Panoptic geographies: an examination of all U.S. geographic dissertations

The study of geography as a discipline has often employed a top‐down approach that examines the output of the field's most prominent members. In this paper, we provide a bottom‐up approach by analyzing geography dissertations. We start by assembling a database that includes the title, author, date, and university for every geographic doctoral dissertation written in the United States over the last 120 years. The database allows us to track the rise and fall of regions of interest and specific topics. It gives a broad overview of the different schools in geography and their influence within separate historical periods. And it permits a more empirically based delineation of geographical “eras” based on the commonality of words in dissertation titles. This work is at the convergence of the quantitative and qualitative; we quantify and visualize textual data to provide a more robust history of geography. The result is a new, more comprehensive way to look at the changing discipline of geography.     

Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Place,Memory, and Conflict

Produced over the past decade, monuments and museums dedicated to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s have desegregated America's memorial landscape. Tracing a broad arc across the US South, the material elements of this landscape — historic markers, monuments, parks, registered buildings, and museums — present a distinct challenge to representations of an elite, white American past. This challenge, however, is offered in a distinctly gendered manner, inasmuch as the role of women in organizing and leading the movement is obscured. Further, the historical narratives concretized at these sites are mediated by conventions associated with civil rights historiography and the tourism development industry. The result is a complex, sometimes ironic landscape. Via the narratives they embed and the crowds they attract, these landscapes are co‐constitutive with contemporary politics of representing the past in the United States. This paper offers an overview of current memorial practices and representations of the Civil Rights movement found at the country's major memorial landscapes.     

Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Place,Memory, and Conflict

Produced over the past decade, monuments and museums dedicated to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s have desegregated America's memorial landscape. Tracing a broad arc across the US South, the material elements of this landscape — historic markers, monuments, parks, registered buildings, and museums — present a distinct challenge to representations of an elite, white American past. This challenge, however, is offered in a distinctly gendered manner, inasmuch as the role of women in organizing and leading the movement is obscured. Further, the historical narratives concretized at these sites are mediated by conventions associated with civil rights historiography and the tourism development industry. The result is a complex, sometimes ironic landscape. Via the narratives they embed and the crowds they attract, these landscapes are co-constitutive with contemporary politics of representing the past in the United States. This paper offers an overview of current memorial practices and representations of the Civil Rights movement found at the country's major memorial landscapes.     

Using Photography to Visualize Children's Culture of Play: A Socio‐Spatial Perspective

Visual methodologies have great potential to offer insight into children's culture and how it shapes childhood. We explore children's culture of play in an urban, low‐income neighborhood using photographs as a means of encouraging participatory research with elementary school students. Focus group interviews were conducted to validate children's perspectives on play, and all data were analyzed inductively using open coding to develop categories and emergent themes. Findings suggest that adults often define the physical boundaries of play, but children were largely able to determine the nature of their activities. Children's culture of play in this study highlighted issues of power and privilege, while concurrently emphasizing the socio‐spatial nature of childhood.     

CREATIVE PRESERVATION IN CALIFORNIA'S DAIRY INDUSTRY*

ABSTRACT. Farmers in Marin and Sonoma Counties, located north of San Francisco, are experimenting with numerous alternatives to California's widely known industrial dairy style. Many analysts suggest that consumer politics, food scares, and globalization explain such shifts to organic and other types of “quality” food production. While acknowledging the importance of these factors, we argue that the alternatives in this region are best understood as an outcome of broad‐based land‐conservation efforts developed through historical and ongoing struggles over urban growth, rising concerns about environmental values, and deep regional interests in dairy preservation. Over time, preservation of this agricultural landscape has contributed to the emergence of a quality food industry historically rooted in the region's politics of place.     

Etna and the Perception of Volcanic Risk

Sicily's uneven geological structure is positioned within a system of tectonic plates, and its very active volcano has always made it prone to disasters. Many Sicilian cities have in fact been destroyed by natural events many times over the centuries. This can certainly be understood negatively as the destruction of entire towns, the emission of volcanic ash, and the mutation of landscapes by a terrifying force have instilled fearful memories in local populations. But from another point of view one must consider the positive elements of Etna. Its beautiful landscapes were a major attraction on the Grand Tour, and its inhabitants have long associated the volcano with the concept of rebirth and fertility. This paper analyzes two age groups of residents in the town of Nicolosi and is a small part of an ongoing research project that is much more complex, involving representative samples of the entire population of several towns around Etna.     

The desert and the sown: Nomad–farmer interactions in the Wadi Faynan,southern Jordan

The paper discusses the changing relationship between pastoral nomads and farmers, one of the recurring themes in the history of the arid Near East. In many parts of this region that history has often been characterized in terms of changing cycles of sedentary farming and pastoralism, linked respectively to notions of cultural florescence and collapse. The paper reviews the complex history of cultivation, herding, and industrial activity (copper mining and processing) that has been established for the Wadi Faynan in southern Jordan, a desertic region used today largely by Bedouin herding groups, from the Early Bronze Age to the present day. As recent studies indicate for the Negev region as a whole, it concludes that notions of simplistic cycles in nomad–sedentary relations are unhelpful: historical contingency played a far more important role than the physical landscape and the changes effected to it by climatic shifts over the past 6000 years.     

