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Sunil Aggarwal This last year has been an eventful time of General Exam preparation and passage, conference attendance and presentations, and health justice activism. At the end of April, my committee approved my dissertation research proposal to daylight the medical geography of medical marijuana access and germplasm delivery in Washington state. As long as things go smoothly with Human Subjects Committee approval of this research, I should be able to defend around this time next year. Here's to the supportive and vibrant atmosphere of the UW Geography Dept! In other news, I passed on the torch of Geography graduate student representation in the Graduate and Professional Student Senate. Michelle Bilodeau micheb3@u.washington.edu I am currently working on my Master's thesis which is entitled "Place-based suicide: the 'scene' and unseen meanings of the Golden Gate Bridge." Through the incorporation of landscape geography, sociological and psychological literature as well geographies of mental health, I examine societal interpretations of suicide from this culturally symbolic place. I presented some of my preliminary research on this topic at this year's AAG conference in San Francisco. Other than my thesis, which I am hoping to defend by the beginning of next year, I am working on a side project examining accessibility and availability of health care in the Seattle metropolitan area using GIS. I, along with several other graduate students are hoping to present this paper at a statewide health conference this fall. In my free time, I am training for a triathlon. Rebecca Burnett rburnett@u.washington.edu In my two years in the master's program I have taken courses such as Marxist Theory and Queer Geographies as well as formed my committee with Victoria Lawson and Michael Brown. I am on track to finish my master's degree spring quarter and this summer I will going to Beijing to present my research at the Second Global Conference on Economic Geography. In addition, this summer I will doing research about the "Economic Geography of Music" in which I will trace how economic restructuring has influenced the music scenes in Detroit, Manchester U.K., and Seattle in the past 40 years. Next year I will begin my predoctoral research on the subject roles and representations of women in poverty in the U.S. Astrid Cerny Since April 2006, I’ve been based in China to complete my dissertation research. I had funding from both a Fulbright and from China Studies at UW to do this. It’s been an eventful year, in ways I wasn't expecting. The best part was my fieldwork in the Altai and Tianshan mountains. I got to spend the summer with nomadic Kazak families, sleeping in their family yurts and interviewing them about everything from why the grassland is degraded to what their household economy is based on. Following three months of that, I was based in one of the dirtiest cities on earth for the long winter. I only had my cell phone stolen, though theft of all kinds is as ubiquitous as the air pollution. I got involved in a multi-lateral wild horse breeding and reintroduction project co-sponsored by the Smithsonian as the “nomad expert”. I contributed to a large publication for this project. I traveled to several parts of Xinjiang, as well as to Hong Kong for a conference and additional research. Since March I have been based in Beijing once again, to focus on data analysis, dissertation writing and higher government level interviews. I presented my research twice in Beijing, including to the US embassy officers. I’ve been interviewed about my research and the state of China’s environment three times in the last month: by NPR, China Radio International, and a World Resources Institute affiliate. I was granted an extension on my Fulbright, so I may go to Kazakhstan or back to Xinjiang for more fieldwork. I plan to return to Seattle in the summer and I expect to defend by the end of 2007. Hong Chen I started to pursue a PhD degree at UW in September 2006. I am interested in the changing roles of local government and the forces of administrative adjustment in Chinese cities. In Jan 2007, I participated on an international conference of “the 3rd Annual Graduate Seminar on China” in Hong Kong, and presented a paper titled “China’s Changing Urban Politics and the Impacts on Chinese Cities” at 2007 San Francisco AAG in April. I was also selected to be the student representative of AAG China Geography Specialty Group. This summer, I will work on my preliminary exam in Geography at UW. Besides academic working, I also serve as the editor of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association Weekly Newsletter in Seattle from November 2006 to present. Dominic Corva Over the last year I completed fieldwork in Bolivia, defended my dissertation proposal, and taught four classes (Geog 277, Geog 330, LSJ 380, and Geog 123, in that order, with a 123 TA quarter thrown in during autumn 2006). I also had two articles accepted for publication, one in ACME and the other in Political Geography. I also had the honor and pleasure