• 11:45-12:45 GTU Induction Ceremony - Old Mill 225 

• 1:55-2:45 Open Class: Geography of Race & Ethnicity in the US, Prof. Rashad Shabazz. Laf. 108

Tuesday, Nov. 13

• 11:30-1:00 Film “Radiant City” in John Dewey Lounge; with GEOG175 (Urban)

• 4:00-5:15 Open Class: Weather, Climate & Landscapes, Prof. Beverley Wemple, Rowell 103

Wednesday, Nov. 14

• 10:30-12:00 GIS Open Lab & Demonstrations, Lafayette 203

• 12:50 Open Class: GEOG085 Remote Sensing – come see student presentations, Lafayette 309

Thursday, Nov. 15

• 5:30-6:45 Alumni Panel – what have UVM Geography graduates done since graduating? With GEOG203; John Dewey Lounge

Every day events

• Info & Games Table in Old Mill Annex 9:00-4:00

• Treasure Hunt: get a game card at the info table

• Tower Tours – meet at the info table, 9-4

• Travel Slide Shows @ Info Table

• “Question of the Day” at the Davis Center Marketplace       

• Faculty research posterst and powerpoints in Old Mill Annex & Old Mill           

My junior year was spent abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark studying issues surrounding migration and identity.  In Copenhagen, I concentrated my studies on the Danish policies surrounding immigrant integration efforts in the inner city region.   In addition, I gained an understanding of the broader European immigration issues through field visits to Vilnius, Lithuania; Istanbul, Turkey; and the Schleswig-Holstein region of Germany.

When I returned from Denmark, I continued my research in immigration issues by taking several human geography and GIS courses that allowed me to further purse my interests. My senior year was spent working as a Teaching Assistant for Geography 060 and acting as a Research Assistant for Dr. Bose.  I also completed an independent research project on transnational elites and the spatial construction of expat communities in Singapore.

After college, I accepted an internship in Washington, D.C. with the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrant (USCRI) working with the Reception and Placement program.  After a few months, I was offered a full time position with the organization.  I now work as a Program Assistant for USCRI supporting domestic refugee resettlement in six sites across the United States.  In addition, I am the Program Officer for the Citizenship and Integration program in Erie, PA and Raleigh, NC. 

I am grateful to have found such a supportive and tight knit community at UVM’s Geography Department. 

The video and interview set this small sawmill business into the broader context of the US rural economy.

Plus, it features Bela Fleck and the Flecktones in the background.

Check it out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPh2X3Lw1IA

Bobby Sudekum has won the Central NY student of the year award from the American Society for Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing.

Bobby has been invited to the awards dinner in Utica, NY and the award comes with a $1000 prize.

Here is Bobby's story:

I got the idea for Go Force One, by watching a mountain bike film and wondering how they got gorgeously smooth zip-line-like camera angles while zooming through the woods.  It felt as if you were flying next to the biker.  So I began to think, "How can I get this camera angle, but without a zip line?" I remember day dreaming in Economics of Public Policy and the light bulb going off.  I immediately texted my two engineering roommates.  They said it would not fly, it was just too heavy. I spent the next couple of weeks researching for the largest foam glider I could find (within my budget).  I found one for $10 online and bought two. The first design had the camera on the underside of the fuselage, but I realized that it would be more interesting to the eye if you could see what’s in front of the plane. I made this video so I could get the word out, inspire others, and in return maybe my plane would fly better. We are now in the works of building a plane from the ground up. It’s about 1.5 times bigger than the current Go Force One, and I want to put 3 cameras on it .. It’s going to be called the Go Force Bomber.

See the Go Force One

http://vimeo.com/22392382

As a Geography major, I followed the path of a social geographer, focusing on how people and environments influence one another, and seeing how geospatial technologies could visually interpret these relationships.   I was interested in people and places, and had gotten a taste for travel through two different study-abroad programs.  I took a winter session class through the UVM Geography Department in 2006 to Vieques, Puerto Rico which explored the political, social, and physical implications of the United States’ naval occupation of Vieques Island.  I also studied at the University of the South Pacific in the Fiji Islands during the Spring semester of 2008, where I took classes about human rights in the Pacific and Pacific Island biogeography.   I really enjoyed living abroad and was eager to give it another shot, this time in Europe.

I easily found a job with a family in Faxe, Denmark (about 45 minutes South of Copenhagen by car), a few months later my visa was approved and I booked a one way plane ticket to Copenhagen for September 1st 2009. My schedule as an au pair was pretty laidback.  I worked Monday through Friday for a little bit in the morning, had a big break in the middle of the day and worked again in the late afternoon/early evening.  I had a lot of free time which I spent working out, reading, cycling, and relaxing on the nearby beach in warm weather. 

I also got to travel quite a bit over the course of my year in Denmark.  My family was very generous with giving me time off as long as we arranged it in advance.  I visited Germany, France, Norway, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Iceland, Sweden, Poland, Croatia, and Bosnia.  I made very little money as an au pair (only about 550 American Dollars per month, depending on the exchange rate) since I wasn’t paying for rent, utilities, or food but I became an expert on budget traveling and used the site www.couchsurfing.org to stay with locals for free.  I also used the site for social networking in Copenhagen, where I would visit most weekends.  I cannot recommend Couchsurfing enough and I can’t even begin to mention all of the incredibly generous and interesting people I met through it.

