THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL: A Great American [Cultural] Pilgrimage

by Fox | Jan 27, 2016 | Geographers

Journey step-by-step with Kevin S. Fox & Sonia Ibánez and get to know the how-to basics of hiking the Appalachian Trail, witness this other side of America through their photographs and get a taste of an America experienced 5 kilometers per hour.  Musical accompaniment by Martin Langer.

Veranstaltungsraum STADTWERK Hochhaus, Strubergasse 26, Salzburg 

February 5, 2016 19.00 hours

Geographers of Everything and Nothing Vol. 4

by Fox | Apr 12, 2015 | Geographers

Q&A with Craig Angus

GI: Paper or digital map?

CA: Depends on the time and place. For teaching I prefer a projectable digital map. For years we struggled finding the money to buy enough sets of large paper flip maps which ran around $400 a set. Now thousands of awesome maps are available on line for free. Maps showing the spatial distribution of just about anything and anything. I am not averse to paper maps, back in the mid-80s a group of friends and I rode our bikes across Tibet ending up in Kathmandu, our only map was a hand drawn map (the Chinese government did not like sharing maps) given to one of my mates when he was in Tibet the previous March when the country opened up for the first time. That map likely saved our lives. Currently all of my AP Human Geography students own a copy of the Geography Coloring Book. I like adding the tactile/kinesthetic sense experience to my class. Each student colors and labels the map they feel is most closely related to our current field of study with the goal being to complete the entire earth by year’s end.

GI: GPS or mental map?

CA: Mental, don’t want anyone messing with my memories and imagination.

GI: Rural, suburban or urban?

CA: I enjoy all three. I live rural, love spending time in the urban and appreciate sub-urban for what it is.

GI: Mountain, river, desert, island? In order of preference.

CA: No preference, I have activities I do in all of them that I really enjoy. Skiing, rafting and canoeing, desert camping and hiking and travels to any of the islands that makes up Japan.

GI: If pre-colonial was ‘0’, colonial ‘5’, and post-colonial ’10’ what number would you give your geographical imagination?

CA: 10

GI: By train, by foot, by bicycle or by car?

CA: Bicycle. This is the biggest drawback living out of town; I have done bike tours all over the world, no better way to see things.

GI: What is less important: Gross National Product or Gross National Happiness?

CA: GNP which doesn’t really indicate anything or measure accurately.

GI: Favorite country name?  Favorite city name?  Favorite small town?

CA: Burkina-Faso, Kuala Lumpur, Laramie, Wyoming.

GI: Paper notebook or laptop?

CA: Depends on the task. Notebook does fit in my pocket though and I usually carry one.

GI: What is the capital of Bhutan?

CA: How would I know?

GI: Do elk have a geography? Explain.

CA: Of course. They transhumance themselves by season without any help, living and grazing up high in the summer and down in lower elevations in the winter.

GI: Favorite geographical concept?

CA: Projecting spherical shapes/3 dimensional shapes a flat surface. I once drew myself in the Robinson Projection.

GI: Lastly, what does it mean for someone, some object, some place, some process to “have a geography”?  Please explain through an example of your teaching, research or creative work.

CA: Having a geography could mean something has a spatial distribution or a story that takes place across space. I do a field study on poverty with my students in the state of Colorado where they have to show the spatial distribution of 10 economic indicators across the state and make scatter graphs.

Craig Angus is a History, geography and woodworking teacher at the Dawson School in Lafayette (Boulder County), Colorado.  A seasoned world traveler, he likes thinking about the “adjacent possible” and combining unlikely ideas to come up with new and  exciting ideas.  His philosophy is this: The ability to reform and to have self-discipline are important but I do not believe that these things provide impassioned learning or original thinking.  So the important thing is sidestep the need for these things (not all the time but a good part of the time) and provide an experience for students that is interesting to them in a really big way.  The teacher provides the topic or the context and allow students to find their place within that context and to run with their idea. The teacher provides an experience where students must think and solve problems such as the problem everyone faces when they have to find an answer to a question that is consuming them.

