm. Here, vast agricultural landscapes and a vibrant sustainable agriculture community belie the inequities and exploitation faced by the immigrant workers whose labor fuels the region’s highly productive agro-food system. With these contradictions in mind, I decided to focus my academic studies on developing a better understanding of the dynamics underpinning ‘local’ agricultural production and tracing its connections to the ‘global economy’. In particular I am interested in the movements of agricultural commodities, people, and production systems across considerable geographical distances and the possibilities for improving incomes and working conditions for farm laborers under these circumstances.

These interests shaped a research trajectory which led me to focus on the role of certification and labeling programs in promoting ‘socially responsible’ agriculture, primarily through third party monitoring of labor practices. I situate this work at the intersection of critical studies on agricultural restructuring, governance, and labor and social movement organizing. Pre-dissertation research focused on the possibilities and limits of social certification and labeling as a strategy for governing production relations in California agriculture. Out of this research I have written two articles for publication in academic journals, one in press and another that has been accepted pending revision. In addition I presented analysis from my work at the 2007 AAG conference in San Francisco.

My dissertation project extends these lines of inquiry into the international arena, focusing on the fair trade system. Because my project examines regulatory systems and commercial networks that operate across considerable socio-spatial distances, I am developing a research program that necessarily engages multiple geographical scales and units of analysis. Accordingly, I will conduct interviews with certification actors at different locations in the fair trade network, from NGO representatives and fair trade activists, to commercial buyers, to producers and workers in Ecuador’s fair trade banana industry. Despite a growing body of research on fair trade, studies have not systematically considered how the system operates across different production systems and the majority of research has focused on small-scale independent producers. Through a study comparing the effects of fair trade certification on independent producer cooperatives with the effects of fair labor certification in plantation agriculture, I hope to address this gap in the current fair trade literature.

The Society of Woman Geographers’ fellowship has allowed me to take the fall semester off from teaching to concentrate on developing my dissertation prospectus, initiating fieldwork, and preparing two articles for publication. In November I attended a series of meetings focused on the establishment of a domestic fair trade program in the US, where I engaged in participatory research and established contacts for future research. In addition, the NSWG fellowship will enable a research trip to Ecuador during the spring semester. In April I will present a paper based on my research about domestic fair trade at the AAG conference in Boston.

My name is Caroline Chen and I am a Ph.D. student in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley. I hold a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts in the Practice of Art (Sculpture) and German Studies from UC Berkeley.

My research focuses on ways in which people use designed spaces in improvised or unexpected ways, with emphasis on the implications of such unintended use for landscape architects and planners. My dissertation, tentatively titled The Danceable City: Improvised Uses of Space by Niu Yangge Fan-Dancers within Beijing’s Urban System, examines unintended consequences of Beijing’s modernization for the everyday practices of Chinese female niu-yangge fan-dancers. My proposed research seeks to accomplish three tasks: (1). To map shifting dance locations within interstitial urban space by female niu yangge fan-dancing groups in Beijing in the past twenty years; (2). To determine what spatial constraints and opportunities these groups have encountered as Beijing urban planners “green” the city for the Olympics; and (3). To discover adaptations that female niu yangge fan-dancers have adopted in response to changes in urban form in order to continue their activities.

My research began in 2004 when I received a US Fulbright fellowship to go to China, just after I graduated from the Harvard School of Design. I stayed on in China to continue my research after the grant expired and only returned to the US to start my PhD program in 2006. This past summer in 2007, I returned to China to continue my fieldwork. The summer started off with a conference in southern China: I presented my work-to-date in a conference paper titled, Dancing in the Streets in Contemporary Beijing: Improvised Uses and Long-life Practices within the Urban System to the Pacific Rim Community Design Network. After the conference, I flew north to Beijing and recruited from Peking University, eight female undergraduate urban planning students who volunteered to help me collect data in exchange for learning research methods. Meeting weekly, we called ourselves the “Dance City Research Team” and descended upon the streets of Beijing at daybreak and after dinner to interview Chinese niu-yangge fan-dancers to interview them about their dancing practice. Dancing as a way to keep fit, to socialize with their friends and to lift their spirits, these women dance on a daily basis. With ages ranging from 58 to 84 years old, they are one segment of the Beijing population whose needs few people appear to consider when making plans for the new Beijing. We asked the dancers how modernizing changes in the city affect their dancing routine and recorded their stories. We eventually mapped the women’s migration across the city in search of suitable dancing spaces and uncovered a path that lead from underneath freeway overpasses, to parking lots, to sidewalks after road widening, construction of new housing or creation of new green spaces displaced their old dancing spaces. As a team, the Chinese students and I tested out questionnaires, revised awkward questions, and surveyed dancers all over the city; at the end of summer, we collected a total of 437 interviews. I am now in the process of translating and coding their responses.

Also while in Beijing this summer, I organized a three-person panel of China researchers for the Association of Asian Studies conference in Atlanta, GA in April, 2008. Our panel is titled: “Building, Greening and Beautifying Beijing: Beyond the Olympic Image.” I will be chairing this panel and my own paper is tentatively titled: “Dancing Beijing:” an Olympic Competition.

After returning to Berkeley in the fall of 2007, I continued with the second year of my coursework. The highlight, however, was being awarded the chance to program and organize the UC Berkeley Landscape Architecture Environmental Planning Department’s Colloquium “Everyday Spaces and the Bodies that Move Through Them,” a weekly, lecture series for scholars to share their work at the College of Environmental Design. I chose to focus this interdisciplinary lecture and discussion series on a similar theme as my dissertation: how people with agency use everyday spaces in unintended ways. By inviting scholars who study cultural and social landscapes from China, to Egypt, to Latin America, suburban America and San Francisco, I sought to open the floor for discussions of how people from different cultures have varying patterns and practices for using everyday space. I also tried to address this topic across scales: from the large scale effects of global warming on waterfront suburban houses to the human scale design of the chair that we sit down on everyday.

Lastly, this November, I had the great pleasure of meeting the Bay Area Chapter of the Society of Women Geographers in person after accepting co-chair Joanna Biggar’s invitation to attend Dianne Aigaki’s lecture on her botanical adventures in Tibet. At the gathering, I met many incredible women doing really interesting work. Nonna Cheatham sent me an Earthwatch publication as a follow-up to our conversation over cheese! It has been a great, memorable and productive year, filled with interactions with many inspiring people, places and experiences; I thank the Society of Women Geographers for making it even better.