After an amazing year in Denmark, I returned to my parents’ house in New Jersey in September of 2010.  I immediately started applying for GIS technician jobs in the New York City area.  There weren’t that many job postings that interested me and I was initially very discouraged since many positions required a master’s degree (I applied for those anyway).  I applied for about 15 different jobs and after about a month of sending applications, I heard back from a private company called ALK Technologies in Princeton, New Jersey, that makes navigation software, about their entry level GIS technician position I had applied for. I went in for an interview, was offered the job about a week later, accepted it immediately, and started work two weeks after that.  I couldn’t believe how lucky I had been to find a job that interested me so quickly!  At ALK, my official title is Network Editor.  I edit geographic data that goes into the navigation system my company makes.  I make sure that streets are in the right place and have correct names, which I do by cross-checking with a variety of different sources such as city and county GISs, Google Streetview, Bing Maps, etc.  It’s a friendly and casual workplace (I get to wear jeans!); my department is incredibly social and made up of lots of interesting, young geographers. 

There are jobs out there for geographers, you just have to look for them and be willing to live in a place like New Jersey (it’s really not bad guys!).  My advice to current Geography students -- take a GIS class.  Although geographical theory is really worthwhile and important, having technical skills will set you apart from other applicants, and get you in the door.  GIS can also provide numerous methods to examine and interpret our fascinating world.

Rashad Shabazz will introduce his longtime mentor in activist scholarship, Angela Davis, before she speaks on March 25, 7 p.m. in Ira Allen Chapel. Learn more about the event. (Photo: Sally McCay)

Surveillance cameras. Confined -- and defined -- spaces. Human interactions through Plexiglas barriers. Hard lives, hardened men. This is prison. But not necessarily one you enter by order of a court, argues Rashad Shabazz, assistant professor of geography. Some prisons you inhabit simply by being poor or working class and black.

It's more than a metaphor for oppression. Based on Shabazz's study of the 1962 Robert Taylor housing project in Chicago, as well as research on South African mining compounds and observations of current communities from New York ghettos to South Central Los Angeles, there is an architecture and landscape designed to exert control.

"Robert Taylor's open spaces," writes Shabazz in a recent issue of the journal Souls, "were 'dead spaces' with no trees, pathways, or playgrounds; tons of concrete isolated residents from the surrounding Black community. Robert Taylor's landscape gave the appearance of openness, while concealing its carceral logic."

There was, he explains, constant policing and surveillance. Interior units were cage-like. With no supermarkets nearby, small corner stores stocked with processed foods and fatty meats contributed to obesity along with the humiliation of dealing with cashiers enclosed behind bulletproof walls, merchandise received through turnstiles.

Robert Taylor was a training ground and one stop on a relentless circuit. As Shabazz quotes a former resident on growing up there, "Prison was just a change of address."

Man in space

This geography of prison culture, the geography that shapes how poor black men define themselves, is central to Shabazz's work. "The way in which black communities are structured -- the containment, the bars, the closed space -- what impact does that have on the body?" he asks, helping further define his research. "What impact does it have on gender performance?"

By way of contrasting the impact of prison on expressions of masculinity, Shabazz notes the tough posturing that even little boys on the playground are subject to. As adults, middleclass white men prove themselves through acquiring property, financial stability, power in the workplace, heterosexual marriage.

The need is ubiquitous in our society, but without access to mainstream norms, prisoners take on an exaggerated masculinity.

"Because of the geography of prison," Shabazz says, "the sheer horror of prison life, the suffering, the isolation, it exaggerates the desire for patriarchal control. Toughness is not only articulated by a posture there, but by bulking up the body, by inking the body. Tattoos say something about pain. There's no need to posture any more."

What prison does to men, so too do the prison-like spaces in which poor black men grow up, and return to, after release from the "inside." In their desperation for credibility, they articulate a will to hurt others; in their powerlessness, they exert control over women and children. They learn, Shabazz says, "a prisonized masculinity, to negotiate and survive violence."

Rap up

This equation between prison culture and inner city black men became so pervasive that it is now iconic, made cool even, co-opted, ironically, by white youth who may not understand the troubled origins of hip-hop.

The infamously violent and misogynistic lyrics of rap music evolved from this phenomenon. The aesthetics that originated in the "'hood," so confounding to much of the middleclass -- the baggie pants, exposed boxer shorts, large T-shirts and bandanas -- is a replication of carceral life. "Prisoners wear baggy clothes," writes Shabazz, "because in prison they do not receive clothes that fit; neither do they receive belts, so that their pants sag."

The implications of creating communities that serve as prep school for prison, having a circular system that feeds what has become a major industry in the U.S., is deeply troubling to Shabazz.

He is a member of Critical Resistance, an organization seeking to abolish the prison industrial complex, co-founded by Shabazz's mentor Angela Davis, professor emerita of history of consciousness and feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz and an activist who spent 18 months in jail and on trial during the civil rights movement.

"The biggest lesson I learned from (Davis)," says Shabazz, "is that my scholarship must have stakes in the greater good.

So he looks for answers in education, ending poverty, in decent shelter and basic freedoms.

"Why," Shabazz asks, "do we keep people in cages? Does it work? It punishes, but does it keep people safe?"