Mary Washington Geography

Dawn Bowen Wins Award

Stephen Hanna — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:49:09 +0000

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Dawn Bowen, professor of geography, for winning the Grellet C. Simpson Award at the 2012 Commencement Ceremony on May 12. The Simpson award is considered UMW’s most prestigious annual award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.

As her current and former students all know, Dawn’s dedication to student learning inside and outside of the classroom is unparalleled. From introductory courses to her field programs in Guatemala, she works harder than any other member of the faculty to develop course content that will enrich student experiences.

The presentation of the Simpson Award was, of course, the highlight of graduation for her colleagues in the department. But I do not want to slight the 25 Mary Washington Geographers who earned their degrees in December 2011 or walked on Saturday. Once again, many of our graduates earned cum laude or higher status. Congratulations to the class of 2012!

UMW Geography Spring Banquet and the “Unterschenkel Projection”

Stephen Hanna — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:25:36 +0000

Unterschenkel Projection?

Our annual symposium was a great success and, as always, ended with our banquet down at Brock’s where we celebrated student accomplishments, caught up with about a dozen recent graduates, and learned about a new map projection – the Unterschenkel Projection (see picture). We had a great turn out to honor the new members of Gamma Theta Upsilon and to congratulate the Class of 2012.

The presentation of the Geography Alumni Scholarship is always a special moment at the banquet. This year Ethan Bottone (2014) earned the honor. Not only has Ethan impressed us in the classroom, but he also won a Writing Center award for a seminar paper and was one of the best undergraduates at the annual World Geography Bowl competition at SEDAAG.

Wes Roberts earned the Palmieri Award, given to a non-senior geography major who demonstrates excellence in introductory and upper level courses. We were happy to present the NCGE Excellence of Scholarship Award, given to the student who has an enthusiasm for and commitment to Geography, to Mohammad Mesbahi.

The Maury Award, presented to the student who excels in geographic techniques was given to two students this year, Morgan Lamon and Krystal Hawkins. In addition, now that the GISc Certificate program is in its fourth year, we felt it time to begin recognizing the best students in that program. The inaugural winner of the new Geospatial Technologies Award is Photios Katsourakis.

The last two awards are reserved for our top graduates. This year’s Lewis and Clark Award winner is Amy Leap who earned the highest GPA in geography classes. The Straw Award, presented to the senior who exhibits the most professional potential for scholarly contributions in Geography, was won by Brian Brown (who also won an award from the writing center)

Geography Symposium Schedule

Stephen Hanna — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:49:53 +0000

Tomorrow (April 18) is the day for the Nth Annual Geography Department Symposium! Highlights will include talks on post-earthquake development in Haiti, fair trade, the geography of hate crime, and landscapes in science fiction film. All are welcome to come to Monroe Hall to see the great stuff Geography students have accomplished this year!Here is the complete schedule:

Morning Presentations in Monroe 240

9.00: Rachel Sheets: A Galaxy Not So Far Away . . . . A Talk on the Science Fiction Film Landscape

9.25: Tayler Stuger: Fair Trade

10.00: Brian Brown: Memory, Tourism, and Authorship: Making Sense of the Cambodian Genocide at Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek. (research partially funded by Geography 50th Anniversary Endowment)

10.25: Andrew Devereux: Gentrification: The Schools of Thought

11.00: Colin Hess: Post Earthquake Development in Haiti (research partially funded by Geography 50th Anniversary Endowment)

11.25: Morgan Lamon: Hate Crime in America: A Geospatial Perspective
12.00-2.00 Poster Session in Monroe 319

Variety of posters from GEOG/GISC 351 Spatial Analysis

Afternoon Presentations in Monroe 240

2.00: Evan McLaughlin: Anarchism in the Media: Dominant Narratives, Counter-Narratives and the Limits of Legitimate Dissent

2.25: Rachel McGuirk: 21st Century Racism: The Changing Geopolitical Discourse of Undocumented Migrants

3.00: Nora Allen: Mapping Historic Resources

3.25: Krystal Hawkins: The interrelated nature of the factors of food accessibility in Nunavut

Learning from Haiti: Development through Home-Grown Capacity Building and Group Organizing

dnrallis — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 19:07:52 +0000

In this guest blog, Dr. Dawn Bowen, Professor of Geography at the University of Mary Washington, writes about a journey she and UMW Geography major Colin Hess made to Haiti in April 2012. During the first week of April, Colin Hess and I undertook a truly transformational journey. We traveled to the island nation of Haiti; the only country in the world with a last name: “The poorest country in the western hemisphere.” Despite U.S. Government warnings about travel to Haiti (the Department of State strongly urges U.S. citizens to consider carefully all travel to Haiti), we were neither robbed, raped, or murdered. In the view of U.S. authorities, this might be considered somewhat miraculous. Not only did I survive, but I returned with a powerful sense of what Haitians can and have achieved, witnessing their organization and capacity building. I also learned about the demoralizing, destabilizing, and dehumanizing influence of NGOs and missionary groups on the Haitian people (I make this last comment knowing that I may once again be labeled as the anti-Christ or being in bed with the devil.) Every day, I was impressed with the Haitian people and their organizations. OP7G was the most amazing. [...]