I am currently a graduate student in Geography and Women’s Studies at Penn State University, where I am working on a dissertation project that combines my longstanding research interests in food systems and critical pedagogy. My past research and publications include work on rural identity and anarchist politics in Plainfield, Vermont, farm markets and landscape change in southern New Jersey, and post-military land use on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. I have also been involved in organizing conferences and workshops on the topic of alternative agriculture and food.

Since July of 2007, while supported by the Society of Women Geographers Fellowship Program, I have been conducting fieldwork as part of my dissertation research project towards a PhD in Geography at Penn State University. This research involves an in-depth study of two “Edible Schoolyards” (school garden and cooking programs), one in Summerville, Nova Scotia, and the other in Berkeley, California. The study examines the ability of these programs to motivate children to make behavioral changes in their eating habits, looking particularly at the ways in which motivation can be impacted by cultural, economic, and racial difference. The research focuses on how garden and cooking programs work materially, and differentially, to bring forth a variety of visceral reactions and sensations that can have an impact on the choices that children make about food.

I spent July through September conducting interviews with a variety of people associated with a school garden and cooking program in Summerville, Nova Scotia. This included teachers and staff at the school, dietitians and nutritionists, former students, parents, food activists, and community leaders. During this time, I also volunteered at the school, supervising children in the garden and kitchen. In addition, I conducted a number of data-generating activities with students in their classrooms. These activities included focus groups with a number of the 6^th grade students. In addition, I created a document and presentation that explained my research to school children and visitors.

In October, I left Nova Scotia and traveled to Berkeley, California where my second research site/school is located. From October through December, I conducted interviews with teachers and staff at the school, parents and teachers, and also food activists in the community. Beyond interviews, I was similarly involved in volunteer, participant observation opportunities at the school site. This included working to set up and co-lead cooking classes and garden classes. I also conducted a number of data-generating activities with students at the school, including peer-led interviews and letter writing. In addition, I developed and presented to the school a short presentation on my research.

During this 5-month period, I have also conducted a fair amount of textual research, including internet-based research of local papers, websites, and blog sites that deal with issues of food justice, community and school gardens, and other food-related activities. This research serves as background data, which will help me to situate the particular school sites within a broader framework of food activism and politics.

December concludes the fieldwork portion of my research. In January of 2008, my fieldwork towards my dissertation will be complete, and I will move on to the data processing and analysis stage of my dissertation. This includes the transcription of interview data, and the coding of interview transcripts and participant observation journal notes. I will present on some preliminary findings of this research in the beginning of February. By March of 2008, I hope to begin the write up stage of my dissertation. In April of 2008, I will present on more of the findings of my research at the Association of American Geographers annual conference in Boston, MA.

I am a Masters student in the Department of Geography at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University, interested in the impact of global warming on wildfire ignition patterns in forested areas. Specifically, my thesis research focuses on the interactions between wildfire ignition and the environmental controls of lightning occurrence, weather, and vegetation type in the sub-arctic Forest-Tundra of the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada. I became interested in the sub-arctic Forest-Tundra as an undergraduate student at York University, in Toronto, Canada, and for my undergraduate thesis completed a dendrochronological study on the ring width sensitivity of white spruce and its relationship with latitude and tree age along the Anderson River.

My interest in northern forest research was sparked by a longstanding fascination with physical geography and forests and in general. Originally from Trinidad, I grew up in a valley vegetated by dry tropical forest, and spent most of my childhood hiking through the valley in our backyard. However, the fascination with northern forests and fires was generated by my family’s emigration to Canada in the late 1990’s and my subsequent immersion into an undergraduate degree which focused on the dynamics of Canada’s vast forested areas.

The sub-arctic Forest–Tundra is a transitional ecotone between the boreal forest and the arctic tundra, and because of this it serves as a marker of global warming impact. My continued interest in the ecotone was informed by its potential use as a global warming gauge. Northern forests are large carbon sinks, and there has been much discussion in the literature about how the effects of an increase in temperature, changes in precipitation patterns, and melting of the permafrost layer will impact wildfire frequency, in northern forests. If we assume that wildfires will increase in frequency, then logically, the conditions necessary for ignition also need to improve to support this increase in occurrence. My thesis posits the question of how the spatial patterns of lightning, weather, and vegetation type influence the occurrence of fires in the NWT. This is of critical import, because if we understand the current relative influence of each of these environmental controls on wildfire occurrence, future research will be able to focus on how changes in these controls over time, have, and will influence wildfire occurrence in the sub-arctic Forest–Tundra.

Last fall I obtained and commenced analysis of continuous weather, locational lighting and wildfire data from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (ENR) in the NWT for the 2005 to 2007 summer fire seasons. The scientists at the ENR have been instrumental in the acquisition these data. With the generous support of SWG, I will travel to the NWT in the summer of 2008 to ground truth vegetation types classified using satellite imagery. This semester I will TA for the upper level Advanced Geographic Information Science class while completing most of my thesis writing. After completing my Masters degree, I hope to return to Syracuse University to pursue my Ph.D., so that I can continue examining wildfire ignition dynamics.

“Protecting changing spaces: A comparative study of three Mexican cities with UNESCO World Heritage districts, Guanajuato, Morelia, and Oaxaca”

First, I would like to thank the Society of Woman Geographers for providing me with the financial backing needed to undertake my research in Mexico. I am currently a PhD candidate in Syracuse University’s geography department. I was born and grew up the youngest child of ex-pat American parents in Tübingen, Germany. As long as I can remember, I have always been a geographer of sorts – I started traveling on my own in Europe as a teenager. In college, I studied political science and Spanish – my college did not offer geography. I spent a semester abroad in Chile and upon graduation, moved to Korea to work as an English teacher. When I returned to graduate school in international relations at Syracuse, I discovered geography, and finally found a disciplinary home. My geographical interests include cities, tourism, urban landscapes, and tourism cartography.

My dissertation research focuses on the symbolic and material importance of UNESCO World Heritage designation for three Mexican cities whose historic centers share this distinction: Guanajuato, Morelia, and Oaxaca. Mexico’s historic city centers are characterized by colonial architecture and their centrality to local power structures, both civil and religious. Thus, despite their changing uses and the movement of such power structures to peripheral areas, the symbolic meaning of these spaces remains salient for locals, yet their look and structure has also been reconfigured to fit the needs of cultural tourists, a market niche Mexico increasingly seeks to capture. Tourism, after remittances and petroleum, is Mexico’s largest source of income. Traditionally, national tourism strategies emphasized Mexico’s beaches, but the need to diversify Mexico’s tourism products has led to the increased promotion of colonial cities as well as archaeological ruins. Mexico ratified the World Heritage Convention in 1984 and by 1987, Oaxaca, Puebla, and Mexico City’s historic districts had been added to the list, in addition to archaeological zone of Monte Alban, near Oaxaca. Guanajuato followed in 1988, and Morelia in 1991. But, what exactly does “World Heritage” designation mean for these sites? Their architectural richness, first and foremost, is considered to be of “universal value” though also, their political and economic importance in the context of the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries, respectively.