Understanding Place Attachment to the County in the American Great Plains

The American Great Plains is a region dominated by a flat, treeless, semiarid environment that has challenged population settlement for over 140 years. As railroad companies successfully attracted pioneers to settle the land, state governments established hundreds of counties. Following Jeffersonian ideals, many of the counties were small in area so they could better serve the local agricultural‐based population. When states established these counties, they envisioned that the population would continue to grow and the Great Plains would become the breadbasket of North America. Unfortunately that did not materialize. A succession of hardships combined with serious environmental constraints has discouraged large‐scale settlement in the region. Many counties reached their maximum population in the early 1900s and their totals have decreased ever since (in some counties by as much as 60 percent to 80 percent). This has led a number of government officials to consider consolidating counties much like school districts have been combined. Using Logan and Gove counties in western Kansas as a case study, our purpose is to understand how attached people are to the county in which they live. Employing multiple methods, we gathered information about how different segments of the population regard their local county. We learned that changing computer technology and the Internet has the biggest impact on peoples' attachment to the county seat.     

Prelude to Brazil: Leo Waibel's American Career as a Displaced Scholar

Beyond Germany, Leo Waibel (1888–1951) built a distinguished reputation for his work in Africa and the Americas. Today he is remembered especially in Brazil, where he boosted the development of geography as a research discipline in the years 1946–1950. During his tenure of the chair in geography at Bonn (1929–1937), Waibel's main research preoccupation became the role of the tropics in the world economy. In early 1937, he sought research leave to make an extended field trip to Brazil. Stripped on political grounds in the same year of his chair, Waibel came to the United States, where he became the only geographer to receive help from the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars. He would eventually serve as one of the very limited core staff on President Franklin Roosevelt's “M” Project on migration and settlement. This paper reconstructs the context of his work in the United States, clarifying especially the nature of his collaborations with Isaiah Bowman, widely regarded at the time as the leading geographer within the United States. Waibel's correspondence from the United States, and later from Brazil, reveals an international career marked by contradictions.     

Ethnic Place Identity Within A Parisian Neighborhood

The Goutte d'Or neighborhood of Paris has long been seen as an impoverished yet colorful quarter of the city. In recent years, it has also developed a reputation as a center for immigrants. Three populations now share the neighborhood: the European French, the Maghrebi immigrant population and their children, and the newest population of migrants from former Francophone colonies. This paper examines how the Goutte d'Or's social and ethnic identity is revealed in the built environment and in its social and economic activity. This neighborhood demonstrates how different communities and place identities coexist. It also shows how global networks of migration, exchange, and visits infuse local places. The Goutte d'Or distills many aspects of French immigrant identities, providing an example for increasing numbers of immigrant neighborhoods in France and across the world.     

Landscape persistence and stakeholder perspectives: The case of Romania's Carpathians

The traditional use of land for food, fuel and wood created cultural landscapes, which are threatened across Europe. The factors which contributed to their endangerment need to be identified to achieve effective preservation of such landscapes. The aim of our study was to identify landscapes with historical persistence in a GIS-based comparative analysis of historical and contemporary maps and the most prominent causes of the past landscape changes, based on stakeholders' perspective. We considered a case study in Romania's Carpathians. Three major land cover types were extracted from maps dating from 1912, 1980 and 2009: built-up, pastures and forests. The historical persistence of all land cover types was poor (<20%) and profound changes were quantitatively confirmed. Large, compact patches of unchanged forests were located in the neighbourhood of a national park. The persistent pastures were situated close to human settlements, and their preservation can be related to local traditional agro-silvo-pastoral management. Although the built-up area has increased over time, the corresponding surfaces are small and consist of scattered patches located around historical monuments. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to investigate stakeholders' perspective. Using cluster analysis five prominent causes of past landscape changes are identified: 'increasing tourism', 'land tenure and social changes', 'land-use intensification', 'post-communist transition', and 'foreign investments'. We join the results of the GIS analysis with those from stakeholders' perspective to gain more insights into the landscape changes. This research offers important information that could be used for the further planning of these valuable cultural landscapes in order to avoid potential conflicts and degradation.     

Aquaterra Incognita: Lost Land Beneath The Sea

The author proposes scientific recognition of an existing, previously undefined and unnamed global feature. Aquaterra is suggested as the new name for the lands that were alternately exposed and inundated as ice sheets advanced and retreated over the past 120,000 years. The vertical amplitude of sea level change amounts to 130 meters, and the aggregate global area of aquaterra equates to the continent of North America. The time period coincides with the total span during which modern humans are known to have existed.     

Reading Lanyu's tourism landscape: Hybridity and identity on Orchid Island,Taiwan

This article analyses the creation and implications for cultural identity of a hybrid tourism landscape on Taiwan's Orchid Island (Lanyu). It particularly argues that Lanyu's native Tao people have begun to gain a somewhat stronger cultural identity and autonomy through this landscape. Orchid Island underwent rapid modernization within the past 60 years. The article not only shows how tourism was imposed by Taiwan's government, but also how the Tao have made greater use of tourism's landscape over time for their own purposes. Not without sociocultural problems and contradictions, Lanyu's tourism landscape has been polysemic enough to allow for gradually improving relationships between Taiwanese and Tao and for gradually increasing Tao participation in modernity on their own terms.     