of participating in a local mini-conference organize by Steve Herbert called "Liberalism, Governance and the Geographies of Law", as well as a micro-seminar led by Derek Gregory in the fall, organized by Matt Sparke. I look forward to finishing my dissertation this upcoming year, 2007-2008. Rowan Suzanne Ellis rowansue@u.washington.edu This has been an amazing year for me as I formalized my dissertation project, taught independently for the first time, continued studying Hindi, and prepared to conduct a year of fieldwork abroad. My dissertation research looks at the relationship between labor market restructuring and new forms of youth political participation in urban India. In 2006-2007 I held a FLAS Fellowship for the study of Hindi and South Asian Studies and taught Geography 436: Social and Political Geographies of South Asia. This year I also completed my preliminary and general exams. In collaboration with three other geography graduate students, I organized a session titled, "New Directions in Postcolonial Geography" for the 2007 annual meeting of the AAG. I will be leaving Seattle in the summer of 2007 for a year of fieldwork in South India with the support of a Chester Fritz Fellowship. Todd Faubion, Department of Geography Undergraduate Adviser tfaubion@u.washington.edu 206-793-1252 My major success this year was the completion of my master’s thesis in April, titled HIV/AIDS Care in South Africa: Examining Treatment Possibilities and the Context of Regressive Social and Health Policies Post-Apartheid. I enjoyed presenting some findings from this thesis at the Association of American Geographers conference in San Francisco, where I also presented findings from the Department of Geography’s Study of Undergraduate Learning with Rick Roth. I am currently re-working a couple thesis chapters for publication and preparing to take my preliminary exams in the fall. Within the department, I have enjoyed my position as co-President of the Geography Graduate Student’s Association and as an Undergraduate Adviser for the 2006-2007 academic year—best of luck to all the graduating undergraduates! Outside the department, I continue my service work at Rosehedge AIDS Housing and Healthcare, serving as President-Elect in 2007. Steven Garrett, PhC, MS, RD Ph.D. Candidate, Social and Environmental Geography University of Washington and Nutrition Education Evaluation Specialist Washington State University In early 2007, I received PhD candidacy and my research proposal was approved by my committee. I am a full-time lecturer at the UW-T in Urban Studies teaching all of their GIS courses and a spring course of my design called, Agro-Ecology and Society. I am actively researching and writing in order to complete my PhD within the next year. Since my research has involved paid fellowships and consulting (rather than one long research program), I have elected to write three papers instead of a dissertation. The first paper is in review with GeoJournal and is about "chum" salmon sustainable fisheries discourse and practices in the Puget Sound . The second is about linking Human Rights discourse with the geography of food access issues in an African-American community. I will be presenting the paper based on this research at AAG in Boston . And lastly, I am working with the American Community Garden Association to survey all North American community gardens to develop some baseline data for further research. This paper will explore the uneven development of gardens. Jaime Kelly I am beginning my third year in the PhD program in Geography, with a focus on informal labor markets in China and transnational organizations. This year, aside from presenting at two conferences, I also completed my preliminary exams and hope to take my generals before the Spring quarter. I am currently in Beijing on a summer FLAS fellowship. taking language classes that will prepare me for ethnographic research. Specifically, I received a grant from the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies to conduct three months of preliminary research in Hong Kong this coming Spring quarter. Amber Pearson I recently completed the requirements for the International Health Certificate and am working on a PhD in medical geography. Last summer, through a grant by the Puget Sound Partners for Global Health, I traveled to southwestern Uganda to conduct preliminary fieldwork. My work spans ecology and microbiology to political and economic context of enteric infections. I hope to return to Uganda to conduct my dissertation research within the next year. I also work as a Research Assistant for MESA Air, an EPA-funded 10 year cohort study. I am assisting with the geographic aspects of assigning exposure to air pollutants. Kevin Ramsey kramsey@u.washington.edu http://students.washignton.edu/kramsey This year two papers based in part upon my MA thesis research were accepted for publication. • “A Call for Agonism: GIS and the Politics of Collaboration”, forthcoming in Environment and Planning A • “GIS, Modeling, and Politics: On the Tensions of Collaborative Decision Support”, forthcoming in