My research seeks to examine what UNESCO World Heritage designation means for historic districts, their preservation, and contemporary uses and promotion. I arrived in Guanajuato in August and the majority of my research to date has taken place there. Major activities include consultation of the State Archives and Municipal Archives, which provided back issues of local newspapers as well as other archival material, as well as interviews. Cartographic products for tourism purposes were available and not surprisingly, they emphasize the historic center and not the city’s mines, which provided the economic basis for the city’s development in the seventeenth century. Review of the newspaper records have yielded more than four hundred articles that report on preservation efforts, public works intervention, and tourism-related activities in Guanajuato. I also collected current newspaper articles, as well as solicited data from various government offices, when available.

Furthermore, I spoke with officials in various governmental sectors, including urban development, tourism, cultural affairs, and heritage preservation. I also interviewed architects that have been involved in the preservation schemes. I have obtained the current planning tools, which date back to 1994, as well as the regulations and norms that apply to the historic center. The Institute for Anthropology and History (INAH) published a catalog of inscribed buildings in 2001 and small plaques on the buildings designate them as cataloged. Land use changes in the historic center, however, have not been systematically recorded, for instance, it is unknown how land uses really breakdown in the historic center, i.e., how commercial uses compare with residential uses, though the current municipal government is considering the creation of an archive that will begin documenting this information in 2008. Land use changes are lamented and casually referred to as widespread, yet the lack of data makes it difficult to ascertain how much more commercialized the historic center really has become. One indicator, however, of more emphasis on a tourist economy is that since 1998, the number of hotels and hostels in Guanajuato doubled from 55 to 110. Another effect of the lack of land use data is that the municipal government does not know exactly how many of the buildings are part of the built environment’s heritage are in disrepair, uninhabited, or in danger of collapse. The urban development office estimates that between seventy and seventy-five buildings are in this state. Furthermore, Guanajuato does not have one office dedicated to its historic center; only a sub-section of the “Protection and Vigilance” department within urban development conducts daily visits to the historic center. Minimally, Guanajuato’s historic center is now mainly a landscape valued for economic and particularly tourism-oriented purposes, yet the lack of territorial information makes it an endangered and vulnerable resource, and considerably alters the nature of production of urban space due to World Heritage designation.

I am currently in the second year of my Master's program at Kent State University. I would like to consider myself a human geographer which both an interest in cultural and economic geography. My current research interests are consumption, ethnicity, and immigration with a regional focus on Japan. When most people think of Japan, they think of it being one homogenous nation. Through my research, I wish to show how Japan is becoming more heterogeneous on various scales.

My thesis will be examining the consumption places of Brazilian immigrants in Japan as they pertain to the creation of various subjectivities. Currently, there are about 286,557 Brazilians in Japan. The main driving force behind Japan accepting a large influx of Brazilian immigrants has to do with how the Japanese government constructs the economic and cultural subjectivities as Brazilians. The reason that these Brazilians are able to immigrate to Japan is because they are of Japanese blood, thus they are considered returnees as opposed to immigrants. Because a large number of Brazilians work in factories, many Japanese create a subjectivity of Brazilians which is bound to the factories; in other words, many believe that the Brazilians are only capable of doing factory work.

The Japanese government, media, and business sector are not the sole actors in creating economic subjectivities for the Brazilians. The Brazilians have created economic subjectivities for themselves as well, many which have been created to resist the subjectivity created by Japanese society. While many Brazilians do work in the factory, others have decided to create their own businesses. My research wishes to focus on how these economic subjectivities contribute to the creation of Japanese-Brazilian places and spaces and how they have multiple meanings in both the Japanese and Brazilian communities.

My interest in this subject came from my study abroad experience in Japan. I studied abroad at Hiroshima University for one year and I noticed that there were a large number immigrants in the small town that I lived in. One reason for this was because Hiroshima University had a significant international student body. In addition, there were many immigrants from Peru and Brazil who worked in the factories nearby as well. When I started my Master's degree, I was alarmed that there was virtually nothing written about the Japanese-Brazilian immigrants from a geographic perspective. Through my research, I hope to fill this gap.

Because of the Pruitt Fellowship, I was able to conduct my fieldwork in Japan over the summer for my thesis. I spent eight weeks in Nagoya, which is located in Aichi prefecture. Not only did I do fieldwork around Aichi prefecture, but I also traveled to nearby prefectures as well. I can truly say that this fieldwork has changed me. Not only did I learn a lot about the Brazilian community in Japan, but I was able to make some friendships as well. I also learned that research is not a static, one-dimensional process, but rather dynamic; researchers should let the process of doing research change them a new understanding of their research and allow them to explore areas that were not previously explored. I initially wanted to focus on the consumption patterns of the Japanese-Brazilians, but after interviewing a few of the business owners, I decided to also focus my research on the role that these businesses play in creating multiple subjectivities.

This fall, I have completed a significant portion of my thesis, and I hope to finish by March. I do not only wish to disseminate my work in the academic community but through the general public as well. I hope to do this by not only participating in the AAG annual meeting, but also through publishing my work, and making my work accessible through the Internet, and giving presentations on my topic to the general public. Since many of my respondents wanted to see the final product of my research, I hope I can have my work published in Portuguese as well.

I am a PhD Candidate at the University of Arizona, and have just arrived in Leh, Ladakh, India, to begin my dissertation research. I am a feminist political geographer and my dissertation research reflects those concerns – it is focused on the geopolitics of reproduction as experienced by women in Leh. In Leh, religious identity has become politicized and personal decisions such as whom to marry and how many children to have are now part of political discussions. In my MA research, I explored the ways that this has played out in the decline of intermarriage between Buddhists and Muslims (the main religions prevalent in Ladakh). I found that when I asked questions about politics, people told stories about marriage, social occasions and children. This inspired my dissertation research, which is focused around the question of how women negotiate intimate decision-making when their decisions are part of political narratives. Given political narratives about population competition, are women’s choices affected? If so, how?

