Critical Approaches to Place NEH project featured in El Paso Herald-Post
My new National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funded project with Dr. Kerry Banazek, “Critical Approaches to Place: Teaching Narrative Mapping in Southern New Mexico” was featured in the El Paso Herald-Post:
“What is a map? What do maps do? How do they entice, lie, tell stories, reveal cultural values and participate in complex histories?
Those were some questions faculty, researchers, and graduate students at New Mexico State University (NMSU) recently explored in an interdisciplinary workshop, thanks to a $149,890 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The event, which was held Aug. 4–6, kicked off a three-year project focused on critical approaches to place and the environment.”
Faculty Position at New Mexico State
I have accepted a position as an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at New Mexico State University. I greatly enjoyed my year as a visiting faculty member in 2017-2018 and look forward to continuing on as a permanent tenure-track faculty member. This fall I will teach World Regional Geography and Cultural Geography. I look forward to jumping into new research and writing projects in the Chihuahuan Desert and the Land of Enchantment. Stay tuned…
Sessions at 2018 AAG
I will contribute to a number of teaching-related sessions at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) conference in April 2018 in New Orleans. I am presenting a paper (“Southwestern Road Trip as Experiential Field Course”) in the “Experiential Learning in Geography Education” session on Tuesday, 10 April. I am also part of a panel on “Building the Geo-Humanities” on Friday, 13 April. On Saturday, 14 April, I am the discussant for a session on “Place-Based Pedagogy and Learning.”
Visiting Faculty position at New Mexico State University
I have taken a position as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Geography at New Mexico State University (NMSU) for the 2017-2018 academic year.
NMSU is in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in the shadows of the new Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument. My students and colleagues are great. My NMSU Department of Geography page is here.
Climate Change & Poetry Course at the Poetry Center
See a blog post about my upcoming community course “Climate Change & Poetry” at the Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS) webpage here.
from the post:
There is not one climate change; rather, there are many climate changes. This refers to both the physical science—the awareness that different regions will see different effects—as well as to the social perception of climate change. Alternate frames place it, for example, as an environmental justice issue, a national and global security issue, or an opportunity for social change. As recent provocative books and no less than the Pope have pointed out, climate change calls capitalism itself into question.
American Landscape Field Course Featured in UA News
American Landscape Field Course at Spiral Jetty May 2015
A UANews piece published today features the American Landscape Field Course that I recently taught at the University of Arizona. In the course (GEOG 407/507), we hit the road for a 10-day road trip throughout the greater Southwest, visiting iconic land art sites such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, as well as iconic places such as the Grand Canyon and Glen Canyon Dam. We visited with Matt Coolidge at Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Wendover residency site; with Sara Frantz, archivist at the Center for Art + Environment; with Jeff Brown at Sagehen Field Station in the Sierra, where we visited Helen & Newton Harrisons’ Force Majeure plots; and with many others along the way. In the geographic tradition of field learning, we camped along the way, and we had an ongoing discussion of the many ways to approach and think about landscape—environmentally, artistically, politically, culturally.