Geographers of Everything and Nothing Vol. 3

by Fox | Mar 7, 2015 | Geographers

Q & A with Christopher Gaffney

GI: Paper or digital map?

CG: Paper. I´ve yet to see a digital map laid out on a library table.

GI: GPS or mental map?

CG: Mental. GPS is mental anyway and I think we’re losing our ability to navigate the simplest environments with the navigation aides.

GI: Rural, suburban or urban?

CG: Definitely a preference for urban with access to the rural. Having grown up in Arlington, Texas I have had enough of suburbia for a lifetime.

GI: Mountain, river, desert, island?  In order of preference.

CG: Mountainous island, with a spot on the beach where the river flows into the sea. Deserts are great to visit, but if I had a choice, the desert mountains of New Mexico and Chihuahua.

GI: If pre-colonial was ‘0’, colonial ‘5’, and post-colonial ’10’ what number would you give your geographical imagination?

CG: 8.5- the last 1.5 are very difficult to scrub out, especially living in Switzerland.

GI: By train, by foot, by bicycle or by car?

CG: Train for long trips, car for day trips, bike for everyday and touring, walking everywhere in cities.

GI: What is less important: Gross National Product or Gross National Happiness?

CG: GNP

GI: Favorite city name in Brazil?

CG: Açaílândia, Pará…always wanted to go there, the açaí must be fantastic.

GI: Paper notebook or laptop?

CG: Notebook

GI: What is the capital of Honduras?

CG: Tay-goose-see-galpa. Was once stuck in a prison there for a few hours.

GI: Does college basketball in the United States have a geography?  Explain.

CG: Most definitely. There is a class and economic geography in the production and selection of players. The political-economy of the NCAA and the NBA reflect and recreate the political geography of sport in the USA. The incredible identity associations that form around college bball teams in the USA inform personal associations with place.

GI: Favorite geographical concept?

CG: Lefebvre´s production of space triad.

GI: Lastly, what does it mean for someone, some object, some place, some process to “have a geography”?  Please explain through an example of your research or creative work.

CG: Habeo geographia, ergo sum. To be “written into the earth” is to leave a mark of our passing or to be mutually recognized by one’s environment. In my creative, journalistic and academic writing I have tried to express my vision of the world as a way of interacting and trying to shift it. There is no escape from geography, as far as I can tell, and to be able to recognize the ways in which our own lives are influenced by and can have influence on the way that the planet is written (or forms) is what motivates me to do my work as a geographer. Writing, teaching, and talking about the world is a means of geographic interpretation and engagement that all geographers have. Showing how things, places, ideas, flows, and processes are inextricable connected to the “geo” is what geographers are primarily engaged in. I tried to show how football stadiums are connected to the world in Temples of the Earthbound Gods and in Hunting White Elephants to demonstrate the multiple daily events that create something like the World Cup and Olympics.

Christopher Gaffney received his PhD in Geography from the University of Texas and taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2009, Gaffney received a Fulbright Scholarship to study the urban and social impacts of the World Cup and Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. From 2010-2014 he was a Visiting Professor in the Graduate School of Architecture and Urbanism at the Universidade Federal Fluminense. Gaffney´s research has focused on social movements in the context of mega-events, the urban dynamics of Rio de Janeiro, and the political economy of football. Much of this research was tied to a three year, national scale research project hosted at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro that investigated the impacts of the World Cup in the twelve Brazilian host cities. His current research projects are focused on a mapping of social, political, and economic actors that are shaping the 2016 Olympics. Beginning in January 2015, Gaffney assumed the editorship of the Journal of Latin American Geography. He has recently moved to Zurich where he is a Senior Research Fellow in he Department of Geography. He is working on a book entitled Hunting White Elephants, based on his blog of the same name.  

Geographers of Everything and Nothing Vol. 2

by Fox | Dec 14, 2014 | Geographers

Q & A with Andy Knox

GI: Paper or digital map?

AK: Several of the most enjoyable conversations that I can remember started off by looking at a map with someone. Paper maps all the way! A beautiful paper map is a contagious conversation starter. I wonder what would be the effect on the general vibe of places if more outdoor maps existed in public spaces? More interactions with strangers? More lingering in places that then built more connections?