I intend this research to contribute to scholarship in the following ways: a) provide an explicitly feminist take on geopolitical theory, by making the focus of the research the very people who are often left out of conventional geopolitical theory; b) make geopolitics less abstract by examining the everyday processes through which state formation and international relations play out; and c) draw political geographers’ attention to demography – the study of population is very political, but political geographers have so far not addressed demographic questions.

1. Geopolitical dynamics of the district: What are the intersections between local political identities, international geopolitical narratives (e.g. the India/Pakistan conflict), and community geographies of interaction?

2. Geopolitical dynamics of town and neighborhood: How are changing geographies of interaction – the meaning and use of public spaces and households – understood? What influences do these spatial dynamics have on family, identity and self-definition?

3. Geopolitical dynamics of the body. How do emergent geopolitical narratives and concurrent identities relate to marriage patterns, family decision-making, reproductive strategies and fertility decisions? To what degree are families of Buddhists and Muslims related, and, if so, to an increasing or decreasing degree?

This summer I began my research with a pilot study that involved testing my survey questions, making contacts with local women’s organizations and the local reproductive health providers, doing preliminary interviews, and planning how to accomplish the community-based ethnographies. During the fall in Tucson, I reviewed the data I had collected thus far and made arrangements for my longer research stay. My experience over the summer was very encouraging, and the preliminary results are exciting. Although my sample size was small, the pilot of my survey questions proved to be very intriguing: while prevalent political narratives in Leh suggest that Muslim women have more children, the survey results suggest that both Buddhist and Muslim women share the “quality over quantity” discourse in common, that is, they express a desire for small families with the perception that they will be better able to care for two or three children. I also had very interesting interviews with reproductive health providers, who have a lot to say on these issues. My preliminary interviews revealed heightened tensions around family planning, as there are some who fear that women’s enthusiastic embrace of family planning, (especially sterilization), will lead to the decline of the Buddhist community.

The summer was heartening, because my initial fears that women would be reluctant to talk about personal matters were exaggerated. My personal ties to Ladakh have placed me in a position that has some advantages. My marriage to a Ladakhi and prior experience working with a women’s NGO in Leh have made me a somewhat familiar figure (women are often keen to comment on my own reproductive choices and relate their stories to mine – e.g. having a love marriage, waiting to have children). At the same time, being a foreigner also has advantages as people have a sense of my neutrality or want to make sure I understand their side of the story. I am currently settling in, refining my survey and setting up participatory ethnographies.

The SWG Pruitt National Dissertation Fellowship has greatly aided my dissertation work through the funding of equipment, software, and stipend money for the data analysis I will conduct when I return to the U.S. in the fall.

I am a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, where my primary academic focus is paleoclimatology, or the reconstruction of past environmental conditions. Central to my studies is also understanding how geographical work may be applied to real-life situations, which is why I have chosen to focus my dissertation work on reconstructing past drought conditions and examining how that data may be used for the purposes of water supply management and drought education projects.

My dissertation is entitled: ‘A multi-proxy investigation of paleo-drought in the Uinta Mountains, Utah with applications in water resource management’. The Uinta Mountains stretch East-West for about 200 kilometers in northern Utah and Colorado. Their importance for water resources in the western U.S. lies in the fact that this mountain range feeds the Green River, which is the principal tributary of the Colorado River, an invaluable and highly contested source of water in the West. My dissertation work consists of two basic parts: development of a circa 1,000-year record with annual precision of past droughts in the Uinta Mountains using dendrochronology or tree-ring analysis, and determination of periods of aridity in the Uinta Mountains over the last 13,000 years on timescales of decades, centuries, and Millennia using diatoms, which are highly-sensitive algae whose remains are preserved in lake sediments. Once these records are completed, they can be used to better understand natural water supply variability in the region, assess a reasonable ‘worst-case’ drought scenario, test the fidelity of models predicting future droughts under conditions of global warming, make water supply/forest/agriculture management decisions, and educate the general public, children in particular, about the causes and effects of drought. I am working closely on this project with Dr. Glen M. MacDonald in the Department of Geography at UCLA (my academic advisor, whose interests include the use of tree-rings and fossil pollen to reconstruct past environments) and also with Dr. Katrina A. Moser in the Department of Geography at the University of Western Ontario (who works with lake sediments to infer past environmental changes).

Since this summer, I have completed a significant portion of my tree-ring work. Although past droughts in the Uinta Mountains appear to have been similar in severity to those experienced in living memory (e.g., the ‘Dust Bowl’, the 1977 drought, and the recent, ongoing ‘Turn of the Century’ drought), they were much longer in duration, sometimes lasting many decades. In addition, ecologically sensitive trees at tree-line appear to be affected by summer drought in the Uintas. This Fall I also continued sampling a lake sediment core for diatom analysis, attended two conferences, was a teaching assistant and guest course lecturer, and began the initial process of starting non-profit organizations in the states of Utah and California aimed at disseminating drought education tools to elementary schools.

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography and the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. My research involves the causes and impacts of climate variability and change. My dissertation aims to increase our understanding of how climate variability in the western United States impacts water resources, which are increasingly threatened due to population growth pressures, natural climate variability, and the prospect of future climate change.

My receipt of the Pruitt National Fellowship has made a tremendous contribution to my ability to progress in my research. Over the last six months, I have been able to concentrate on my research, spending my time in the field and in the laboratory. In July and August 2007, I conducted the main thrust of my dissertation field work. I completed a pilot study in summer 2006, but the majority of my sample collection occurred this past summer. Using an increment borer, which is a non-destructive method to remove cores from trees, I was able to collect approximately 500 tree-ring cores from Pinus flexilis (Limber pine), Pinus Ponderosa (Ponderosa Pine), and Pseudotsuga menziesii (Douglas fir) trees over eight sites in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho.

Since returning to Tucson at the end of August, I have spent the large majority of my time in the laboratory, working with the tree-ring samples I collected. I first mounted and sanded all of the cores. I then began cross-dating my samples and building chronologies for each of the field sites. This important process allows dates to be assigned to each core with certainty, and must be completed before further analyses take place. Thus far, I have completely dated one site and partially dated four other sites. Following the cross-dating procedure, the tree-ring cores must be measured for future climatic analyses. This is a very time-intensive procedure. Due to the Pruitt Fellowship, I was able to hire an undergraduate student to work for me part-time measuring these samples. This has been incredibly valuable to me, freeing me to concentrate on the dating aspect of the lab work.

