The 3rd Annual Geography Student Symposium

Abstracts by Author Last Name

C F G J L M P S T W

Nick Bauch
Food, Place, and Identity on Via Emilia

This paper examines how food serves as a link between identity and place.   To do this, I look at the production of four geographically indicated, legally trademarked food products from a territory in northern Italy that contribute to Bolognese cuisine: Parmiggiano-Reggiano (Parmesan cheese), Prosciutto di Parma (Parma ham), Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena (balsamic vinegar from Modena), and Prosciutto di Modena (Modena ham).  The process of changing these foods from raw material to an ingredient of a cuisine (the production process) is a way to manifest an identity and a believed tradition of this sub-regional territory.
There are at least four specific ways in which identity is linked to place: landscape, symbol, experience, and social relations. Food plays an important role in all of these elements, making it an unusually strong connector between identity and place.   Food clearly lies in both the cultural and natural realms of our existence, representing one of two major geographic themes in the paper.  The other major theme is the emergence of a Europe more focused on its regions - or in other words, the re-scaling of power from the state to the international (Eropean Unioin) and the region. In 1992 the EU passed a law that allowed food and beverage producers to register their product with the EU for trademark protection. The law promotes the natural and cultural connection of food to place, and promotes the strengthening of regions in the EU.

Dawn Biehler
Who let the dogs out? Urban ecology, pet practices and race in 1970s Baltimore.

Drawing on the methods and concerns of history of science, this paper uses a case study about domestic pets gone wild to propose that urban geographers should examine how animal ecologists have studied the city. The work of urban ecologists (not to be confused with sociologists bearing the same label) does not merely reflect broader discourses on urban topics in ways one would expect from natural science; it also constructs distinct representations of nature, urban life and problems, and exchange between natural and social orders. This paper specifically addresses the work of Alan Beck, an ecologist and public health scholar who in the 1970s studied Baltimore’s stray dog population and recommended strategies for improving human and canine health at the urban scale. Arguing that urban dogs provided an important point of contact between city-dwellers and nature, Beck pressed for more responsible practices among pet owners to ensure healthy urban environments. His observations and recommendations, however, echo traditions of surveillance and the disciplining of space that historians of medicine have documented in other public health efforts. Beck viewed stray dogs through the racialized optic of the current moment in Baltimore's history. He literally mapped stray dog problems onto Baltimore's African-American neighborhoods, and used sociological understandings of communities to explain residents' (purportedly unhealthy) relationships with domesticated canines gone free. Coinciding with the growing popularity of urban ecology and the advent of stricter pet nuisance laws, Beck's work engaged both the materiality and the meanings of animal nature in US cities.
Keywords: urban ecology, animal geography, dogs, African-American neighborhoods, Baltimore

Eric Carter
Health, Disease and Environment: Political Ecological Approaches.

This paper will explore fruitful theoretical and methodological linkages between geographical political ecology and studies of health, disease, and the environment. The field of political ecology recognizes a dynamic and historically-constituted relationship between environment and society, with political economy influencing environmental change at regional, national, and international levels.  Studies of health and disease in geography could profit from an engagement with this field, and likewise political ecology could benefit
from greater attention to issues of human health and well-being. Points of engagement to be discussed include: (1) New approaches to the impact of global and local, short- and long-term environmental change on emergence, resurgence, and distribution of diseases, particularly vector-borne diseases. (2) Re-scaling of the reductionist biomedical discourse, to engage the causes of disease and ill health at many scales of varying importance, which are not merely biological but also social, economic, and political in origin. (3) Exploring connections between political ecological critiques of Western industrial agriculture and health problems of affluent economies, with special attention to the "obesity epidemic" in the United States.  (4) Historical approaches (in dialogue with historical geography and environmental history) to health, disease and environment that would foreground disease ecologies in environmental histories and chart changes in scientific discourses on the relationship between environment and health and disease. This paper will review pertinent current literature across disciplinary boundaries, identify potential intellectual and institutional obstacles to integration, and suggest avenues of political engagement generated from such an integration.
Keywords: medical geography, political ecology, health, disease, environmental change.

Michael Fleenor
Screw the Homeless. We're Homeless too: Homeless ex-Prisoners, Stigmatization and Separation:Transitions from Confinement to Community Re-entry and Homelessness.

