Events / Past Colloquia

Banished: Zoning Out Disorder in Contemporary Seattle

"Disorderly" people are increasingly being banned from various public and private spaces in Seattle and other cities. Once banned, individuals are subject to arrest if they re-emerge. Three key mechanisms are used to accomplish banishment in Seattle: parks exclusions orders; criminal trespass; and off-limits orders. Although these work to notably increase the territorial authority of the police, they only exacerbate the challenges that disadvantaged citizens face. The practice of banishment therefore deserves sustained scrutiny and critique.

Presented By: Steve Herbert
University of Washington
Department of Geography/Law, Society and Justice

Friday October 3rd, 2008

Winter 2008

Mappa-loquium: Finding our way with new mappings of geographical learning

This is a collaborative colloquium presentation through which we hope to enable a broader departmental conversation over the use of multimedia mapping technologies for teaching. It builds on a faculty workshop last summer designed to foster the use of geovisualization technologies in geography classes that do not have a specific GIS focus. It also draws on the experiences some of us have had in developing online mapping projects in our teaching, both here in Seattle and on this year¹s Geography Department study abroad program in Rome. Together we hope to stimulate discussion over both technology and teaching methods, and, just as we want to stress the enabling aspects of cartographic creativity, we would also like to enable further departmental innovation in cartographic pedagogies.

Presented By:Sarah Elwood, Katharyne Mitchell, Matt Spark and Matt Wilson
University of Washington
Department of Geography

Friday May 30, 2008

Environment and Sustainable Development: A Comparison of Taiwan with Hong Kong and China

East Asia is a paradigm in many ways of the costs of development sweeping the world, resulting in rapid urbanization and industrialization, followed by severe environmental degradation and pollution. Taiwan, following in Japan’s footsteps, has had some of the world’s worst environmental problems, with the PRC and Hong Kong following suit. The three states have widely different geographies, political and economic systems, and environmental programs. All three began to really address the environment only in the 1980s. Taiwan has come the furthest, China the least. All three states aspire to sustainable development, but none are close to reaching that goal. China faces the most daunting challenges.

Presented By:Jack Williams, Ph.D.
Michigan State University

Friday May 16, 2008

"On The Return of the Food Riot"

The return to the streets of one of the oldest forms of protest in human history, the food riot, should not come as a surprise. While the structural factors behind the price rises appear random, the conjunction of oil price rises, biofuel policy, meat consumption, poor harvest and financial speculation could, to varying degrees, be predicted and mitigated. More seriously, the policy architecture to weather this storm has been undermined by thirty years of neoliberal development policy. The structure and motive of food riots today looks similar to that in eighteenth century England and the twentieth century United States, and absent some fundamental changes in development policy, we should expect to see many more such riots.

Presented By:Raj Patel

Friday May 9th, 2008

Disciplined Insurgency: Can a College of the Environment Change the World?

Among the most dramatic transformations of the disciplinary landscape of the American University in a generation, possibly a century, is that organized around the term “environment.” In the last decade at least eight of the preeminent universities in the US have created colleges with that nomenclature. Better late than never, many faculty and students say. Responding to faculty interest, the Provost of the University of Washington is leading the change here arguing that it will create “synergies” between units with environmental expertise through collaborative research, more integrated and efficiently delivered education. Focused on the connections between “discovery, development, and application to real world problems,” the new College of the Environment will also demonstrate the relevance of the UW to private and public sector sources of funding, the Provost argues.

Taking a political ecology approach, this talk asks why environmental colleges have appeared in recent years, and if they might advance the insurgent knowledges that various threads of environmentalism – including ecology, conservation, and recent geography – promised would challenge the growth imperatives and inequalities produced by capitalism. The case of the UW, and our Department of Geography, will be examined in depth. Isn’t it strange that geography and environment evoke such different meanings to professional geographers at UW!

Is insurgency possible if the goal is to appeal to private philanthropists, corporations, and federal agencies? Can the College of the Environment change the world if its funding is largely private? What role might the Department of Geography and other insurgent disciplines play to answer “yes?”

Presented By: Doug Mercer, Ph.D.
Department of Geography
School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences University of Washington

Friday April 25, 2008

Transition of Travel Destinations of Japanese Package Tours in China by Newspaper Advertisements

This research assumes to clarify the distribution of visiting destinations from 1980 to 2004 by package tours in newspaper advertisement. We analyze the advertisement inserted in Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo version). Because the China visit package tour was published for the first time in 1980, we collected the advertisements in 1980, 1984, 1994 and 2004. According to the statistic data by JTB (Japan Tourism Bureau) and JNTO (Japan National Tourist Organization), March, August and November are always peak periods of China travel to Japanese tourists. Therefore, we select the advertisements published in January, June and October, which are two months before peak periods as our research objects. First of all, Hong Kong played the role of gateway or relay city in the age when the infrastructure in China was insufficiently equipped. Hong Kong didn't appear in the advertisement of China travel in 2004, and it can be thought as a result of the improvement of infrastructure in China. Secondly, tourism policy of Chinese government also accomplished important role in destinations change. Thirdly, the registration of World Heritage influenced destination selection of China travel. There were only 6 World Heritages in China in 1987, but the number of World Heritages increased to 30 in 2004 with a rapid and aimed speed. Fourthly, effect can be recognized in the tourism promotion activities of Chinese government. Fifthly, mass communication media in sending country Japan is also an important factor which can't be disregarded.