My research is also advancing on other fronts. I have been meeting individually with each of my committee members to decide on the papers that will make up my dissertation. I have received very good advice from them and look forward to my future analyses and writing. I have also entered into a collaboration with a non-profit educational institution in Wyoming, which will culminate in a workshop with natural resource managers in the Jackson area, likely in summer 2008.

In October 2007, I had a paper accepted for publication in the International Journal of Wildland Fire. This paper is one of two papers I am tying up that deal with air quality, the topic of my Master’s thesis. The other is currently in the revision stage at the International Journal of Climatology. In addition, I submitted an article for inclusion in the Encyclopedia of Global Warming and Climate Change. I attended the 70th Annual Meeting of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers in Long Beach, CA in October. I presented a paper and was awarded the Harry and Shirley Bailey Award for the Outstanding Paper in Physical Geography for this presentation. Outside of my dissertation research, I participated as a judge in an undergraduate poster competition for the University of Arizona’s Student Showcase event. I also attended a workshop held at Arizona State University, titled Conference on Climate Change & the Role of Higher Education in Arizona: Preparing our Students for a Changing World, a topic that is important to me.

In the upcoming six months, I will continue working with my samples, and I will then be able to start analyzing the resulting data. I will be attending three more conferences over the next six months: the American Geophysical Union, the Association of American Geographers, and the Mountain Climate Research conferences. I will also be teaching an introductory physical geography course in summer 2008. Once again, I would like to thank the Society of Women Geographers for your role in helping me achieve the progress noted in this report.

Society of Women Geographers Interim Report – Begum Basdas (UCLA, Geography)

I am currently a PhD Candidate at University of California Los Angeles, Department of Geography in the final stages of writing up my dissertation. I will be receiving my doctorate degree in June 2007. I define myself as a critical feminist geographer with a focus on urban and cultural geographies. My research and teaching focus on transnational feminist geographies of gender and sexuality in Western and non-Western scholarship. My dissertation draws on contemporary cultural geographies to scrutinize Western theories of the body, city, and sexuality in Istanbul and it urges a more dynamic presentation of urban geographies of sexuality and gender through examining the everyday practices of women in Istanbul. In a political milieu where women from sexual, religious, and ethnic minority groups are systematically oppressed and excluded, my dissertation research offers a radical, distinctive and progressive examination of geographies of difference. In teaching, I juxtapose western theories and practices with the studies of Muslim women in the Middle East and North Africa.

My dissertation, titled “Cosmopolitanism in Istanbul: everyday claims to bodies, sexualities and mobility in the city” examines the possibilities of cosmopolitan experiences in the public spaces of Istanbul-Turkey by focusing on women’s embodied, gendered, and sexualized differences in the city. Since the early 1980s, Istanbul has become a site of/for differences where ethnic, religious, gendered, sexualized, and other marginal groups variously articulate their identities and bodily claims to the city. In spite of a growing literature on these changing dynamics, women’s sexualities have rarely been a topic of focused study. I address this void by examining the geographies of sexual differences experienced and narrated by heterosexual and non-heterosexual women in Istanbul. Through women’s narratives of sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, gender discrimination, and lesbian invisibility I scrutinize cosmopolitan and marginal identity in Istanbul. My dissertation research adopts and develops feminist methodologies in geography. It has been radically shaped by the women I have worked with in the field. My ethnographic research triangulates participant observation, interviews, and focus groups with participatory and action-oriented techniques. My active participation in women’s organizations in Istanbul is my main access to field information. I work with women from different grassroots feminist organizations and NGOs in Istanbul. I particularly volunteered and worked as part of Amargi Women’s Cooperative and LambdaIstanbul LGBT Solidarity Association. I also participated in Istanbul’s Women Platform Against Violence, where women from different political parties, NGOs, and other feminist organizations come together in political action and ‘being on the streets’. While my ethnographic work supports organizing women to make their voices heard, my writing serves to better understand how women claim their sexual rights of urban citizenship in Istanbul’s public spaces.

Earlier this academic year, I was in Istanbul and continuing my active participation in LambdaIstanbul to establish meetings only for women within the association. During my visit, I was invited to give a talk in Istanbul Bogazici University Sociology Department. This was an extraordinary opportunity for me not only because I received my BA degree from this department, but also because many leading scholars in Istanbul on gender, sexuality, activism, and urban studies are in this department. They all attended my talk and provided me with invaluable comments to improve my research. Presenting and sharing my work with scholars and activists in Turkey and, thus, partially shifting my audience is also a part of my academic objective. I am currently preparing for conference presentations and a lecture, which are also sections in my dissertation. I will soon be presenting a paper in an interdisciplinary conference organized by Women Studies Department at UCLA. My paper and panel presentations at the coming AAG 2007 focus on activism and fieldwork in feminist research.

Zhihong Chen

Zhihong Chen, University of Oregon

Society of Woman Geographer Dissertation Fellowship Interim Report

Life creates its own wonder, unpredictable for us as it might be. A person who both grew up and attended college in the vicissitude of Beijing - the traditionally called “zhongyuan” (Middle Plain) region in China, I never thought I would become interested in China’s remote geographical margins. China’s frontier regions, vast as they were, rarely had anything to do with my world back in the early 1990s. It would appear enormously surprising to me that someday I would be working on a dissertation titled “Going to the Frontier: Chinese Intellectuals’ Reconceptualization of Chinese Geography and Peoples During the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937).” But looking back, I figured out that there were probably some early signs in my life that already foreshadowed my intellectual path later. When the well-fed state officials came down to my village, several times a year, requesting the poor peasants to submit a significant portion of their harvests from crop fields as taxes, and monitoring population reproduction in each family, that was the time when I realized firsthand, amidst frequent helpless sighs of the villagers, the inescapability for modern nation-state subjects from an ever intruding state surveillance and power. Looking into the boundless crop lands, I kept wondering whether there was any place which was not so legible for the state and therefore, state hegemony could not sufficiently permeate.

My search for differences in human existence evolved into a strong interest in geography and history after the mid-1990s, when an occasional trip to northwestern China transformed my understanding of “China” geographically and ethnically. During this trip, I found myself encountering different ways of thinking and living among various minority peoples: Uygur, Dongxiang, Tibetans, and the Hui (Chinese Muslims). The diverse geographical imaginations and spatial structures of different peoples’ worlds greatly intrigued me. My image of “China” greatly changed following that trip, and it has been complicated further by my formal study of nationalism and ethnicity in China during my doctoral training in History Department at the University of Oregon. I have found that the image of China as a unity was historically constructed across the fissures and fractures of distinct identities, through processes of social contestation and the forming of new hybrid identities. There is no one single “China,” instead, many “Chinas” have existed and continue to exist in people’s memories, imaginations, and fancies.

