Sarah Paige

I completed my general exam in spring quarter, and then defended my dissertation proposal in August. Now I'm in Uganda conducting field work on my project. I'm using activity-space mapping and semi-structured interviews. Activity-spaces are locating places where people are exposed to primates and/or primate habitats, and we are using geographically weighted regression to detect if location has a significant association on health. The interviews are to uncover why people are in those places in the first place. Because we are studying people living outside of a national park, I'm interested in the role of the political economy of conservation as well as grounded experiences with social, political nuances within the community that affect where and how people live.

Timothy Stiles

This past year I was a teaching assistant in the Department of Geography and had the pleasure of assisting with Geography 123: Intro to Globalization, Geography 280: Medical Geography, and Geography 463: Geographic Information Systems Workshop. In addition, I conducted field research throughout the year in support of my Master's thesis which is titled, “Technology constructing Nature and Naturally constructing Technology: Relationships between Geospatial Information Technology and Sustainability within the Private-sector". My research is an ethnographic case study in which I’ve been analyzing the discourse and practices of geospatial information technology and sustainability within a Transnational Corporation. Lastly, this past year my wife and I celebrated the arrival of our first child. I am looking forward to celebrating the completion of my thesis during the autumn quarter (2008), and will be expanding this work into pre-doctoral research throughout the upcoming year.

Kacy McKinney

This year I became a PhD candidate, having completed my General exam and dissertation proposal defense. I spent the summer 2008 in
Ahmedabad, Gujarat, where I studied Intermediate Gujarati. I held a
FLAS fellowship for the 2007-2008 academic year for Intermediate Hindi, and a summer FLAS for Gujarati. I co-organized and chaired a session at the 2008 AAG meetings in Boston titled, "Alternative Visual Methods in Human Geography". I will be leaving in mid October 2008 for ten months of fieldwork in Gujarat. My research is funded by a FLAS academic year fellowship for advanced Gujarati and field research and a Chester Fritz fellowship. This research uses ethnographic methods to investigate the interaction between agrarian and technological change and social inequality in the context of Bt cottonseed production in west India.

Todd Faubion

The past year has been a productive one.  I successfully passed my preliminary exam, reworked an MA thesis chapter into an academic article, participated at the AAG's in Boston, assisted teaching a new class in the Global Health Department titled Population Health, and took a pre-dissertation research trip to South Africa.  My goals for the coming year are to pass the Generals, create and defend a solid dissertation proposal, obtain funding for my dissertation research, and continue to develop my capacity to thoughtfully engage around topics of HIV/AIDS, globalization, health, health care access, and sub-Saharan
African studies.  I am delighted to continue in my role as an academic adviser in the Department of Geography.

Dominic Corva

Over the last year, I taught GEOG 330 (Latin America), GEOG 123 (Introduction to Globalization) and a special topics course for Law, Societies and Justice called "Reefer Madness: Cannabis and Criminalization in the U.S."  I also served as lead TA, which I am also doing this year.  I have a writing fellowship in the winter, when I plan to defend my dissertation, which is on globalization and the political economy of narco-governance.  My Political Geography article finally came out in January, it's pretty much the introduction to my dissertation.

Dena Aufseeser

This past year, I successfully passed by preliminary exam, presented a version of my work on tourists’ interactions in Cusco at the AAGs in Boston, and participated in an interdisciplinary graduate conference here at UW, sharing my research on volunteer work with children in Peru.  This summer, I used funds from a FLAS award to go to Cairo, Egypt and learn Arabic, and then attended the International Geographers’ Conference in Tunis.  I received the Duggan Fellowship from the Center for Labor Studies and will use funds from that to continue to develop my research related to child poverty in Peru. 

Angela Leung

I was the teaching assistant to Dr. Dorothy Paun at College of Forest Resources for ESRM 320 & ESRM 321 from Summer 07 to Winter 08. This is my first time TA business courses to non-business majors and graduates. I enjoyed this teaching experience greatly.

I also taught two quarters at Green River Community College last year on a few sections in Introduction to Geography and Introduction to Human Geography.  This independent teaching experience in a community college environment enriched my teaching portfolio.

Arnisson Andre Ortega

In June of 2008, I went to University of Colorado for a Summer Short course on Environmental Demography. In addition, during October of 2008, I presented a paper at the Southeast Asian Graduate Student conference in Cornell University titled "Unpacking Manila’s Desakota: Tying Filipino Migration and the Secondary Circuits of Capital in Residential Spaces." For the 2009 AAG, I am a panel organizer for a session titled "Our Cohort’s Response:  Graduate Students and the (Re)Theorization Project in Population Geography" as well as presenting a paper titled:  " 'Bahay' and  'Bayanihan': Situating the Geographies of the Habiting in the Neoliberal Context." I am also planning to attend ICAS 4:  Think Asia! in Daejeon, Korea on 6-9 August 2009 where I will give a paper titled "The Demographic Emergence of a Desakota:  Spatio-Temporal Trends and Patterns of Population Growth and Migration in the Manila Mega-Urban Region." I’m also currently working on a collaborative research project with two junior demographers in the Philippines entitled "Manila Desakota Project." I am also serving as the newsletter editor of AAG's Population Specialty Group in addition to co-organizing the 2008 Graduate Student Orientation with Tish Lopez. Finally, I volunteer with the Lifelong AIDS for the Chicken Soup brigade every Tuesday and I run with the Seattle Frontrunners.

Caroline Faria

This year I have been continuing my research on gender, nationalism and South Sudanese diasporic politics. This included projects at the start of 2008 on the annual Miss South Sudan beauty pageant and on men, masculinities and nationalist music in the US-based diaspora. I presented two papers from this work at this year’s AAGs and at a conference on Feminist and Queer Geographies at Leeds University in the UK and I also attended a conference on Critical Geopolitics at Durham University in September. Since August 2007 I have been conducting research with the South Sudan Women’s Empowerment Network, observing their leadership trainings in DC, their negotiations with international donors and the new Government of South Sudan, and helping to organize one of the largest national women’s conference since the signing of the peace in 2005. This was a really rich and exciting experience involving over 200 women leaders from all over the country and it was also was a fascinating opportunity to spend time in the capital of South Sudan as it goes through a rapid period of change. I will be presenting a paper based on this project at the African Studies Association meetings in Chicago in November.

Matthew W. Wilson

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.