Our Colloquia Series presentsÌýengaging research from around the world. Guest presenters cover variedÌýtopics from all aspects of Geography. This page lists abstracts from past and future colloquia.

Poster of event

von Dreden Stacey Fellowship Fellows Presentations

Sept. 14, 2018

Hattie Houser (advised by Joe Bryan) Documenting Femicide In Mexico: Connecting the Disappeared to a Larger Body Politic Abstract : Femicide, the disappearance and death of women due to their gender, is occurring throughout Latin America and increasingly within Mexico. In Mexico, this issue has been connected to a myriad...

 image of 8 globes showing DJF surface temperatures 1979-2012

The CESM Large Ensemble Project: Inspiring New Ideas and Understanding

Sept. 7, 2018

While internal climate variability is known to affect climate projections, its influence is often underappreciated and confused with model error. Why? In general, modeling centers contribute a small number of realizations to international climate model assessments [e.g., phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5)]. As a result, model...

Graphic of Earth with GIS satellite lines surrounding it

The Implementation and Effectiveness of GIS in Education

Aug. 31, 2018

How is Geographic Information Systems (GIS) taught in formal and informal educational institutions? How should it be taught? Due to the advent of web GIS, the open data movement, citizen science, mobile field apps, maps as a storytelling medium, and other forces, spatial thinking through geotechnologies is being increasingly valued...

Public postings on a board with various posters and info in a foreign language

Michael Dwyer: Territorial affairs: Legacy and invisibility in the global land rush

April 27, 2018

Over the last decade, transnational farmland deals in the global South have become increasingly prevalent and controversial. Framed by scholars as a new global land rush, these deals have highlighted the link between the shifting geopolitics of development cooperation and intertwined problems of food security, climate change, and global trade...

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American Association of Geographers Preview: Student Talks

April 6, 2018

Four Geography graduate students will present a preview of the talks they will give at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) meeting in New Orleans April 10-14, 2018: Sarah Tynen : State Territorialization through Bureaucratic Control: Authoritarian Governance at the Neighborhood Level in China By building on the concept of...

A visualization of openflights data using graph drawing

David O'Sullivan: Reimagining GIScience for relational spaces

March 23, 2018

A mismatch between largely absolute Newtonian models of space in GIScience and the relational spaces of critical geographies has contributed to mutual disinterest between the fields. Critical GIS has offered an intellectual critique of GIScience without substantially altering how key geographical concepts are expressed in data structures. As an example...

Statues on a Chinese city street

Andrew Grant: Ethnopolitics and the Chinese City: Urbanizing Tibetans during the era of Commodity Housing

March 16, 2018

This talk explores how China's urbanization program is recasting the politics of place in the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau, Xining. Urban development discourse and practice is transforming increasing numbers of China’s ethnic population into de-ethnicized urban citizens under the the sign of the Civilized City. The state deploys...

computer graphic of aerial shot with roads, city, and open country

Kathleen Stewart: Big Data GPS Trajectory Analysis for Travel Activity Modeling

March 9, 2018

We have been applying big geospatial data processing techniques to vehicle GPS data collected over several months in 2015 for Maryland roads in order to reconstruct spatiotemporal vehicle trajectories and understand how the volume of traffic varies on different types of roads. Volume of traffic or vehicle miles traveled estimates...

Map of geographical distribution of tornado and flash flood warnings

Jennifer Henderson: A Hazard Multiple: The Co-Production of Tornado/Flash Flood Warnings in a National Weather Service Forecast Office

March 2, 2018

During a tornado outbreak in May of 2013, a family of seven took shelter in an underground culvert in Oklahoma City, fearful, no doubt, for their children’s lives; minutes later, they were swept away in flood waters that raced through ditches and culverts near the city, killing all of them...

Woman squatting, burying head in arms, in front of earthquake devastation of Sichuan China

Christian Sorace: The Mirage of Development: The Sichuan Earthquake, One Decade Later

Feb. 23, 2018

As we approach the 10th anniversary of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, it is worth reflecting on the post-earthquake reconstruction from the perspective of what was built, why was it built, and ultimately for whom was it built? Based on my book Shaken Authority: China’s Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan...

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