Therefore, my choice of the multidisciplinary dissertation topic on frontier research, geography, and nationalism during the Nanjing decade in China is a result of both intellectual inspiration and personal experience. I am especially interested in the fate of geography as an academic discipline in China and its relationship with modern Chinese nation-building and cultural politics. Much research has been done on the political functions of geography and the close connections among colonialism, nationalism, and the disciplinary formations in many Western countries. In China field, such research is still largely lacking and insufficient. My dissertation hopes to fill that gap.

From June to December 2006, I have made significant progresses in my dissertation research and writing, thanks to the support of the Evelyn L. Pruitt National Fellowship for Dissertation Research. Additional fieldwork was done and more primary sources were acquired. I have also finished the first draft of my last chapter, a 93-page paper focusing on the development of modern scientific geography and its connection to frontier affairs in China. With continuing funding in the next months, I will be able to finish Chapter Two and Three by the end of the funding period in August 2007.

Megan Dixon

University of Oregon

11 January 2007

Megan Dixon developed an interest in Russian culture during her college years. She received a doctorate in Russian language and literature in 1999, but felt the need to deepen her understanding of the post-Soviet period. Graduate study of urban and cultural geography has allowed her to pursue that goal. She is examining conceptions of St. Petersburg at several scales, tracing the conflict between ‘local’ and ‘global’ and debates over the idea of the city as a ‘place’ that have been brought on by increased economic and cultural globalization. Several visits to Leningrad/Petersburg since 1990 allowed her to observe growing contrasts to the Soviet era that prompted her research interests. Pruitt Fellowship funding supported her research trip to St. Petersburg from August to December of 2006.

As a lens for evaluating ‘native’ re-conceptions of the city, she is studying the experience of Chinese migrants in the city. After a warming of relations between China and Russia in 1990, Chinese began to reenter European Russia. Her interview subjects include current students, businessmen and restaurant owners, and employees of a large development consortium with plans to construct a 150-hectare district just outside the city.

Her concern is to examine more closely interactions between previous residents and noticeable migrants, such as Chinese. The fact of rapid urban development in Chinese cities makes the Chinese migrants ‘experts’ in the kinds of situations that Russian residents of St. Petersburg now face, and thus their views of the city can provide useful perspective. Meanwhile, Petersburgers remained largely isolated from global trends during the Soviet period, and a strong local culture resists the idea of Petersburg becoming a world city in the manner of Moscow. A main research question seeks to unravel the relationship between apparent nationalist prejudice against Chinese and anxiety about urban changes.

With this question in mind, Megan interviewed specialists in urban planning, architecture, and transportation in order to understand the objective physical environment perceived subjectively by residents. She interviewed both Russian and Chinese city residents about their daily routes to and from work in order to explore the commonalities and differences in perceptions. She specifically studied the Baltic Pearl, the planned new district southwest of the city, interviewing Russian and Chinese specialists at work on the project.

Her initial data indicate that Russians and Chinese as individuals have similar perceptions of many aspects of St. Petersburg: appreciation for its preserved historical center, frustration with transportation problems. Chinese residents do have a constricted experience of the city in present-day Russia, as nationalist activity against all foreign groups has increased (although one key informant stated that this is a recent phenomenon, not true in the late 80s and early 90s). As is typical of migration patterns, early arrivals in the city have completed some adaptation to local life and customs: a businessman in the city since 1993 speaks of maintaining his contacts “Russian-style.” By contrast, employees of the Baltic Pearl, who arrived en masse for a particular project, have friendly relations with the Russian employees inside their firm but seem to live and socialize separately from local culture.

During her stay in Russia, Megan was also able to make a trip to Moscow, where she met Russian colleagues in cultural geography and gained valuable perspective on St. Petersburg’s cultural development by observing trends in the capital. Megan will return to Russia for a follow-up trip in March 2007. On this visit she will conduct further interviews with Chinese and Russian city residents and do additional research at the Baltic Pearl development firm.

Rebecca Hernandez

My name is Rebecca R. Hernandez and I am a graduate student in the department of Biology at California State University, Fullerton. I am interested in processes responsible for global environmental change, in particular, biological plant invasions. Invasion by nonnative species is shifting the composition of coastal sage scrub (CSS) plant communities in southern California from native perennial shrubland to exotic annual grassland. Disturbance of the soil, and especially, biological soil crusts, is known to increase germination of exotic plants. These crusts, which are a fragile aggregation of cyanobacteria, fungi, green algae, lichen and moss, are found on the soil surface, and perform key ecosystem functions in arid and semi-arid environments, such as CSS. Because little is known of the composition of soil crusts in CSS, I will first identify the dominant organisms found in the soil crust assemblages. Using field and greenhouse experiments, I will then test the hypothesis that disturbance of biological soil crusts increases the germination of exotic plants in CSS. I expect that disturbance of soil crusts will increase germination densities and rates of exotic plants. Additionally, I expect higher densities and rates of germination of native plant species in intact soil. Results will assist land managers to better manage and preserve CSS communities by including biological soil crusts as a component of overall ecosystem health.

To date, I have established all field plots and collected preexisting germination and ancillary data. This semester, I collected both exotic and native seeds for the greenhouse experiment that will take place in February. I also collected post-disturbance germination data for all field plots for the month of December. I continued to work on my thesis dissertation by completing my abstract, prospectus, proposal, and poster.

In addition to completing my research goals this semester, I taught two laboratory sections of biology for non-majors and earned a 4.0 in my three courses. I was also awarded the Graduate Equity Fellowship by the CSUF College of Letters and Sciences. Next semester, I will continue to collect my post-disturbance germination data every 30 days and complete my greenhouse experiment.

My interest in global environmental change arose from my undergraduate education in geography at the University of California at Los Angeles. Since that time, I have had the opportunity to work with a NASA research scientist, be employed as a GIS analyst, study the ecology of the Hawaiian Islands, TA for a lower division biology class, and research an endangered species of southern California. Next semester, I will begin part-time work as a field biologist for an environmental consulting firm that will complement my thesis work.

After earning my Masters of Science in Biology, I would like to return to UCLA to earn my Ph.D. in Geography. As humans continue to influence global environmental and biological processes, system-level analysis is deficient without a fluency of geographic procedures and spatial contexts. I am so thankful for the Society of Women Geographers for investing in my education and giving me the opportunity to pursue my research interests.