GI: GPS or mental map?

AK: This depends on the moment. Would I trade in all of my mental maps for a shiny new GPS that would store them for me and keep them organized, retrievable and free from ever getting lost in the shuffle of life? Nope. Never. But without a GPS I never would have found Rabbit Hash, Kentucky.

GI: Rural, suburban or urban?

AK: Rural for living. Urban for visiting. However should my next move plop me in a city, flip those two around. Suburban is good for, I don’t know, stopping to get an In-N-Out Burger chocolate milkshake on the way through. In all seriousness, having grown up in the suburbs of New York State, I am not all that excited about that option anymore.

GI: Mountain, river, desert, island? In order of preference.

AK: I live in the mountains and after riding my mountain bike or running on a local single-track it is tough to take a smile off my face. Some of the best thinking and recharging (mentally and physically) for me is when I am on one of the trails near my house. The snowy peaks of the Sierra, Aspen trees turning yellow, alpine meadows packed with wildflowers, big California trees make the mountains tough to beat. But variety is exciting and important to me. Next weekend the family is taking the camper van down to the beach to celebrate my daughter’s birthday. Traveling and new experiences continue to provide me with a massive buzz in life.

GI: If pre-colonial was ‘0’, colonial ‘5’, and post-colonial ’10’ what number would you give your geographical imagination?

AK: I can’t imagine life without curry so that puts me safely to a ‘5’. But perhaps more significantly I can’t imagine life without the ability to relatively easily and cheaply visit new places around the world, meet new people and have experiences otherwise known only by the thought of it all. That belief pushes me more towards that double-digit end of the geographical imagination spectrum. Globalization is a game changer.

GI: By train, by foot, by bicycle or by car?

AK: Definitely by bike. I am in the midst of co-teaching an elective course this term with a small group of students that looks at the science, history and culture of bicycles. We have spent time looking into the historical and physical evolution of the bike across time and place. We are refurbishing salvaged bicycles. Initially, we needed to deconstruct each one and sort out which bits were still useable and what required replacing. Now our efforts are focused on cleaning, repainting, rebuilding and repurposing each bike to handle the rigors of a bike tour. The culminating experience of this class is setting off for a week long, self supported, urban geography focused bike tour of Northern California that will help us to answer the course’s Essential Question: What opportunities does a bicycle provide? We will spend time in Davis, California looking at the economic and lifestyle opportunities a bike friendly community provides. We will spend time in Sebastopol, California looking into the “Slow Cities movement.” We will spend time on a completely non-mechanized Sonoma County farm that uses bicycles to transport food to and from the market meeting farmers and, all the while, eating lovely local food. The distance between the mountains to the valley and eventually to the coast that we will cover (while not sacrificing the physical and sensory experience of being outside) peddles the bike ahead of any of the other aforementioned modes of transport.

GI: What is less important: Gross National Product or Gross National Happiness?

AK: GNP. I am fascinated by the idea and pillars of GNH.

GI: Favorite country name?  Favorite city name?  Favorite small town?

AK: Favorite country name: Nicaragua. Not too long ago I attended a reading in a theater where David Sedaris provided a hilarious account of how people who return from traveling abroad love to pronounce the places names that they visited with an overly exaggerated attempt at a local accent. Neeeee–car –a-GUA! Favorite small unincorporated community name: See question #2.

GI: Paper notebook or laptop?

AK: A paper notebook does not require updating my flash player (which apparently I am not very good at) or charging and can survive have a little coffee spilled on it now and then.

GI: What is the capital of Mongolia?

AK: The large map on the wall in my two-year old daughter Amelia’s room says Ulan Bator. Amelia and I spend quite a good deal of time discussing the places we have been and our upcoming adventures we will take together. Due to Amelia being vertically challenged – our recent geography lessons have been largely focused on the Southern Hemisphere. Central Asia may have to wait until she is three or at least a few inches from now.

GI: Do yaks have a geography? Explain.

AK: Sure. Yaks own a developed understanding of the Himalaya. They enjoy international wandering and are gregarious multipurpose animals. Yaks are adaptable to varied landscapes and are quite intelligent. They sound just like most of the geographers I know.