Presented By: Guoqing Du
College of Tourism, Rikkyo University, Japan

Friday April 11, 2008

Personal Firewall: How hackers are re-imagining risk in the information society

My ethnographic research with computer hackers in the United States reveals a peculiar set of motivations, anxieties, and geopolitical imaginaries. I draw upon the writing of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens on the Risk Society to help understand the dynamics behind the preference shared by hackers for specific political responses to electronic risk. The politics of risk championed by my interview subjects focuses on individualized, rather than collective solutions to these potential threats. The "personal firewall" emerges as both a technical solution and a powerful metaphor for the redistribution of risk to individual consumers in the information society.

Presented By: Kris Erickson, PhC
University of Washington

Friday April 4, 2008

The Triumph of the Egg

At the turn of the twentieth century, cold storage warehouses went up in cities across the United States, bringing urban consumers year-round access to perishable provisions. Among these foods were eggs. While Americans used cold and other means to preserve food at home, many viewed the refrigerated warehouses with great suspicion. They saw the very notion of durable freshness, today so taken-for-granted, for what it is: a paradox, and one that suggested either deception, the disturbing manipulation of markets and nature, or both. And in the case of eggs, the rise of cold storage did in fact unleash an assortment of questionable trade practices. This talk examines the technological changes that first threatened the moral economy of fresh food marketing and then resolved, at least temporarily, the resulting controversies. It also situates the egg's story in the broader history of freshness.

Presented By: Susanne Freidberg
Associate Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College

Author of French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age (2004).

Friday February 29, 2008

Global R&D in China

Labour Market Convergence in a Cross-Border Region: the Case of Cascadia’s Forest Products Industry

The emergence of supranational institutions and the resurgence of regionally-based economies has created a growing body of literature related to cross-border regions. Cross-border regions exist throughout the world, but some of the most prominent exist in the EU and along the Canada-U.S. border. Cross-border regions are comprised of contiguous sub-national units of territory from more than one nation-state. Cross-border regions share strong economic, political, social, historical, and environmental similarities. This project examines the extent to which convergence is occurring in four labour market segments of the forest products industry in the cross-border region of Cascadia. Cascadia is comprised of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. The four segments include: pulp and paper, lumber production, logging, and reforestation. The forest products industry provides an interesting case when examining labour market convergence in a cross-border regions because of the similar market foci, ownership patterns, and costs of parent firms throughout the region. Additionally, and critical to the purposes of this study, are the similarity of divisions in the industry’s primary (e.g. pulp and paper, sawmills) and secondary (e.g. logging, reforestation) labour market segments. The framework for this study draws upon Peck’s (1996) work on labour market segmentation and Gertler’s (2001) work on cross-national convergence. The purpose of this paper is to present the framework, research methods, and preliminary results of this study. Primary information for this paper is drawn from in-depth interviews with representatives of forest products firms, labour union officials, production workers, and logging and reforestation contractors.

Presented by: Brendan Sweeney

January 25, 2008

Till Class do us Part: Youth and The Politics of Waiting in India

Processes of global and regional social change have radically altered young people's prospects and their experience of time and space. Nowhere is this more evident than in the instance of the large number of educated youth unable to obtain secure salaried work. In places as diverse as Morocco, Argentina, France and India there are now a large number of young people, most of them men, who have been conditioned to expect secure salaried work but who, in the absence of other opportunities, seemingly spend much of their time "hanging out" - on street corners, in universities or while conducting part-time work that bears little relation to their ambitions. Drawing on four years of field research conducted between 1996 and 2007 in western Uttar Pradesh, India, I refer in this paper to a public culture of waiting among educated un/underemployed young men and discuss two forms of politics that have emerged out of their sense of marginalization. First, there have been efforts by un/under-employed university students, across lines of class and caste, to protest against regional processes of economic restructuring with specific reference to their position as "students" and "youth", a type of politics that resonates with Partha Chatterjee's ideas of political society. Second, a range of class- and caste-interested forms of political engagement have emerged among disappointed young men that fracture a broader student movement, and I use this point to discuss the continued heuristic value of the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu for an analysis of youth mobilization. I also appeal for a closer focus on how time and space are implicated in youth political practice.

Presented by: Craig Jeffrey, Associate Professor of Geography and International Studies University of Washington

Time and venue: January, 18,

Colloquium committee and GGSA present:

Tanya Matthews from Human Subjects
Presentation and Q&A for grad students

This Friday the colloquium committee and GGSA are pleased to announce a presentation and question answer session with Tanya Matthews of Human Subjects. I know from personal experience that Tanya is extremely helpful and knowledgeable on this topic and she is especially knowledgeable about how to aid geographers in navigating this complex process.