As the countdown toward graduation begins, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Society for Women Geographers for the gracious Pruitt Fellowship that helped to fund my dissertation fieldwork. I am a human/cultural geographer with a focus on urban and social geography, qualitative and quantitative methods, and globalization, with a regional focus on Canada. My interest in Canada stemmed from my childhood in a small town in the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York, about 1.5 hours from the Canadian border between New York State and Quebec. I sought warmer climates for college, and attended Jacksonville University in Jacksonville, Florida, where I received a BS in History and a BA in Spanish in 2000. I went on to study Geography at Virginia Tech where I graduated with an MS in Geography in 2003 after completing my thesis on the Geography of Community Bands in Virginia. Having found my niche in academia, I went on to work towards a PhD in Geography at the University of Tennessee. There, I studied under Dr. Thomas Bell, a scholar whose work on music and popular culture I have long-admired. In addition to my academic pursuits, I love to travel and I enjoyed immensely my four summers of fieldwork in Canada, and Newfoundland in particular. I am also a semi-professional trumpet player. I conduct an adult, volunteer community concert band in Knoxville, and I play trumpet in a German band, a brass quintet, and other musical groups. Finally, I truly enjoy long distance running and am active in the Knoxville Track Club. In fact, I will run in the Boston Marathon this April, having qualified in a marathon earlier last year.

My dissertation research examines the impact of globalization on cultural policy in Canada using the Canadian Content regulations for radio. These regulations set minimum quotas for the amount of “Canadian” music broadcast on Canadian radio stations. I am interested in how this policy, the ways that music is accessed and exchanged, and the influence of American popular culture on Canadian national identity, played out at both national and local levels. At the local level, I did a case study of the influence of Canadian Content regulations in the St. John’s, Newfoundland radio market. Interviews with station personnel revealed that many radio stations in the market use local music, much of which contains very place-specific elements, to fulfill Canadian Content requirements. Station personnel also saw their role in the broadcasting of local music as a means of presenting Newfoundland culture and preserving the culture. Considering the importance of music in the ever-changing Newfoundland national identity, I conducted phenomenological interviews with radio listeners to understand the role that the radio broadcasts of music play in identity construction. Results showed that Newfoundland radio is very important for connecting Newfoundlanders living off the island to their home, and Newfoundlanders living at home to those living off the island. Technological innovations such as Internet radio aid tremendously in this connection. Other innovations, such as satellite radio, help ensure the presence of local content on terrestrial radio stations because station personnel felt that local content on the radio will protect their stations from competition by a seemingly placeless form of broadcasting. In short, my study showed that through the Canadian Content regulations, globalization, and technological innovation, Newfoundland radio broadcasts have become both local and global in their influence.

As I write this report, my advisor is reading a completed draft of my dissertation. My plans are to graduate with a PhD in Geography this May, and I am in the process of applying for tenure-track faculty positions to start in the Fall 2007. The Pruitt Fellowship was essential to the completion of my fieldwork and the timely completion of my PhD. I am excited to be part of such a strong, international organization.

Sandra Kerr

Sandra Kerr is in the Masters of Environmental Studies Program working on a degree in Urban Planning.

York University, Toronto, Ontario

January 2007

Maps may outline the many paths that one can take in the world. But who defines these maps, and what impacts do these lines, pathways, and patterns have human interaction? My curiosity in this area, combined with the desire to connect research to community action, has led to my current work in urban planning and geography.

Specifically, I am working with social statistics and other data to map patterns of crime and neighborhood characteristics. My Masters studies have continued to increase my knowledge and experience in the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to supplement policy-making, planning, and action. Using these tools, I am exploring the spatial distribution of gendered crime and various economic, social, and physical neighborhood attributes based on crime data, 2001 census data, and land-use data. I hope to identify patterns regarding the distribution of gendered crime within cities, considering the population and land uses of the city, to determine how access to socio-economic resources and amenities, population density, residential stability, and land-use affect the opportunity for crimes against women. In this investigation I strive to supplement information on crime prevention through urban planning, and contribute to the body of knowledge on planning neighborhoods that are safe for women.

My background ranges from grass-roots community service to development work at the federal government level, with a constant connection to academic research. These seemingly disparate roles and environments have shared a common thread: they have renewed my awareness of the voices and experiences of marginalized groups—which often prove to be the voices of women and minorities—and have sparked an interest in gender, race, and class in terms of spatial relationships. Marginalized groups are rarely among the decision-makers, experts, and researchers involved in decisions on issues with a geographic dimension (such as housing, distribution of services and allocation of funds) that affect lives on a daily basis. My academic and professional plan is both shaped by, and response to, some of the very same disparities that have possibly influenced the creation of the Pruitt Fellowship itself.

As I complete my final year in the Masters of Environmental Studies (Urban Planning) program at York University, I would like to thank the Society of Women Geographers Pruitt National Minority Fellowship Program for making this portion of my academic career possible. The Fellowship has facilitated the completion of relevant coursework in space and criminal justice, in addition to laying the foundation for a literature review and synthesis paper. I plan to attend and contribute to several conferences on the spatial aspects of crime, including an upcoming conference on Race, Class and Community Recovery in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Miri Lavi-Neeman

An Interim Report, January 1, 2007

Department of Geography, UC Berkeley

I would like to express again my deep appreciation at being selected for the Society of Woman Geographer award. In addition to the honor, thanks to the SWG award I was able to focus more exclusively on studying this semester. My fall semester has been the most productive and motivating since the beginning of my prospectus writing.

I was born and grew up in one of the most, contested, divided, but also fascinating spaces in the world, the city of Jerusalem, on the imaginary borderline between the eastern and the western parts of the city. In this charged context and given my mixed ethnic background, I was always aware, at some level, of the role geography and history play in shaping lives, producing differences, possibilities, and identities.

During my master’s studies in history and philosophy of education and my intensive work and research on environmental education reforms and on Israeli environmental justice NGOs, I have become particularly interested in the ways critical cultural geography might inform studies of environmental questions in Israel. I have been mainly concerned with the ways notions of place, identity, and space shape Israeli environmental thinking and with the ways environmental education has emerged and been conceived under the national-Zionist project.

With the completion of my degrees at Tel-Aviv University, in 2004, I have joined the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. Even though the subject of my proposed dissertation--the place of Zionist environmental education in the contested Israeli desert land—is intended to address “burning” questions for Israeli society, my methodological and theoretical approach is underrepresented among studies of Zionism. At Berkeley I found an intellectual community that employs a similar methodological and theoretical approach. My goal in coming to Berkeley was therefore, to conduct a study within the borders of the state of Israel yet informed and supported by international scholarship and perspective.