Spatial morphology of an Australian high street: a century of retail change in Subiaco town centre

ABSTRACT

This paper describes an empirical case study of the Subiaco town centre in Western Australia. The research method employs geospatial mapping of archival and contemporary data sources to explore the town centre's changing spatial structure and high street morphology at the micro-scale over the past century. Once a thriving retail and business centre, Subiaco's (and possibly the state's), premier retail high street destination is now being compromised as the disruptive influence of online retailing gains further traction in the marketplace. Retail disruption provides the paper's conceptual foundation. Agents of disruption include the processes of creative destruction and innovation diffusion, which together with macro-economic factors help to explain the centre's evolution over time and space. The paper examines changes in the town centre's morphological character including residential gentrification, a growing dominance of fast food outlets, an overabundance of comparison stores and a more gendered offering in retail and personal services establishments. The paper also refers to the potential of the town centre to regain its past residential status as a means of fostering economic growth and renewal and suggests that this will only be achieved with radical intervention at the policy and planning level.     

PUBLIC MEMORY AND POLITICAL POWER IN GUATEMALA'S POSTCONFLICT LANDSCAPE

ABSTRACT. Landscape interpretation, or “reading” the landscape, is one of cultural geography's standard practices. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to reading landscapes transformed by insurgency movements or civil wars. Those landscapes can tell us a great deal about past and present political and social relationships as well as continuing power struggles. Guatemala presents a complicated postwar landscape “text” in which the struggle for power continues by many means and media, including how the war is portrayed on memorials, and in which the Catholic Church and the military/state are the two main competing powers. This essay explores some of the images and the text presented in Guatemala's postconflict landscape through contrasting landmarks and memorials associated with the country's thirty‐six‐year‐long civil war that formally ended in 1996.     

Cashing Out,Cashing In: Rural change on the south coast of Western Australia

Over the past century the cultural and physical landscape of the Shire of Denmark on the south coast of Western Australia has been transformed by successive waves of in-migrants. The paper examines the period since the early 1970s when alternative lifestylers and early retirees, attracted by the district's natural beauty and low land prices, began moving in and acquiring former Group Settlement holdings. The activities of these and subsequent 'alternatives' and 'cashed out' early retirees settling in the district have raised the marketability of the Shire's cultural capital. These changes have occurred in association with broader processes of rural restructuring and changing notions of 'rurality'. Increasingly, Denmark's cultural and physical landscape has become a highly marketable product for consumption by Perth's affluent middle classes. In recent years land prices have risen rapidly as speculators and financiers seek to 'cash in' on the 'cashed out' society. The paper explores these issues and relates them to broader processes of economic and social change occurring at the national and international levels.     

URBAN TRANSPORTATION PLANNING IN CALIFORNIA:AN EVALUATION

California's excellent road system has provided unmatched mobility for most of the state's residents. Recently, however, constraints on construction of high-capacity roads have threatened the future of unrestricted auto use. California's transportation planners have therefore shifted emphasis from expanding the transportation system to increasing its efficiency. No concomitant change has occurred, however, in state legislation or resource allocation. As a result, rather than being an integrated process, transportation planning and implementation are fragmented. This paper examines the origins and implications of this situation and possible remedies for it.     

Place in Haitian Literature Since The 2010 Earthquake

Novelists responded immediately to the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010. Analysis of key works demonstrates the numerous images and interpretations that the catastrophe has generated among Haitians, and is valuable as a source for indigenous understandings of the altered nature of place in Haiti. Literature offers insight into the Haitian view of the earthquake's effect on gender relations, family structures, urban migration and development, and memory. Literature also participates in the country's reconstruction by articulating the challenges and opportunities faced by Haitian society, and by providing a space for therapeutic self‐expression. In this literature we witness the development of the language, attitudes, emotions, and meanings that are and will be the earthquake's cultural legacy.     

The Perception and Impact of Natural Hazards on Fishing Communities of Kutubdia Island,Bangladesh

Natural hazards lead to unexpected and often dire situations for people who have few resources and little control over the environment in which they live. Kutubdia, an island in the southeastern part of Bangladesh, experiences frequent natural hazards that impact the livelihoods of its people and put them in vulnerable situations. The research elaborated here is the result of 300 household surveys collected from persons in Kutubdia's fishing communities. The surveys investigated the perception and consequences of natural hazards on the fishing communities. The results indicated that the experience of natural hazards—cyclones, erosion, and flooding are examples—have increased over the years. Coastal erosion displaced seventy‐two (24 percent) fishers, forcing them to relocate their houses several times and imposing multiple challenges on their lives. Literacy was not associated with perceptions of environmental changes or changes in fishing. However, young fishers—less than forty years of age—perceived that environmental changes had affected fish catch more than their older colleagues.