Sixteen hundred individuals are released daily from state and federal prisons in the United States. This amounts to 600,000 individuals each year released from the geographically confined spaces of prison to the controlled public spaces of community re-entry. The rate of incarceration in the United States now stands at 699/100,000—the highest rate globally. Males dominate prison and prison-release populations. Race matters since Afro-Americans (12.3% of the US population) account for roughly half of all inmates nationally. Being released from prison to the community may well create higher homeless populations due to inadequate transition planning and the social stigmatization of being both an ‘ex-con’ and homeless as the community seeks to separate itself from these people. Recidivism too is at an all-time rate suggesting, perhaps, that with the increased criminalization of both poverty and homelessness, prisons and jail may well be substitutes for transitional housing and community relocation efforts. New racialized and geographically marginalized spaces have been produced in our cities, including Madison, Wisconsin. Madison, Wisconsin’s own public perceptions towards homeless males and ex-prisoners reinforce the geographic marginalization. There are problems researching this topic due to certain social stigmata at most community levels, including academia. Homeless males need to prove what for others is neither mandated nor stipulated. That is, one’s presence in controlled public space must be for a purpose one can prove.

Adam Grodek
Sedimentation Response of the Maunesha River Watershed to Historical Wetland Drainage in Southcentral Wisconsin - A Preliminary Assessment

Reece Jones
Religion, Identity, and Homeland in Bengal: A Territorial Explanation of Religious Nationalism

Hindu and Muslim communal violence in South Asia is often thought of as a primordial conflict between two historically adversarial populations. However many scholars of the region have shown that up until the late nineteenth century there were relatively few differences between Hindus and Muslims, particularly in rural areas where the belief system was largely syncretic. As colonialism was challenged in the early twentieth century, the meaning of being a Bengali, a Hindu, and a Muslim was contested and redefined while political support bases were developed. In this paper I will point to the territorialization of a Hindu-based vision of the national homeland as the key process in the development of communal difference in Bengal. Once the boundaries of the homeland were delineated and the homeland was linked to the Hindu history of the population, the non-Hindu communities residing there became others, which initiated a contestation of hegemony within the territory.

Stephanie Jones
Agroforestry (Non)adoption and the Dilemma of Participatory Development
in Malindi District, Kenya

In a reaction to top-down, generalized prescriptions for development and conservation in the so-called “Third World,” development and conservation literature since the 1970s has abounded with calls for community participation, local ownership of development programs and the divestiture of decision-making power from powerful elites to the disenfranchised poor. Community based, environmentally sustainable development, hence, has become the new orthodoxy in development work, and donor institutions such as the World Bank and the European Union incorporate mandates for local participation and local benefits in many of their projects.
One such project—funded mainly by the European Union—began in 2001 in Coast Province, Kenya, to conserve coastal East Africa’s largest remaining stretch of indigenous forest, long under assault by local communities extracting trees for subsistence and commercial purposes. Founded in the principles of participation, “the Project” attempts to generate local support for forest conservation by trying to increase agricultural productivity and encourage farm forestry practices. Halfway through this 3-year enterprise, I interviewed beneficiaries from the local communities on the adoption (or non-adoption) of agroforestry and farm forestry technologies to assess the Project’s impact on land use practices. I found that adoption was generally low by May, 2003, but in a later trip in January 2004, I discovered that interest had grown for at least those trees whose timber and other products fetched the highest price. However, markets, water availability, and many other issues remain to be resolved if the Project is to have any impact at all.
Overall, the Project’s impact on local forest-adjacent communities has been significantly lower than hoped for, and I concluded that poor project administration is an important reason. By not addressing successfully the setbacks of tree investment in the project areas, by issuing one-sided directives to the community in lieu of true exchange, and by ending with little to no support for continued programs, the Farm Forestry Project will fade into oblivion. I believe that much of this is due to an incorrect approach to community-based, participatory development. Like any business, community-based conservation and development project demands a product that is attractive to locals—practically and financially. Condescending treatment of project “participants” merely apes true participatory development, generating local reliance on hand-outs (a.k.a. “incentives”) for participation rather than convincing communities that tree-planting is a desirable and profitable enterprise worth their own investment.