Journal of Environmental Management Matt Wilson and I co-organized a panel session and two paper sessions at the AAG around the theme of Research Design and Methodologies for Critical GIS Research. In winter quarter I successfully completed my general exam and am currently putting together a dissertation proposal. I will be examining the cultural and environmental politics of mobility in the debate over how to replace the Seattle Alaskan Way viaduct. I am particularly interested in exploring the disconnects between competing discourses of urban cultural, economic, and environmental change and the transportation modeling studies used to predict the impacts of alternative courses of action. My research will include a discourse analysis of media representations and public statements, interviews with political actors and activists, and ethnographic observation of public events and activist work. A small grant from the Nancy Bell Evans Center will help to fund my field research during the summer of 2007. This coming autumn I will be completing my fourth and final year as research assistant and outreach director for the Participatory GIS for Transportation research project. I am busy planning and preparing for our final “experiment in online participatory democracy” called “Let’s Improve Transportation” which will recruit up to 300 residents of King, Snohomish, and Pierce counties participate in a new and potentially more meaningful way to involve citizens in the process of regional transportation decision making. See www.pgist.org for more information. Finally, I received a fellowship with the Project in Interdisciplinary Pedagogy from the UW Bothell Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Program. This fellowship will, in part, support me as I teach three courses at UW Bothell during the 2007-2008 school year. The courses I will be teaching are: • Political Ideas and Ideologies: Democracy in Theory and Practice • Community Mapping and GIS • Institutions and Social Change Tricia Ruiz By end of this quarter I will have completed my Master’s degree in Geography. My thesis is titled ‘Exploring the Links between School Segregation and Residential Segregation: A Geographical Analysis of Schools and Neighborhoods in the United States, 2000’, for which I have created a dataset that merges data from the Census and from the National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data to compare student populations with respective resident populations in school districts across the U.S., while also examining data tabulated at the school level and at the tract scale. A collaborative research project with Suzanne Withers and William A.V. Clark (UCLA) has resulted in a paper that has been invited to be part of a special issue in the journal Population, Space and Place. We have created a migration dataset that contains information on changes in housing affordability, home values and household income at county and metropolitan levels, for all county-to-county and intermetropolitan flows from 1995-2000. These data provide evidence that differences in housing affordability, between origins and destinations, have significant effects on the size, direction and demography of family migration flows. The different stages of our work have been presented at the most recent conferences of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, the Population Association of America, and the American Association of Geographers. I also attended the Race, Ethnicity and Place conference, for which I chaired the Education and Inequities session. Last February, I had the pleasure of participating as an invited graduate student speaker at UW’s Diversity Fellows Annual Dinner. For my teaching assistantship this year, I have taught lab, discussion and quiz sections for Geography 315: Explaining and Understanding Geography (Michael Brown), Geography 205: Introduction to the Physical Environment (Craig Zumbrunnen), and Geography 245: Geographic Perspectives on U.S. Population Diversity (Suzanne Withers). For next academic year, which will be my first year in the Geography PhD program, I am extremely grateful and excited to have received a twelve-month fellowship from UW’s Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE). The formal research training that CSDE has to offer will be a wonderful opportunity for me to extend and enhance my research focus on the spatial demography of public education reform in the U.S. Gregory Simon I spent the better part of this past year writing the dissertation examining 'geographies of mediation' within the context of energy sector reforms in rural India. I defended this summer and also completed and published an NSF funded research project examining the cultural and political history of park planning in Seattle. I was awarded a 2 year postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University beginning in Fall, 2007, and will teach and conduct research as part of the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West. Timothy Stiles I am very thankful for the funding that I have received from the UW Graduate Opportunities & Minority Achievement Program (GO-MAP), which has enabled my first year of graduate study in the Geography Department’s MA Program. During this time I have worked toward the development of a stronger theoretical and technical foundation in preparing for the research that I will be conducting over the summer. It will be an ethnographic case study on ‘sustainability’ within the private-sector; and, more specifically, I will be analyzing its related discourse within a Transnational Corporation via an exploration of the linkages among several internal- and external-actors. Additionally, this summer I have the honor of co-hosting an orientation for next year’s incoming graduate cohort. Liz Underwood-Bultmann lizub@u.washington.edu In my first year as a Master's student, I worked as a teaching assistant for Intro to Globalization, Crime, Politics, and Justice (in LSJ), and Policing the City. I continue to be interested in property, law, and social control and I plan to spend part of the summer conducting research about zoning law in Saint Paul, MN. Additionally, I served on the Graduate and Professional Student Senate and organized the department coffee break in Fall and Winter quarters. Nicholas D. Velluzzi nvelluzz@u.washington.edu I am completing my dissertation, which is tentatively titled Fermenting Growth: Workforce development and the competitive foundations of localized learning in the Walla Walla wine cluster, which uses an institutionalist approach to explain the territorialization of the wine industry in the Walla Walla Valley. This fall, I will begin a position as a visiting assistant professor at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina in the Political Science Department. I will teach Introduction to Economic Geography and graduate seminars in Urban and Regional Development. Presentations: Production in Place through the Production of Place: The Institutions of Regional Economic Development, presentation at the Annual Meetings of the Association of American Geographers, 2007, San Francisco, CA Publications: Harrington, James W. and Nicholas Velluzzi. Forthcoming. Labor Market Intermediation. Forthcoming in Christine Tamasay and Michael Taylor (Eds.), Globalising Worlds: Geographical Perspectives on New Economic Configurations. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Matthew W. Wilson mwarrenw@u.washington.edu http://students.washington.edu/mwarrenw I am currently finishing my fourth year of the graduate program (a second year PhD student), and have emphasized three areas in my coursework: cartography and geographic information technologies (GIT), political geographies, and gender and the body. My research concentrates at the intersections of several phenomena, namely the devolution of state services to nonprofit and community organizations, the increased geo-coding of city spaces using GIT, and the co-constitutive formation of identities and places by technologists, community residents, nonprofit staff members, as well as cyborg in(ter)ventions. My analysis of these intersections asks how these technologies mobilize identities and spatial imaginations in creating new openings for political contestation. I am re-imagining studies of GIT, wherein subject-object and human-nonhuman relationships are blurred (including researcher-subject relations),and thereby exposing/evoking spaces for new political futures – without requiring the conceptual distancing of the technical from the political-critical. This year, I co-organized (with Kevin Ramsey) three sessions at the AAGs: a panel discussion of methodologies in critical GIS research, and two paper sessions demonstrating these diverse critical methodologies. I also participated as a panelist in a session organized by Melinda Laituri, discussing 'empowerment' in public participation GIS. Additionally, I have been awarded a research grant from the Nancy Bell Evans Center, for research on a nonprofit organization in New York City, and have been selected as a 2007-2008 Fellow of the Simpson Center Public Humanities Institute. I have also enjoyed playing with Spatial Fixx, the graduate student ultimate frisbee team. Stephen Young In Fall quarter, I taught a new 'Special Topics' class based on this year's common book, which describes the work of Dr. Paul Farmer in Haiti. The class was mainly comprised of future medical students, so it was fantastic to engage with freshmen who had perhaps never thought about geography as a discipline that can help explain global disparities in health problems. In Winter quarter, I traveled to India, supported by a Howard Martin travel grant, to begin the fieldwork for my PhD project. I interviewed people involved in microfinance projects in both Mumbai and rural Andhra Pradesh and will be following up on this work when I return to India for 5 months at the end of this year. I also presented a paper on microfinance at this year's AAG meeting in a session I co-organized with Mona Atia. This Spring, I am the lead instructor for Geopolitics, which I will be teaching again in the summer. |
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