A new volcanic island is forming in the southern Red Sea,

about 40 miles off the coast of Yemen.

 

Click here to be taken to the full article.

The 2011-12 UMW Cambodia Study Abroad program ended on Wednesday January 11 as the seven participants left Phnom Penh for home. Students were unanimous in their opinion that the three-and-a-half week program was a great success, that they learned a lot, and that they intend to visit Cambodia again as soon as they can.

During their time in Cambodia, students kept a daily blog recording their activities, impressions, and insights. Over the next few weeks, each participant will post a more detailed reflective entry, focusing on specific issues they encountered or places they visited.

Plans are already underway for the 2012 Cambodia Study Abroad Program, which will take place over the 2012-13 Winter break. We will post information here and on the program website as soon as details have been confirmed.

Members of the 2011-12 UMW Cambodia Study Abroad program are in Phnom Penh, and keeping very busy. Students began arriving here last week, and our program began on Monday with a briefing at the offices of the Peace Corps.

The next day we met with Youk Chhang, Director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an organization dedicated to researching and documenting the Khmer Rouge Genocide of 1975 – 1979. This provided an excellent background for our visits later in the day to Tuol Sleng (a Khmer Rouge interrogation center) and Chong Ek (one of Cambodia’s ‘klling fields.’) Difficult though it was to visit these places, knowing about them is essential to understanding Cambodia today.

We had an opportunity to enjoy Cambodian food, multicultural company, and karaoke on Wednesday night at Phnom Penh’s Mother-in-Law Restaurant. Our dinner companions included a group of young Cambodians, a French NGO worker, a Swedish student, and an American English teacher recently arrived here from South Korea. This followed a lively afternoon visit to an orphanage run by a small local NGO, where members of the group chatted with and played games with some of the children.

Independent exploration and a meeting with USAID officials were on the agenda for Thursday, and we spent the Christmas weekend with a family on their farm in rural Takeo Province, a two hour bus ride south of Phnom Penh.

Members of the study abroad group are writing a daily blog as we travel, so please visit and follow along with us during the remaining two and a half weeks of the program.

Part One: The Arab Spring in Bahrain is posted separately. Part Two: The American Fall in Richmond Coming to America In October 2011, explicitly drawing on the methods of Arab Spring protests, the Occupy Wall Street movement began. As in Bahrain (see Part One of this blog), a continuous presence in a public place of symbolic importance was central to the movement’s message and tactics. As the movement’s name made clear, its target was the global corporate elite (which it termed the one percent). Its message was that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of he wealthiest one percent of the population is antithetical to the principles and functioning of democracy, and harmful to the interests of the vast majority of the population (the 99 percent.) The Occupy movement rapidly spread around the United States. From Mobile to Seattle, in public spaces and on university campuses, the tent became a symbol of resistance to corporate greed and the diminishing economic power of ordinary citizens. Tolerance of the Occupy movement among city authorities and the police forces under their command did not last long. By coincidence or otherwise, in late October and early November the crackdown came. From Davis, California [...]

(Part Two: Richmond, Virginia is posted separately.) Part One: Bahrain 2011 has been a year of occupations. From Cairo to Columbus, citizens have appropriated public spaces as sites of protest. They have set up encampments and insist that they will maintain a continuous presence until their demands have been met (as in Cairo) or they are forcibly removed. This latter fate befell protesters in Bahrain in March, and, on a much smaller and less violent scale, in cities around the U.S., including Richmond, Virginia,  in October and November. I visited Bahrain in October, and evidence of the protests and their suppression are still very evident in the landscape of the capital, Manama, and in some villages elsewhere on the island. I live in Richmond, and when I returned from my travels in mid-October, an Occupy Richmond movement had been formed, and was camped out in a city park.  It remained there until it was cleared by police in a midnight Halloween raid. There are many differences between the the Arab Spring uprising in Bahrain and and the Occupy protests in Richmond. But they also have some very significant similarities. First, both were motivated by the belief  among protesters that their countries [...]