GI: Favorite geographical concept?

AK: I have always been fascinated by the study of place, culture and connectivity. I am interested in learning and thinking about how urban spaces change. I spend one week a year in Cincinnati, Ohio. The urban changes taking place on Cincinnati’s streets are exciting, considerable and controversial. Spending a few hours every day running, walking and marinating in geographic questions with a good friend is far and a way a just reward for otherwise a week of drudgery. Chatting up long term residents on the street, over a coffee or a pint and learning local stories of neighborhoods has helped me to connect to Cincinnati in a way that has shaped my thinking about how all places change and the big questions that urban morphology demands individuals and communities to consider. In graduate school one of my favorite activities was to head off on my bicycle and explore. Funny when this exploration was through a fairly small city that I “knew” very well. I knew the physical landscape well enough to miss the steepest hill if I wanted to. I did not need to consult a map when navigating the grid pattern of the city’s streets. Apart from the obvious super text of the city and its form there was energy from movement and urban changes that was ever present and thrilling to ride circles through. There always seemed an intersection that was in flux for one reason or another. There was a childlike thrill of discovering a new nook or cranny that showed me more about what living in this community was all about. The economic and cultural geography of that place was exciting, changing, clinging to its 1960s roots and always interesting to very slowly cycle through.

GI: Lastly, what does it mean for someone, some object, some place, some process to “have a geography”?  Please explain through an example of your teaching, research or creative work.

AK: Thinking as a high school geography teacher I guess it is when a student has a curiosity or openness to try and think spatially, build bridges between disparate places and ideas, and learn more about the world. Students in my classes that I would classify as “having a geography” take chances in discussions, guess and wonder. An interest in broadening perspectives goes a long way in geographic education.

Andy Knox lives in Truckee, California and teaches geography, history and social science classes at Sugar Bowl Academy.  For more information on Andy click here.

Geographers of Everything and Nothing Vol. 1

by Fox | Nov 8, 2014 | Geographers

Q & A with Harold Perkins

GI: Paper or digital map?

HP: Paper map- it won’t run out of batteries. Paper maps are what I took hiking in the mountains as a young person so there is more than a bit of nostalgia in my response.

GI: GPS or mental map?

HP: Mental map. It won’t lose signal though its just as likely to lead me in the wrong direction as my GPS. I’m concerned technologies like GPS lead to a structured, expertized, capitalized geography (think GPS will show me where the next McDonald’s is on the freeway) while creating a spatially illiterate society that turns on its navigation devices to get to the mall without thinking. Its like what spell checker on Word has done to my ability to spell on my own.

GI: Rural, suburban or urban?

HP: I don’t care for suburban development for all the usual reasons. I am equally at home in environments called urban or rural. However, I increasingly feel like these terms are a false trichotomy in part used as mechanisms to discipline and confine us to certain societal roles and identities. Of course as rational beings we need our ‘compartments’ to comprehend and order the world around us. But I’m tired of the cultural, political, and economic baggage that we accept as hand in hand with where we live. We should all question the constructs (and their motivations) that make up where we live and in part determine who we are and how we act in the production of these spaces.

GI: Mountain, river, desert, island? In order of preference.

HP: River, mountain, island, desert. I’m happiest when my feet are standing in free flowing cold water. The river could be on a mountain, island, or desert- or perhaps all three at once- as long as it is cold water that supports a healthy trout population. Preferably river in a mountain, I think though.

GI: If pre-colonial was ‘0’, colonial ‘5’, and post-colonial ’10’ what number would you give your geographical imagination?

HO: 10 I guess as I certainly identify with post-colonial thinking. We are never going back to a world in a pre-colonized state, but we can work to undermine the myriad ways in which much of the world is still thinking like a 5 and operating according to neocolonial principles.

GI: By train, by foot, by bicycle or by car?

HP: I have enormously enjoyed traveling North America and Europe by train. Very fond memories with little physical energy exerted so that I can explore localities by foot once I get there.

GI: What is less important: Gross National Product or Gross National Happiness?