A Shrinking World (for some)

dnrallis — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:23:01 +0000

It’s now 6.15 am on Monday February 27, and I am sipping a cup of coffee in Suvarnabhumi Airport, Bangkok’s new, gleaming and vast international air gateway. I arrived here late last night on a journey that began on Saturday in Richmond, Virginia, when I boarded 7.40am flight for Chicago. There I connected to a 16-hour nonstop flight to Hong Kong, followed by a short 2 1/2 hour hop to Bankgkok. In an hour or so, I will leave here on Thai Airways for Phnom Penh, a journey of less than an hour. All being well, I will reach my final destination some 37 hours after departure; of that time, I will have spent about 22 hours in the air. This sounds like a grueling journey and, sitting in a cramped economy class seat of a full aircraft, I must admit that it is an experience I did not relished. But then I got to thinking about the discussion we had in one of my classes last week about the first European ships making their from Lisbon to Malacca (in modern-day Malaysia) in the early 1500s. This journey, which would have covered a distance roughly the same as mine, took the better [...]

Mary Washington Geography – Past time for an Update

Stephen Hanna — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 14:47:25 +0000

Such a busy winter, but now our early and very warm spring has taken root and it is past time to up date you on what Mary Washington Geographers are up to.

Our current crop of students are, as always, garnering well-deserved recognition. Ethan Battone (2014) and Brian Brown (2012) each won a Writing Center Award for their seminar papers last month. In addition, Brian was selected for an internship at the National Geographic Society – continuing the tradition Mary Washington geographers getting this highly competitive positions! And, as just posted on Mary Washington’s homepage, Ethan was awarded a trip to the Association of American Geographers’ Annual meeting in New York because of his stellar performance at the SEDAAG Geography Bowl.

Recent graduates have good news to share as well. Sarah McNeal (2011) now has a position with the Bank Information Center where she does research and writes reports on IMF and World Bank programs in Asia. Meanwhile, Kristen Cutler was admitted and awarded funding to the geography graduate program at Syracuse University.

Faculty are busy too. Next year we’ll launch a new minor in Urban Studies (thanks to Melina Patterson’s hard work!) and we’ve received support form both the Administration and faculty for our proposal to start a Masters program in GIS. Assuming the program is approved by the state and we receive the funding for the new faculty we’ll need to ensure that the new program will only enhance our undergraduate programs, we hope to enroll the first masters students in Fall 2014. Finally, the Center for Spatial Analysis and Research (CeSAR), established by Brian Rizzo, has several students working on projects for the Virginia Department of Mines and Minerals and Marstel-Day, an environmental consulting firm located in Fredericksburg. Another CeSAR project funded by the National Park Service will start soon as well.

The Department’s annual Spring Symposium and Banquet will be held on April 18. As always, all Mary Washington Geographers are welcome! Contact me (shanna@umw.edu) or Jackie Gallagher (jgallagh@umw.edu) for more information.

A temple in Cambodia: Phnom Chiso

dnrallis — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:59:32 +0000

Cambodia is best known for Angkor Wat, the vast temple built in the first half of the 12th century by King Suryavarman II to honor the Hindu goddess Vishnu (and, more than incidentally, himself too.) Angkor Wat, though, is by no means the only temple dating back to the days of the Angkor empire. Nearly a hundred other temples dot the landscape around Angkor, and many others are to be found in other parts of Cambodia. Phnom Chiso is one of these temples, located atop a hill in Takeo Province, about 60 km south of Phnom Penh. This temple is older the Angkor Wat; it was built in the 11th century. Though damaged by American bombing during the war in Southeast Asia in the 1970s, much of the temple still stands. You can see some of the remains of the temple in this short video I made in December 2011. In the opening segment, I try to give an idea of the landscape around the temple; a landscape very typical of much of southern and central Cambodia. It is flat, and sugar palms dot the landscape, surrounded by rice paddies (most of them recently harvested when the video was taken.) [...]

It takes a village, and more: A development project for young women in Guatemala

dnrallis — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:42:57 +0000

Guest post by Dr. Dawn Bowen, Professor of Geography at the University of Mary Washington. In January, I traveled to Guatemala to interview young Maya women who had received scholarships so continue their secondary education. An organization, Community Cloud Forest Conservation (CCFC) run by Rob and Tara Cahill and several Guatemalans, began providing small scholarships for young women, aged 13-24, about seven years ago. Its goal was to accomplish two things: 1) educate young women, thus producing better educated mothers who would raise healthier, fewer, and better educated children, as well as providing them the opportunity to become teachers or nurses, or any other occupation of their choosing; and 2) train them in agroecological techniques that would help directly improve the nutrition of their own families and help conserve the remaining cloud forest. I spent a week with many of these young women, talking about what they had learned and what they hoped to achieve. I also saw the end product of their five week course, where they had developed a proyecto de vida, or life project, a tangible goal that [...]

Emerging Red Sea Island

zac25 — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:43:41 +0000

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.… Read the rest

Cambodia Study Abroad Program a great success

Donald Rallis — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 07:54:01 +0000

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.