Chris Limburg
Making Place with the Mind: Groundwork for an Examination of Deity Yoga and its Implications for Place

Deity yoga is a tantric meditation found in High Asia in which the practitioner identifies herself with a tutelary deity. The meditator imagines herself accruing the qualities of a particular deity in order to transform her mind into the mind of the deity: the mind of enlightenment. Part of the practice is imagining the deity's divine palace as the residence and environment of the deity and thereby of the practitioner herself. The deity-yogi creates a homology of her place and the place of the deity; she now lives in a divine environment populated with other enlightened beings that foster her divine being.

How does this imagined landscape play out when the meditator leaves the cave? Is the imagined environment relevant beyond the personal practice of the meditator? This paper aims to investigate the possibility that such a landscape shapes the ethics of the practitioner such that they create new, and perhaps better, places. The practitioner weaves an imagined landscape that may have real effects on their own experience as well as the intention with which they act upon their world. Is there an ethic implicit or explicit in this practice? These questions all beg an examination of this practice as a method of creating place.

This paper will attempt to lay groundwork for geographical examinations of the meditation and ritual practice of deity yoga. The discussion will search out contemporary geographic ideas concerning the construction of place that might yield insight into the relationship of deity yoga to the landscape in which it is practiced. Finally, the paper will suggest that an ethic lies at the heart of deity yoga's influence on landscape.

Devon W. Liss
Effects of logging on stream hydrology in a high permeability watershed: upper Oconto River of northeast Wisconsin.

Amplified storm runoff is commonly associated with forest clearing. The extent of this impact is evaluated through an investigation into the relationship between storm runoff and a suite of climatic and land cover variables in the 1826 km 2 upper Oconto River watershed of northeast Wisconsin for the period 1914-2000. Sensitivity to storm runoff is analyzed using least-squares regression and correlation analysis. A regression model including all independent variables explains 48% of the variability in per unit of precipitation storm runoff. A stepwise regression model explains 47% of the variability. Short-term antecedent temperature and long-term antecedent precipitation consistently account for storm runoff fluctuations in stepwise regression models. Physically, these variables act as proxy measures of storm runoff potential by conveying soil moisture conditions as well as water table and capillary fringe levels. Storm runoff is not influenced by widespread forest cover change during the study period due to the imprint of late Pleistocene glaciation, which facilitated the development of soils with extremely high infiltration capacities on a landscape with relatively low relief and low drainage density. These conditions maximize infiltration. Key words: hydrology, runoff, logging, Wisconsin

Amanda Moore
Initial Exploration of a Fuzzy Logic-based Approach for Predicting Local Soil Variation

Brenda Parker
Sex and the City: Gendering Neoliberalism

Michelle Schenck
The Rural-Urban Continuum in Gabon: Transmission of a Cultural Preference for Bushmeat

Across the tropics, forest-dwelling people hunt wild game, or "bushmeat" in Central Africa, as it is the best way to obtain protein in a dense forest where livestock production is difficult and importing meat is not economically feasible.   Individuals who reside in rural Gabonese villages are likely to prefer and consume bushmeat frequently due to its historic and contemporary availability and low price (or lack thereof), which has created familiarity with and habitual consumption of bushmeat and an associated cultural significance.   The tradition of eating bushmeat is transferred into urban areas due to the rural-urban continuum in which migrants do not make a complete break from their rural roots once they move to the city.   Urbanites can reconnect with the rural experience through bushmeat consumption, and bushmeat may become a cultural heritage item in which consumers are willing to pay more for it than domestic alternatives. In this presentation I will examine the significance of bushmeat to both rural and urban communities, and the problematic distinction between subsistence and commercial hunting.   Understanding who is driving the demand for bushmeat is critical to developing equitable and sustainable management policies for an unsustainable bushmeat trade.

