LEXINGTON, Ky. (April 22, 2022) — Eleven university faculty and teaching assistants were recognized by the University of Kentucky with the 2022 Outstanding Teaching Awards on Thursday, April 21, in the J. David Rosenberg College of Law Grand Courtroom.
Some recent kayak trips on the North River near Beaufort, NC (which, naturally enough, is north of North River, SC, but strangely enough well south of the other North River, NC, and even more strangely, south of the South River in the same county) revived some nagging questions about the source of sediment to coastal marshes.
Freshly deposited mud on the North River marshes.
Most of my work in this context has dealt with larger rivers on the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains (drainage basins >15,000 km2) addressing (among many other things) how much fluvial sediment is delivered to estuaries and coastal wetlands, and where within those drainage basins it comes from? Some updates and reminiscences were covered in this post. Essentially, my work (and many others) has found that in many river systems much of the sometimes-considerable sediment loads from the upper watersheds never reaches the coastal zone, being stored as alluvium in lower river reaches. Much of what does reach the coast derives from coastal plain sources near the coast, not from upriver.
Just published, in Ecosystems: Tree mortality may drive landscape formation: Comparative study from ten temperate forests. I am but one of 14(!) co-authors on this, but I've been involved in working out effects of trees on soils and landforms for 20 years. This study pulls together data from 10 protected forests and estimates the total volume of material affected by processes such as tree uprooting, and infilling of stump holes and decayed root channels, focusing on the differences between trees that die with their roots in the ground (eventually broken) vs. those that are uprooted. Uprooting-related soil volumes accounted annually for 0.01– 13.5 m3ha-1, reaching maximum values on sites with infrequent strong windstorms (European mountains). The redistribution of soils related to trees that died standing ranged annually between 0.17 and 20.7 m3ha-1 and were highest in the presence of non-stand-replacing fire (Yosemite National Park, USA). Comparing these results with long-term erosion rates indicates that tree effects may be a significant driver of landscape denudation. The full abstract is given below.
2021-2022 A&S Distinguished Professor Lecture
Patricia Ehrkamp
Professor and Chair, Department of Geography
Geographic studies of migration have resoundingly demonstrated that the pathways for people on the move are not simple linear trajectories, but routinely involve circuitous routes that may be repeated and often involve a great deal of waiting, on paperwork, at border crossings, in detention, and sometimes in refugee camps. While refugee resettlement offers a hope for durable refuge for some, the naturalization process itself can become another moment of great uncertainty. This lecture is based on collaborative research in four resettlement sites in the US conducted 2016-2019 and funded by the US National Science Foundation (co-PIs Dr. Jenna Loyd at UW-Madison and Dr. Anna Secor at Durham University).
My talk explores the potentially contentious role of the medical waiver form (Medical Certification for Disability Exceptions (N-648)) in citizenship applications. Based on this collaborative work, I argue that medical certification requests deliberated during the naturalization process echo the medico-legal process of initial asylum-seeking, folding structures of scrutiny at time of entry into a similarly distrustful process years later. At both moments, legal terms of credibility can clash with medical knowledge about mental and physical functioning or impairments as certified by medical practitioners. Yet the denial of a citizenship application can prolong the time that one does not have access to benefits like Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which can negatively affect housing, food, transportation, and other daily needs. Thus, the denial of a medical waiver turns a process for making legal disability accommodations into a situation that sustains disabling living conditions while extending the horizon of citizenship. This analysis highlights how thinking critical refugee studies together with feminist disability studies provides avenues of further extending feminist understanding of geopolitical processes and space-times.
The event will be held in person and virtually. To register for the virtual event, click here.
Dr. Brianna Theobald is an assistant professor of history and affiliate faculty in the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Rochester. She is an award-winning teacher and researcher in the fields of U.S. women’s and gender history, the history of Native America, and the history of reproduction. Her first book, Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century(University of North Carolina Press, 2019), explores the intersection of colonial and reproductive politics in Native America from the late nineteenth century to the present. She is currently working on two book-length projects, The Indigenous Clubwoman: Genealogies of Native Activism and Safe Haven: Feminisms and the Domestic Violence Movement.
The Documenting Racial Violence in Kentucky (DRVK) project of the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies will be hosting Mr. John Dalton from the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) on Thursday March 3rd at 4:00 pm in the Young Library Auditorium (room 1-62). Mr. John Dalton has a B.A. in Political Science, History, and Religion from Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee, is a 2009 Stanford Law School graduate, and is currently a Senior Attorney for EJI. The EJI is a program, “committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.” DRVK’s aim is to collect biographies to memorialize victims of lynching in Kentucky from the end of the Civil War to the mid-twentieth century. The talk, “Community Remembrance: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Injustice in America,” will build upon the work of the DRVK and EJI.
The talk is sponsored by the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies, African American & Africana Studies, the Gaines Center, the University of Kentucky History Department, the University of Kentucky Geography Department, and the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law.
The Low of Scale Independence has just been published in the journal Annals of GIS (vol. 28, p. 15-29). The article is open-source, and the full text can be obtained here. The abstract is shown below. This artiicle represents a summary and synthesis of my thoughts and research on scale linkage over a period of more than 35 years.