HP: GNP

GI: Favorite country name?

HP: Somalia. Favorite region within a country name: Andalusia.

GI: Paper notebook or laptop?

HP: Paper notebook- its lighter and easier to carry. Plus it doesn’t run out of batteries. See above.

GI: What is the capital of Paraguay?

HP: Is this a trick question? My paper map tells me its Asuncion. Perhaps more interestingly, what is the capital of Bolivia?

GI: Do Africanized honeybees have a geography? Explain.

HP: Absolutely they do- in more than one sense. Strictly ecologically speaking from a Cartesian standpoint, they are a species from another part of the world considered invasive elsewhere and therefore out of place. Their geography is said to be expanded beyond what is considered their ‘natural’ realm.  Perhaps more interesting is the constructed nature of their spatiality. The term African or Africanized is a loaded term used to ‘other’ the insect and the places they come from.  What does it really mean to be ‘invasive’? Could we not say that the migration of all sorts of species around the globe is a form of hyper-mobilized evolution? All of the creatures that are moving around the planet now with help from humans are after all moving about because of the physical energy/laws bound up in the planet. I don’t believe supernatural forces are causing this. Thus can’t we imagine that humans are merely one more kind of ecological disturbance creating a qualitatively and quantitatively new biosphere? Of course a confounding difference, it can be argued, is that the introduction of bees from another continent to a different one is a social, political, and economic process. In the sense that nature is socially produced for certain ends (much of it has to do with wealth and power). ‘Invasive’ bees are likely to be construed from this perspective as an unwelcome byproduct of capitalism’s dependence on connectivity and flows of goods and people. In other words, what kind of biosphere do we want to construct? Perhaps one without angry bees buzzing everywhere.

GI: Favorite geographical concept?

HP: Production of nature thesis. See above.

GI: Lastly, what does it mean for someone, some object, some place, some process to “have a geography”? Please explain through an example of your research or creative work.

HP: It depends on how you want to look at it. In geography 100 I remember learning that everything has a geography. In other words, everything takes up space/a certain position in three dimensional, Cartesian space conceived as a container. You, a building, rivers, trout, all have coordinates relative to some concrete notion of space.  Far more interesting and perplexing is the notion that we produce spaces through the relationships between people, objects and the processes that define their dynamics, fluxes, flows, etc. It’s a much more mobile conception of space as something that we as agents have the ability to produce/consume/contest in our day-to-day lives. For example in my own work on urban green spaces in post-industrial settings: parks, under the first liberal era in the US and Western Europe, were conceived of and designed as spaces where working class people could effectively become more like middle and upper classes through contact with nature and ‘more refined’ people strolling the greenways.  The idea is that the urban green space started out as a social engineering project to pacify the politically restive proletariat in the late 1800s/early 1900s.  Parks during the Keynsian era became collectively produced spaces where factory workers and their families could find respite from the vagaries of industrial life. The idea was that the creation of greenspace would create healthy, rested, happy workers who would be more productive for capital. With the demise of Keynesian urbanism and the ascent of neoliberalism in the post-industrial city, nobody works in factories anymore.  The tax base that collectively supported parks is diminished. So these relict green spaces are re-created in a way that makes it so parks patrons have to work on them through volunteering and fundraisers in order to keep them in decent shape. Good citizenship in the neoliberal city is predicated now on working on the parks yourself in what amounts to responsibilized citizenship. The lesson from all of this: in a Cartesian sense, the spatiality of parks changes little through time as they persist in roughly the same locations; but in a production of space sense, the kinds of green spaces produced in the city change radically over time.

Dr. Harold Perkins is Associate Professor of Geography at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.  His research focuses on urban political ecology and environmental (in)justice.  More specifically he studies urban environments including forest, parks, and waterways to examine underlying processes that create uneven and deeply disempowering relations to nature within neoliberal forms of capitalism.  He employs a political economy perspective to delve more thoroughly into the complex issues of urban environmental governance in the wake of state retrenchment, where multiple actors assume responsibility for environmental service provision.  He is also interested in the political status of nonhuman organisms within capitalist urbanism.  For more information on his work click here.