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Department of Geography
geog@umn.edu
612-625-6080
geog@umn.edu
612-625-6080
Coffee Hour
For a half century, the Department of Geography has hosted Coffee
Hour, the longest-running speaker series at the University of Minnesota and among Geography Departments in the United States.
On Friday afternoons, Geography students and faculty, other colleagues from throughout the University, and visitors gather to hear the speaker, exchange ideas, and enjoy a snack with colleagues.
Spring Coffee Hour Schedule
Fridays, 3:30 to 5:00 p.m., Blegen Hall 445 (cookie/coffee reception begins at 3:15pm)
Jan 27, 2012: “Latina/o Immigrant Street Vendors: Photo-Documenting Sidewalks from Back ‘Home’ in Los Angeles” - Lorena Muñoz
[Postdoctoral Associate for Academic Diversity, Department of Geography, University of Minnesota]
On any give day there are approximately 10,000 Latino vendors selling in the streets of Los Angeles. Street vending in L.A. is reconfigured, organized and supported through the daily practices of Mexican and Central American immigrant vendors. Vendors physically transform streets into public markets, utilizing sidewalks, fences, walls, parking lots and benches to sell, among a variety of products, comida tipica (traditional food) from back ‘home’. Although street vending is illegal in L.A., it is the most visual occupation of the informal economy. Vendors depend on their visibility to be successful entrepreneurs, while as immigrants negotiate ongoing surveillance and policing of bodies by the state and its apparatus. Through a visual ethnography of Latina/o immigrant vendors, Lorena Muñoz explores the use of photo-documentation to analyze the complexities of ‘producing’ landscapes of informal vending in immigrant neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
Feb 3, 2012: “Tempests and transformers: Modeling the impact of hurricanes on the power grid” - Steven Quiring
[Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Texas A&M University]
Hurricanes are extremely destructive. Recent hurricanes (e.g., Irene and Ike) have caused extensive and prolonged power outages. Climate change may pose significant long-term risks to electric power infrastructure depending on how the frequency, intensity, and track of hurricanes changes in the future. However, the relationship between climate change and hurricane hazard is not well understood. This research addresses the critical need to quantify the risk to electric power systems posed by hurricanes. This presentation will also discuss efforts to understand and model the impact of hurricanes for real-time applications.
Feb 10, 2012: “Urban Sustainability: Design of Healthy, Clean Cities” - Julian Marshall
[Assistant Professor of Environmental Engineering, University of Minnesota]
http://www.umn.edu/~julian
Feb 17, 2012: “Globalization Lived locally: A Labour Geography Perspective on Control, Conflict and Response among Workers in Kerala” - Neethi P.
[Fulbright Visiting Scholar, Department of Geography, University of Georgia and PhD Scholar, Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Trivandrum, India]
Supported by the labour geography framework, I analyze how spatial practices of labour shape the economic geography of capitalism; by looking into a model not at a global but at a very local scale of organization and showing its effectiveness while confronting social actors organized at global or extra-local scales. Questioning global stereotypes of economic responses to globalization, we argue that labour is actively involved in the very process of globalization and expansion of capital; empirically demonstrating the relevance of this in the globalization literature. We deal with one region – Kerala – and processes in its labour markets, taking the case of apparel workers in an export promoting industrial park.
[Co-hosted and co-sponsored by the Institute for Global Studies]
Special Thursday Edition of Geography COFFEE HOUR
March 1, 2012: "Metronatural: Inventing Urban Nature in Seattle" - Andrew Karvonen
[Research Fellow, Manchester Architecture Research Centre, School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester]
Seattle is often recognized as a city in harmony in nature, a metropolis inseparable from and infused with the dramatic and picturesque Pacific Northwest landscape. However, the historical record of Seattle reveals the supposedly harmonious relationship between humans and nature to be an invention of local and regional boosters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who implemented large-scale engineering projects to rationalise the landscape. The unintended economic, environmental, and social consequences of their so-called ‘Promethean’ approach to urban nature would be exposed in the 1950s but the ‘metronatural’ reputation of Seattle persists. In this presentation, I examine the politics of nature in the historic development of Seattle to understand how changing perceptions of the urban landscape are related to different forms of expertise, governance, and citizenship.
March 9, 2012: “New Missionary Incursions and Aboriginal Resistance: Youth for Christ and the Challenges of Rebuilding Relationships in Winnipeg’s Inner City”
David Hugill
[PhD Candidate, Department of Geography, York University]
In 2008, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized for the Government of Canada’s participation in the more than century-long program of Indian Residential schooling. For generations, the federal state had coordinated and financed the forced transfer of Aboriginal children to a series of church-run campuses where they were submitted to a harsh tutelage in the ways of the dominant settler society. Harper’s speech indicated a desire to correct the wrongs of the past and begin a process of forging “new” relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. He stressed the importance of mutual respect and co-determination. Since this formal gesture of reconciliation, however, there have been a number of incidents that seem to directly contradict the Prime Minister’s ambition. Last year, for example, the federal government joined its counterparts at the City of Winnipeg in funding the construction of an evangelical Christian community centre in a largely Aboriginal urban neighborhood. Community groups argued that the proposed project’s location as well as its supporters explicit description of Aboriginal youth as a “prime area for development” would reproduce the assimilationist dynamics of Indian residential schools, whereby the Canadian state sponsored private religious organizations to ‘Christianize’ Aboriginal youth. This paper examines the varied dynamics at play in this controversy and attempts to put them in the broader conversation about what “reconciliation” could mean in the contemporary moment. It considers some of the ways that the federal government’s stated desire to build new relationships with Aboriginal people remains fraught with contradictions and challenges.
Mar 23, 2012: Jess Conroy, NSF-EAR Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Tech
Shaking out the dust: Understanding long-term dust variations and their link to climate in the Himalayas and southern Tibetan Plateau
Mar 30, 2012: Sanchayeeta Adhikari , Berg Postdoctoral Fellow, Geography, Macalester College
Apr 6, 2012: Keith Woodward, Assistant Prof., Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison
On Autonomous Spaces
Apr 7, 2012: Joel Wainwright, Assoc. Prof., Geography, Ohio State University
**Saturday morning manuscript workshop
[Co-sponsored with ICGC]
Apr 13, 2012: Najeeb Jan, Assistant Prof., Geography, University of Colorado at Boulder
“The Exceptional State of Pakistan: Catastrophe, Biopolitics and Hauntology”
[Co-sponsored with IGS]
Apr 20, 2012: Jim Glassman, Assoc. Prof., Geography, University of British Columbia
"Global Capitalism: A Love Story, an Enigma, a Tragedy"
[Sponsored and organized by IAS & UMN Press]
Apr 27, 2012: BROWN DAY - SUSAN CUTTER, Carolina Distinguished Professor of Geography; Director of the Hazards Research Lab; University of South Carolina