Michael P. Smith
Optimal DEM resolution and neighborhood size for soil resource inventory using the SoLIM approach

Soil resource inventories using Geographic Information System (GIS) based soil-landscape models need terrain characteristics (such as slope, aspect, curvature, etc.) computed from Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) as inputs. These terrain characteristics are computed over a neighborhood (spatial extent). The objective of this research is to investigate the effect of DEM resolution and neighborhood size on soil resource inventory using the Soil-Landscape Inference Model (SoLIM) approach. The effect of the neighborhood size on soil resource inventory is examined through computing the required terrain characteristics using different neighborhood sizes for 10ft., 30ft., and 90ft. resolution DEMs. These characteristics are then compiled and used to create SoLIM derived soil series maps. The following three hypotheses are tested in this study: 1) for a given resolution DEM, there is a neighborhood size at which soil survey conducted using the SoLIM approach is optimal; 2) the optimal neighborhood size is the same across DEMs of different resolutions.
Field work was completed on a hillslope in Dane County, WI in the summer of 2003 and was used to validate the results of the SoLIM derived soil series maps. Two transects were run in different landscape positions and are used to assess how well the soil series maps capture the transition of soils across space. In addition, point samples were collected and are used to assess the effect of smoothing small terrain features—the process that occurs as the neighborhood size is increased. Results from this experiment show that while increasing the neighborhood size over which terrain characteristics are computed does produce more accurate map products, there is, however, no optimal neighborhood size to use for a given resolution DEM .

Aaron Stephenson
Crossroads: The Environmental History of the Black River Country

Established in 1818 as a small sawmill and trading post by a French voyageur from Prairie du Chien named Rolette, Black River Falls is one of the oldest communities northwest of the Wisconsin River. Benefiting from its unique location at the convergence of three geologic regions and also on the banks of the falls of an otherwise navigable river, the city has served throughout its history as the commercial hub of the surrounding region. From logging to farming to specialized resource cultivation and finally tourism, the economic development of the city of Black River Falls has directly affected the environmental history of the entire Black River Country. However, the single most important element in the history of the community has been the cross-river trade of lumber and agriculture. The fortunes of the area have always been dependent upon it, and although the forest has been recreated to suit the needs of the city and the region, both have shown considerable resilience through land stewardship and clever land use.

Travis Tennessen
Prairie to Plow and Back?: Landscape Change in the Upper Mineral Point Branch Watershed, Iowa County, Wisconsin, 1832-2003

After the arrival of Euro-American settlers in the 1830's, the Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin experienced waves of lead miners and farmers who dug up, bought, sold, fenced, and plowed the former prairie and oak savanna and fundamentally changed the character of the land. Today, as agriculture wanes and suburban houses begin to dot the landscape, it is important to reflect on the changes in hydrology, soils, and land-use that have occurred in the last 170 years. This paper examines the post-settlement landscape history of the Upper Mineral Point Branch, a Driftless Area watershed just north of the 3rd oldest city in Wisconsin. Starting by reconstructing the pre-settlement landscape recorded by federal land surveyors in 1832, I focus on the impacts of agriculture and other human activities on the streams, soils, and vegetation in the watershed and the recent trend of decreasing agricultural land-use and increased forest cover, conservation reserve land, and non-farming homes. My analysis of soil profiles truncated by historical erosion indicates a loss of about 46 cm of topsoil on the upland drainage divide. Re-surveying of channel cross-sections recorded in the 1832 survey shows that many channels are narrower than they were in 1832, indicating recovery from increased runoff and flood peaks that would have characterized the watershed during the apex of agriculture. My analysis of aerial photos through the 20 th century reveals waning agricultural use, especially in the lower parts of the watershed, and recent DNR-supported tree plantings indicate great landscape change should be expected in the upcoming decades.

David Waskowski
Urban Landscape and Belonging: Symbolic Exclusion of Ethnic Others in Sweden

Ethnic identity is commonly promoted through architecture and the design of the urban landscape.  In our own student union, for example, the Ratskeller beer hall imposes on us a German ethnicity.  But German-ness is kept somewhat in check in Wisconsin, as other ethnicities make themselves recognized and are celebrated.  By contrast, in Sweden, one ethnic identity dominates over all others, which is, of course, Swedish.  A crucial component of Swedish ethnic hegemony is its reproduction in the urban landscape, a process that contributes to decisions of who should be allowed to belong, to feel accepted, in Sweden’s society.  Because of its frequent use of symbols, the reproduction process is seemingly benign.  But it in fact helps to marginalize Sweden’s ethnic others, leaving a sizable number of people, including native-born citizens, feeling excluded, ignored and out of place.

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