**Please note that Tanya would like us to read the Belmont Report, which is available at: http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/humansubjects/guidance/belmont.htm.  The Belmont report is an easy three page read and it will help everyone understand the philosophical underpinnings of the U.S. research regulations, and the review process.

Friday Jan 11th, 3-4:30 pm
Smith 304

We will follow with a happy hour on the Ave.

Autumn 2007

Unfamiliar Bonds: Social reproduction and the reconfiguration of floral sex work in South India

India is the only country in the world where cotton seeds, planted to grow the commercial fiber crop, are hybrids, manufactured each season through the laborious process of manually cross-pollinating two varieties. This process, which I call floral sex work, is mainly done by children, mostly girls. Naturally. “Seed pillalu” (seed-children, in Telugu) tend to be migrants from dry villages whose labor is “tied” or bonded for the season. The processes through which children are being inexorably disarticulated from their homes, from schooling, and from childhood in the seed cotton economy is a wrenching, if simple, tale to tell. It is being told to good effect by NGOs, local and international, and a range of other actors: the government, multilateral agencies, transnational and domestic private seed corporations, and politicians. A hitherto untold story is how floral sex work is being done by adult, “low-caste” men and women on small-holder family plots. Familial bonds and gendered bodies are being re-articulated, spatialized, and experienced in multiple ways in this new agrarian regime. My paper, based on ethnographies of floral sex workers, theorizes social reproduction without assuming it is the same process across geographic and cultural terrains. If social re-production is not simply functional to capitalism how do we think about the myriad forms of meaning making that come to suture and disrupt contemporary agrarian capitalisms?

Presented by: Priti Ramamurthy
Women Studies and South Asia Program University of Washington

Friday November 30, 2007

Spaces of Hope: Ex-combatants and Urban Utopias in Contemporary West Africa

Presented by: Daniel Hoffman, PhD
Department of Anthropology, UW

Friday November 16, 2007

Placing the Prison: Neoliberal Governance, Racialized Exclusion, and Prison Development in the Rural American Northwest

Presented by: Anne Bonds, PhC

About the speaker:
Anne Bonds, PhC
Department of Geography
University of Washington

The staggering number of prisoners and correctional facilities in the United States is transforming the geographies of both urban and rural landscapes. As the trend in mass incarceration persists, depressed rural spaces are increasingly associated with rising prison development and the increasing criminalization of rural communities of disadvantage. Drawing on in-depth archival and interview research in three communities in the American Northwest, I explore how prison development intersects with the neoliberal restructuring of rural economies and governance as well local politics of race and poverty. I examine rural prison expansion in conjunction with the prioritization of competitive economic development strategies, shifting access to resources, and the deepening of social exclusion for certain groups. I focus on how local leaders and community residents represent the reframing of public policy towards competitive, market-based models and how these discourses are constructed in the context of job loss and declining tax revenues, increasing competition for investment, as well as local histories and social relations. I argue that these narratives reinforce rural prison expansion as rural communities increasingly adopt economic strategies that re-entrench racialized and classed inequality and the marginalization of already disadvantaged communities.

Friday November 9, 2007

Computer Models and Biomedicine: Mapping the Body as Data in Contemporary Scientific Practice

Presented by: Marko Monteiro, PhD

Both space and place are in question in this project, as well as practices of visualizing/mapping, because of the way the new surgical procedure will involve two separate cities, and the way the research itself is being done between cities. As far as the digital renderings go, I will talk about the contemporary twist in visual cultures of science brought about by digital modeling. Digital technologies at the same time erase notions of space, distance, volume (through the idea of doing telemedicine for example), but bring them back into contemporary knowledge practices through the way the scientists navigate 3D renderings as actual "volumes" and "spaces" in their everyday practice.
Latour's concept of inscriptions guide me in the analysis, and he analyzes the concept through also explaining the place maps have had in scientific culture. Also, geological data is used all the time in comparison with biological data by the scientists in their work.
Modeling is heavily used in geological sciences, and thus the scientists must adapt some of these techniques when doing the same with biological "places" and functions.

About the speaker:
Marko Monteiro, PhD
Postdoctoral Researcher, Science, Technology and Society Program

"My work is focused mostly on the relationships between representations and bodies. I have done research on gender and masculinities in Brazil, looking at how men's representations changed in the 1960's, influenced by feminism and gay identities, and how contemporary representations of men (in the 1990's) were constructed though journalistic work in a Brazilian magazine. I have also worked on scientific representations of the body enabled by new technologies, focusing on biotechnologies, medical technologies and how scientific representations enable the manipulation of the bodily matter in specific ways. I am currently involved in field research in a computer science laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, where a new cancer treatment is being developed based on computer modeling."

Friday November 2, 2007