Communities have been faced with mobility and environmental challenges over decades. For example, the reliance on automobiles have led to decreased physical activities, increased air pollution, and transportation congestion in cities. Efforts to develop healthy, sustainable transportation and environmental systems often include provisions for increasing rates of active transportation and offering environmental exposure assessment to inform health-promoting policies. With rapid development in sensor technologies and geospatial techniques, opportunities arise to upgrade the solutions. This talk will introduce ongoing efforts in leveraging air and mobility solutions to address environmental and transportation barriers. Case studies in monitoring and modeling of air quality and mobility will be introduced. Particularly, experiences in field work, sensor technologies, and model development will be discussed.

Tianjun Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health at University of Kentucky. With background in exposure assessment and urban planning, his research focuses on leveraging sensor technologies and geospatial techniques to develop health-promoting community-based air and traffic monitoring campaigns and empirical models.

Between 2014 and 2020, the Large Lots program sold hundreds of city-owned lots for a dollar to property owners across Chicago's South and West Sides. While Large Lots helped return land to tax rolls and offset its holding costs, the city cast it as an effort to empower residents and turn vacant lots into vibrant neighborhoods. This talk examines the labor of making vibrant neighborhoods. Against its erasure by the city planning imaginary, I situate this labor as an important dimension of life's work under regimes of organized abandonment and their attendant economies of real estate speculation. Through interviews with lot owners, I demonstrate that Large Lots reconfigures relations of responsibility around vacant land in ways that enroll residents' social reproductive labor of land care into the production of investable landscapes. Through a property records analysis, I show that Large Lots establishes renewed channels for speculation in program neighborhoods. These findings situate social reproduction as a generative vantage point for critical understandings of real estate speculation and the uneven geographies of life-making it engenders. I conclude with a critical reflection on deeds registries as archives within which to trace speculative real estate investments and the layered histories of dispossession that constitute their conditions of possibility.


Dr. Rea Zaimi is a critical urban geographer whose research and teaching center on the political economy of housing and real estate in US cities. Dr. Zaimi's archival and ethnographic research examines how historic property regimes structure contemporary processes of speculative and predatory real estate investment, and their implications for housing precarity and life's work in Chicago and Atlanta. Her work is committed to advancing our understanding of the mechanisms that embed social difference within the economic and institutional infrastructures shaping access to shelter. Rea earned her MA and PhD in Geography at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is an Assistant Professor in the Urban Studies Institute at Georgia State University with a faculty affiliation in the Department of Geosciences. 
 

Join us Thursday afternoon 10/31/24 from 12-3 at Alumni Commons.  Geography faculty will be on hand to talk to students about GEO classes and becoming a geographer!  We'll also have a raffle for map prizes, and cake while it lasts!  Hope to see you there!

As part of Geography Awareness week, we invite you to attend the "Geoguesser" Tournament Wednesday 10/30 at 6:00 in WT Young Library, room B-28B.  There are prizes for winners and pizza while it lasts!  Hope to see you there!

The University of Kentucky Department of Geography invites you to our 9th Annual Harrison and Eva Lewis Bailey Distinguished Alumni Lecture. Harrison and Eva graduated from UK; Eva from Psychology in 1948 and Harrison from Geography in 1949. Read more about the fund here, established by Harrison in memory of Eva. 

Prof Eugene McCann, Simon Fraser University
9th Harrison and Eva Lewis Bailey Distinguished Alumni Lecture

Moving ideas:  Policy mobilities, social movement studies, and the spatialities of political activism
This paper attempts to create a conversation between the literature on policy mobilities and the one on social movements. The policy mobilities literature is concerned with the production and circulation of policy ideas, knowledge, and models among localities across the globe, with a focus on hegemonic policies. The social movements literature addresses counterhegemonic political activism at scales from the local to the global. I argue that the notion of ‘moving ideas’—ideas that are moved from place to place and that move people to political action—creates a space for fruitful a dialogue. The policy mobilities literature could benefit from paying more attention to counterhegemonic politics, as discussed in the literature on social movement activism. By the same token, the social movements literature could benefit from many policy mobilities concepts that elucidate how and with what effects ideas travel. The paper builds a conceptual framework by drawing together a series of concepts: situated knowledge on-the-move; persuasion, coalition-building, and policy counterpublics; activism, truth-spots, and the grip of encounter; generative failure and the temporalities of moving ideas; and futuring. The paper grounds its discussion in the case of the global circulation of ideas developed by the harm reduction social movement. This movement promotes non-punitive approaches to drug use and I will focus specifically on harm reductionists’ campaigns for Supervised drug Consumption Sites. This case is the subject of a book, currently under contract with the University of Minnesota Press.

