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2007-2008 Geography Seminar Series Abstracts
Thinking the city through SARS: bodies, topologies, politics
The arrival of the SARS Coronavirus in Toronto in early 2003 prompted a public health crisis, with 213 confirmed cases and 44 deaths, and a crisis in the public health system, which was shown to have chronic problems. For urban studies scholars it also presented a dramatic challenge to how we conceive of cities and the bodies and relations that compose them. In this talk I explore the latter along three intersecting lines of inquiry: the forceful return of the 'nonhuman' to accounts of urban life; the growing emphasis on the unbounded and polyrhythmic nature of urban spaces; and the emergence of new forms of political reason that take the complex geographies of the 'more-than-human' city as their concern.
Wild Cultures: Feminist Perspectives on Animal Consciousness
This talk is part of a larger exploration of animal culture, communication and tool use as differential criteria in relation to discourses about, and evidence for, animal thinking, with a particular focus on whales and bats. In the area of animal studies, reimaginedsocial science theories offer promising possibilities, especially the naturecultureswork of ecological feminist Donna Harawayand the transspeciestheories of cultural animal geographers. Two ways of intervening critically and creatively in human-animal relationships are researched by: 1) Exploring human perspectives on animal mindfulness and tool use;and 2) Analyzingecholocation as a unique form of perceptual, sensory consciousness, shared by whales and bats, to understand what it might tell human beings about animalcommunication, environmental knowledgeand culture. The desire is that these ways will contribute to opening up new social spaces for animal agency to appear, in which we might account ethically for the complexity of animal lives, their subjectivityand consciousness.
The Public Health Disparities Geocoding Project: Monitoring U.S. Social Inequalities in Health
Despite longstanding evidence on intimate links between poverty and health, most US public health surveillance system lack socioeconomic data, thus precluding routine monitoring of socioeconomic disparities in health and their contribution to US health inequities, including racial/ethnic health disparities. To address this problem, The Public Health Disparities Geocoding Project geocoded and linked public health surveillance data from Massachusetts and Rhode Island to 1990 census-derived area-based socioeconomic measures (ABSMs) to determine which ABSMs, at which geographic level (census block group, census tract, ZIP Code) could validly be used to monitor socioeconomic inequalities in health across a wide variety of health outcomes, spanning from birth to death. This presentation will review our methodology, key findings (i.e., why we argue for use of the census tract poverty measure), and the extension of our work to mapping health disparities, so as to inform action to rectify health inequities.
Double Exposure: Global Environmental Change in an Era of Globalization
Global environmental change and globalization are among the most transformative processes of the 21st century. In this lecture, I present a conceptual framework for analyzing the interactions between these two processes, and I illustrate, through case examples, how these interactions create situations of “double exposure.” The double exposure framework shows how broader human security concerns, including increasing inequalities, growing vulnerabilities, and unsustainable rates of development, are integrally connected to both processes of global change. The double exposure framework not only sheds light on the challenges raised by these two global processes, but also reveals possibilities for using the interactions to create synergies and new opportunities for positive action.
Potential futures for road-transportation CO2 emissions in the Asia-Pacific
The diverse economies of the Asia-Pacific region are experiencing the environmental consequences of rapid increases in automobile consumption and use. But the course of change is not uniform across the region. This lecture presents one in a series of studies of comparative transportation emission trends across space and time. Questions to be examined include: How do patterns of road-transportation CO2 emissions differ from the historical patterns of other developed countries and amongst developing economies within the Asia Pacific region? What are the differences in driving forces influencing these emission trends? What road-transportation CO2 emission trends might we expect in the large, lower-income Asia Pacific economies?
Rescaling Urban Sustainability: Corporate Power, Consumption, and Governance along the Russian Timber Trail
Urban sustainability issues are often framed as local problems with local solutions. But the footprints of cities (and the people who live in them) extend far beyond discrete local boundaries. This presentation brings Siberia into the home of the urban dweller by telling the story of pieces of furniture produced by the HomeDepot, IKEA, and other ‘Big Box’ retailers. The journey begins in Chinese furniture factories, travels with the timber into Manchuria and finally ends at its source—the biologically diverse Sikhote-Alin forests in the Russian Far East. The research provides insight into the social and environmental conditions under which the furniture was produced, from factory to stump, and in the process raises questions about forest certification, corporate power, and the role of urban dweller as global green citizen.
An African Perspective on Global Warming
Several times a day, affluent tourists gather at the equator north of Nairobi to watch an impoverished African perform a demonstration of the Coriolis force: he shows how water spirals out of a plastic bowl in a clockwise sense south of the equator, but in the opposite sense north of the equator. The demonstration is a ritual to the entrepreneurial African, is a scientific experiment to the highly educated tourists, but is a hoax to the angry scientists who comment on the demonstration on the World Wide Web. The scientific and political errors made by the participants in this poignant tribute to science, by the demonstrator, observers and commentators, merit analysis because the same mistakes have been made repeatedly in the past, even by the great Isaac Newton, and continue to be made today, in discussions of global warming for example.
The Humane Metropolis: Honoring the legacy of William "Holly" Whyte at Hunter College
Four-fifths of Americans now live in the nation's sprawling metropolitan areas, and half of the world's population for the first time is now classified as “urban.” As metropolitan regions become the dominant living environment for humans, there is growing concern about how to make such places more habitable, more healthy and safe, more ecological, and more equitable - in short, more “humane”. The talk will draw on themes from the 2006 book edited by Dr. Platt: The Humane Metropolis: People and Nature in the 21st Century City (University of Massachusetts Press and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy).
Dr. Platt’s work is in part inspired by and a tribute to the work of Distinguished Professor William “Holly” Whyte, a prominent Urban Sociologist and former faculty member of Hunter College. Whyte’s famous observations and film analyses of corporate plazas, urban streets, parks and other open spaces in New York City made him a champion defender of the value of small public spaces.
Professor and Chair Joni Seager, Dept of Geog, Hunter College presents Keynote Address: On Thinking Like A Geographer
Wallace Murray & Jason Nu present Engaging New York City’s Cycling Public in the Planning Process: A Survey and GIS Analysis of Bicycle Parking Needs
Brandon Derman presents A case study of SDSS design in waterborne transportation facility planning
Elyssa Davis presents
Community Participation in Rural Water Supply and Sanitation in the Dominican Republic
Pat Hackbarth presents The Labor Movement as an Underutilized Ally in Addressing Climate Change and Urban Sustainability
Erin Araujo presents The price of water and space: the political ecology of water scarcity and resistance in San Cristobalde las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico
Dan Milner presents Occupational Folk Song as a Reflection of Historical Geography
HyoJin Ahn, CUNY Graduate Center presents Urban Surface Temperature Retrieval From Space Through Emissivity Classification
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