My proposed dissertation project focuses on the Israeli Negev desert--Israel’s last land reserve and, in this past decade, a region seething with constantly growing pressures in which all parties have stakes. My study looks at how, with the dismantling of the Zionist project, and the transition towards a neo-liberal economy, symbolic and material meanings of the southern Israeli desert are changing at the local levels, particularly within and by environmental education movements from marginalized southern “Development Towns.”

Ever since the declaration of the state of Israel, the desert has been the symbol, the hub, and the mecca of environmental educators. While most of these educators drew on ruralist Romantic trends of Zionism and were of German or Western European backgrounds, the residents of the desert development towns and Bedouin villages had little or no engagement at all in the Zionist/environmentalist experience. Moreover, the desert was traditionally considered the crux of continuing oppressions of these communities.

The new environmental education scene, I argue, employ innovative though contradicting notions of land, nation, place, and identity and presents challenges and possibilities for re-envisioning environmentalism and the future of the desert. My study explores critically the role of past and present Zionist environmental educators in current productions of the desert. I look at how environmental education, a mechanism central to sustaining the Zionist hegemony, has become a central terrain where multiple meanings and identities are contested, reworked, and rearticulated--and where Zionism is reinvented. I see these environmental educators as prominent meaning-makers whose influence might reach beyond their localities and bear new possibilities and challenges for regional social change.

In the current academic year, I am focusing on completing my oral examination and my dissertation prospectus—two milestones in my academic journey which will enable me to move forward with my field work. During the past fall semester, my main goal as part of preparing for my oral exam, was to create the theoretical framework in which to situate myself as a researcher. For this purpose I have defined three theoretical fields (“space place, and identity,” “notions of nature and nation,” and “gender and space”) on which I have been reading and writing extensively. I have also traveled to Israel during the winter break to discuss my ideas with Israeli scholars and communities with whom I will collaborate in the future. I summarized this intellectual journey in a paper for the AAG annual conference, which I will present in a session titled “Nationalism and the Environment.” I would not have been able to achieve all this without the support of the SWG fellowship.

I am a PhD. candidate in Geography at the Pennsylvania State University. During my doctoral studies, I have been funded through a research assistantship with the Human-Environment Regional Observatory (HERO) Network, where I worked to improve methodologies for rapidly assessing the capacity to adapt to climate change across multiple sites. More recently, the John A. Dutton e-Education Institute funded me as an online teaching assistant for the Penn State Certificate in GIS program. The SWG fellowship beginning in January 2007 will allow me to focus on my dissertation about the capacity of community drinking water systems to adapt to climate change.

As the climate changes, climate models suggest that Centre County, Pennsylvania will be exposed to more frequent floods and droughts in the future. Community water systems (CWS), which are drinking water distribution systems with at least 25 customers or 15 service connections, may experience additional stress due to these changes. However, 37 of the 40 active CWS in the county have fewer than 10,000 customers and are classified as medium, small, or very small systems. Such systems often invest most of their time in meeting routine operational requirements, leaving them with little time to consider future issues like regional development or regulatory changes. Therefore, considering climate change at all, let alone planning to adapt to more frequent floods and droughts, is an additional burden on CWS.

In the summer of 2006, I interviewed CWS officials from nine of the active systems in Centre County. Using semi-structured interviewing techniques and social network mapping, I identified the current factors that influence local CWS operation and may be important to these system’s capacities to adapt to climate change. I expected some of the factors that emerged; for example, CWS officials feel that the regulatory environment restricts their ability to act in response to stress or to take preventive actions by limiting funding and compliance options. Several systems that have been operated traditionally by community associations are adapting to their current economic situations by developing municipal authorities; this increases their eligibility for state and federal grants. Other factors important with the smaller systems were a surprise. In particular, some systems without paid staff are able to offset poor economic resources by building and maintaining good relationships with volunteers from their customer base.

The SWG fellowship will fund the completion of my field work in the Spring semester. My case studies will work with CWS officials and other community stakeholders to build scenarios of their CWS’s future capacities to adapt to climate change. I will begin by using the factors CWS officials discussed in the interviews to build a model of current CWS adaptive capacity in Centre County. Because these factors are interrelated and feed back to each other, CWS officials will complete an analytic network process (ANP) exercise to weight the factors as they apply to floods and droughts. Unlike other ranking exercises, pairwise comparisons in the ANP allow participants to prioritize the factors’ relative importance. The resulting factor weights will contribute to the factors’ placement in the adaptive capacity model. During meetings and focus groups, participants will discuss drivers of local change and identify a range of narrative storylines. To ensure that the results remain salient to the participants, they will incorporate both. Based on these storylines, I will use the adaptive capacity model to develop a scenario suite of CWS’s future capacities to adapt to climate change. By working with my study participants to adjust these scenarios, this methodology should support social learning about climate change and CWS management and eventually serve as useful tools for CWS officials.

Fernanda Santos received her Bachelor degree in Geography at Rio de Janeiro State University (Brazil) in spring 2004. During her undergraduate studies she joined the Soil-Landscape research group at that university, and obtained a federal internship from the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA).

She has been pursuing a MA degree in Physical Geography at Hunter College Department of Geography since fall 2005. Fernanda has been working on her thesis at the Earth and Environmental Sciences Laboratory under to supervision of Dr. Haydee Salmun. The thesis's topic is entitled "Quantifying the scales of the land surface heterogeneity", and the members of the Graduate Committee are Dr. Jochen Albrecht (Hunter College Dept. of Geography) and Dr. Andrea Molod (Massachusetts Institute of Tecnology, MIT).

In addition, Fernanda has been co-organizing the Department of Geography GeoSeminar Series together with the undergraduate student Daniel Milner and Dr. Haydee Salmun since spring 2006. She was the Society of Women Geographers Hunter College fellowship recipient on fall 2006.

This semester she is working as a Lab. instructor for Weather and Climate (PGEO 130), and plans to pursue a doctoral degree in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Fernanda has volunteered few times in 2005 at the international not-for-profit organization Dressing for Success, which seeks to advance low-income women's economic and social development and to encourage self-sufficiency through career development and employment retention.

SWG Pruitt National Dissertation and Minority Fellowships

Available for 2008-2009

The SWG Pruitt Fellowship Dissertation Application Guidelines