In our Fabulous New Monroe, Joe and I have a Pollen Analysis Laboratory. Right now, it looks very bare – a huge fume hood, an emergency shower & eyewash, and stainless steel cabinets…   soon we will fill it with mud and nasty chemicals, on our way to extracting pollen grains from the La Sal Mountains! In the Physical Prep Room, we’ve set up two microscopes…  Continue reading »

Some of Phnom Penh’s poorest residents make a living pushing their carts around the city’s streets, gathering soda cans, plastic bottles, and anything else they can sell for recycling. This short video shows some of these hard-working people going about their daily business.  

In a recent blog post, I discussed various ways in which I have tried to convey what places are like through postings on my site RegionalGeography.org. I use words in writing descriptively and analytically about places, but powerful though they are, words have limitations. I can only describe my own perception and interpretation of a place, for example; I cannot describe how others might see it. Pictures can help: I can take a photograph, and while my own perceptions are inevitably inherent in my selection of subject and photographic composition, there is still a lot of room for viewers to bring their own perspectives to my pictures, and interpret them in their own ways.

But a photograph can only engage one of our five senses, and then only in a static way, recording an instant in time.  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it’s not very good an conveying the smells, tastes, feel, and sounds that are also part of what gives a place its character and uniqueness. Technology isn’t yet up to the task of transmitting feel, taste, and smell, but it is extremely capable when it comes to recording and transmitting sound. Film and video allow us to combine multiple images – thereby recording movement – and overlay them with sound, bringing the viewer/listener both visual and auditory components of the scenes they record.

During my current teaching trip to Cambodia, I have begun to experiment with the use of video in my classes and blog posts, starting with a few brief mini-lectures about the places I have visited. I recorded the first of these from the various airports I passed through on my way here (yes, airports are distinctive places!).  The second was on the banks of the Tonle Sap river (where I talked about its rather strange and important qualities.) I have also taught live classes online from Cambodia, some of them with the sights and sounds of the city of Phnom Penh as a backdrop.

Over the last few days, I have begun what I hope will become a series of short videos in which I try to answer the elusive “What’s it like there?” question.  I don’t do any talking in these videos, I simply record various scenes, and let my environment provide its own soundtrack. So far, I have recorded a video in one of Phnom Penh’s bustling markets, another at a city intersection, and a third on the Tonle Sap River. More are in the works showing the city’s sidewalks and streets as seen from a moving tuk-tuk (motorcycle drawn taxi) and another recorded in one of Phnom Penh’s prime public spaces, the broad sidewalks and park along the Tonle Sap riverside. If this approach works, expect for more “Five Minutes in…” videos in the future.

I hope that you will find these videos interesting and informative, and I encourage you to give me your feedback. Tell me what you like and what you don’t, what you think works and what doesn’t. Post your comments here, on RegionalGeography.org or on YouTube. I am at the very start of the learning curve where video-making is concerned, and I welcome all the help I can get!

I love words, and I am enthralled by the power of language. There is a richness in language that goes far beyond its ability to transmit facts, opinions, or instructions. Words can convey emotion, complexity, character, ambiguity, and humor in ways that go far beyond their dictionary definitions. One of my main objectives on this site is to use words to try and give readers a sense of some of the places visit and people I meet, and to communicate some of what I have learned from my travels. But words, for all their immense power,  just aren’t up to some tasks. They can evoke an image in the mind of a reader, but sometimes the image itself cannot adequately be translated into language, no matter how eloquent the writer.  There is truth indeed in the cliche: a picture (or, for that matter, a diagram, graph, or map) is worth at least a thousand words, and can often express a whole lot more nuance and complexity than words can. That’s why I take photographs, and why they are essential to my writing and teaching. During my travels, I have found pictures a particularly good way to document the ordinary. It [...]