Schedule of Events, Friday November 8, 2024:

• A Friday Afternoon Address by Prof Eugene McCann (PhD Alum 1998), Simon Fraser University, W.T. Young Library, Alumni Gallery, University of Kentucky at 3:00pm.
• A Reception at the Bingham Davis House of the Gaines Center for the Humanities, immediately following the lecture.

Dr Eugene McCann is a Professor in the Department of Geography and an Associate Member of the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. He received his PhD in Geography from the University of Kentucky, and his MA in Geography from Miami University. McCann is an urban geographer whose research focuses on the political struggles, strategies, practices, and negotiations that characterize urban policy-making. He has published three books: Urban Geography (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, authored with Andrew Jonas and Mary Thomas), Cities and Social Change (Sage, 2014, edited with Ronan Paddison), and Mobile Urbanism (Minnesota, 2011, edited with Kevin Ward) and over 50 journal articles and book chapters. 

Please contact the Geography Department's office for more information about joining us for the Bailey Alumni Lecture.

Past Speakers

• Carolyn Gallaher (PhD, 1998), Professor, American University [2023]
• Sarah A. Moore (PhD, 2006), Professor, University of Wisconsin [2022]
• Aretina Hamilton (PhD, 2018), Director of DEI, Brandeis University [2021]
• Mark Graham (PhD, 2008), Professor, Oxford Internet Institute [2019]
• Mary Gilmartin (PhD, 1995; MA, 2001), Professor, Maynooth University [2018]
• Edward Carr (PhD, 2002), Professor, Clark University [2017]
• Jamie Winders, Chair and Professor (PhD, 2004; BA, 1998), Syracuse University [2016]
• Vincent Del Casino, Jr. (PhD, 2000), Vice Provost and Professor, University of Arizona [2015]

https://geography.as.uky.edu/bailey-alumni-lecture

The Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky will be hosting an online information session for prospective MA and PhD residential graduate students on Wednesday, October 23 , 2024, at 4pm Eastern (EST). Join via Zoom link further below. 

With 20 faculty and more than 50 graduate students, the Department is known for world-class research and graduate education. Faculty and graduate research is organized around interrelated thematic clusters:

• Black Geographies
• Critical Financial Geographies
• Critical Mapping and GIS
• Digital Geographies
• Environmental Geographies
• Political Ecology
• Political Geographies
• Feminist and Queer Geographies
• Social Theory
• Urban Geographies

Read more about these research clusters, here: https://geography.as.uky.edu/geography-research-clusters.

Admitted MA and PhD students in our residential program are supported through fellowships, teaching assistantships or research assistantships, all of which include a stipend, tuition scholarship and student health insurance.

The deadline for applications is January 15, 2025. Read more about the application process, here: https://geography.as.uky.edu/admissions.

Join from PC, Mac, Linux, or mobile device: https://uky.zoom.us/j/4073288434

The Department of Geography would like to invite their Undergraduate Majors and Minors to a 'Welcome Back' event (with pizza!) to celebrate the new Academic Year.  The event will be held in the WTY Library basement in room B-28A on Wednesday October 9th from 3:00-5:00.  Hope to see you there! 

From simple tables to complex database searches, humans have created countless technologies for finding just the right data at just the right time. One such technology is the slide chart: a handheld device for on-the-fly calculations and information lookup. Slide charts typically consist of layered pieces of printed cardstock, plastic, or metal, which you can slide or turn to line up the pieces and reveal your desired information. The metal foot measurers at shoe stores are slide charts, as are slide rules and analog flight computers. While the term may be unfamiliar, the objects themselves are surprisingly ubiquitous, finding their way even today into homes, cockpits, classrooms, and healthcare facilities. Slide charts complicate the narrative of print culture smoothly giving way to digital culture, and this presentation uses slide charts as cyphers for examining what information people value and how we’ve chosen to organize, access, and use it over time.

Lauren E. Cagle is an Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies and Director of Environmental and Sustainability Studies at the University of Kentucky, where she is also Affiliate Faculty in Appalachian Studies. Cagle is also the co-founder and Director of the Kentucky Climate Consortium (KYCC), a multi-institutional network of climate teachers and researchers in Kentucky higher education. Her teaching includes courses on scientific, environmental, and technical communication, and her research focuses on overlaps among digital rhetorics, research ethics, and scientific, environmental, and technical communication, frequently in collaboration with local and regional environmental and technical practitioners such as the Kentucky Division for Air Quality, the Kentucky Geological Survey, the UK Recycling Program, and The Arboretum, State Botanical Garden of Kentucky. She is currently writing a book on slide charts for the Parlor Press X-Series.