Tag Archives: GeoSym

Presenting (Virtually) at UTK Geography Symposium ’21 this Friday

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Time to shake off the dust and clear off the cobwebs! After a year bereft of conferencing, I’m excited to announce that I will be presenting my research on using music videos to teach Geography this Friday morning at 11:30 AM ET. Anyone interested can access the Zoom Link here, and the password is “geosym2021.”

My presentation is entitled ‘Dreaming of Distant Pleasures: Teaching Geography with Music Videos,’ and I’ll paste the abstract below. I’m looking forward to seeing some old friends/colleagues and finally getting a long-in-the-works piece of pedagogy work out there. Hopefully this will see the light of day in some journal before too long.

“See” you on Friday morning if you want to check it out! The rest of the 2-day schedule is available here, with links.

Music videos are unmistakably geographic. Academics have been preoccupied with them since long before MTV, culminating in what cultural critic Simon Frith said, by 1988, had
“generated more scholarly nonsense than anything since punk.” Despite videos’ potential for communicating and understanding sense of place, however representative, geography research on the cultural constant has been limited. Even more limited has been any approach to using music videos to teach geography. In my time teaching undergraduate courses on World Regional Geography, the Geography of Popular Culture, and related cultural topics, music videos have consistently provided valuable perspective into how artists represent and reproduce place. Additionally, the reoriented access to music videos in the streaming video era, especially those previously propelled by heavy rotation on MTV, MuchMusic, and an array of upstart cable networks in the late-20th century, has given life to countless forums of (often highly personal) open-access ethnographic content. This paper seeks to build off of Smiley and Posts’ (2014) foundation on the valuable role that popular music plays in geography pedagogy. Using multiple examples of videos and video-related assignments, I argue that music videos provide an excellent foundation for communicating and understanding the relationship(s) between music, memory, and place.

Sources Cited:
Frith, Simon. Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Smiley, Sarah L, and Chris W Post. “Using Popular Music to Teach the Geography of the United States and Canada.” Journal of Geography 113, no. 6 (2014): 238-46.

UTK GeoSym 2021: Call for Abstracts!

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Through February 26th, the GeoSym committee (Geography Grad Students Research Symposium) at the University of Tennessee are accepting abstracts for their 2021 meeting (online), rescheduled from 2020. I’ll share their CFA below, with contact information for the co-chairs, Danny and Lindy. I had the privilege of chairing this biennial event in its second occurrence in 2016, and I echo their remarks that it’s a wonderful, congenial place to present new research, especially for first-timers.

Donghee Koh tells Matt Miller to talk to the hand as Brooke Pearson helps check people in (2016).

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: GEOSYM 2021

We are pleased to welcome you to GeoSym 2021, the student-led conference for geography at the University of Tennessee. This year, GeoSym will be held on Zoom from Thursday, March 18th to Friday, March 19th.

If you are looking for a place to share your research in a relaxed, genial environment, this is a great option. Opportunities exist for undergrads, grad students, and faculty to present their research in a series of panels and presentations. We also welcome professionals employed in geography and related disciplines to present their research.

EVENT KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Dr. Latoya Eaves is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Dr. Eaves’ research focuses on critical approaches to race, gender, and queer geographies with a regional focus on the U.S. South. She is a member of the Governing Council of the American Association of Geographers and is a co-founder of the AAG Black Geographies Specialty Group. Dr. Eaves earned her PhD in Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University (Miami, FL) and previously served as assistant professor at Middle Tennessee State University (Murfreesboro, TN) before joining us at UT.

Dr. Stephanie Shepherd is an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences at Auburn University. Her research is focused on fluvial geomorphology, anthropogenic impacts on riverine systems, and GIS applications to these topics. Dr. Shepherd earned her PhD in Environmental Dynamics from the University of Arkansas (Fayetteville, AR) and previously served as assistant professor at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania (Bloomsburg, PA) and as visiting assistant professor at Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster, PA).

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Registration for GeoSym 2021 is free. Sign up at this link between now and February 26, 2021. Abstracts and scheduling information are submitted at this same link.

We look forward to having everyone join us and please do not hesitate to contact us with questions.

Danny Burow (dburow@vols.utk.edu)

Lindy Westenhoff (lwestenh@vols.utk.edu)

GeoSym 2021 co-chairs

Helen Rosko presents her SEDAAG-award (TM)- winning research on the Moonshine industry (2016).

GeoSym 2018 Call for Papers!

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I’m very excited to pass along the Call for Papers for the third installment of this great little conference. I’m biased because I was the chair for the second installment in 2016, but this time around it’s in great hands with my good friends and colleagues Savannah Collins-Key, Emma Walcott-Wilson, and others from the GeoGrads. Savannah was an outstanding co-chair in 2016, too; I’ve gone on record before about all the work she did organizing the paper sessions and basically ensuring that I didn’t burn the whole thing down.

Also, this year’s keynote speaker, Dr. Marshall Shepherd, is one of the biggest authorities on climate and landscape in the Southeast. His name has been getting bigger on a near-monthly basis in the meteorology and Weather Channel world, so you really don’t want to miss the chance to see him speak in this smaller-scale setting.

At any rate, it’s free to submit and participate (a rarity among any kind of academic conference), and you have the rest of December to get your papers ready. Paper deadline is January 1st, 2018, and the Poster deadline is January 15th. More information can be found at the departmental website here or on the Facebook Page here.

GeoSym2016: A Look Back

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I’m excited to report here that my first foray into academic conference production was a success! The 2nd biennial University of Tennessee Geography Research Symposium (or GeoSym2016, thanks to colleague Alisa Hass for the truncated and easily hashtaggable nickname) took place earlier this month on February 5th and 6th at the University of Tennessee. We are currently working on putting updates and links to all of these on our official departmental page, but I figured I would use my personal site to dig into the event a bit more.

In many ways, this event built on our debut Symposium in 2014. The committee, headed by me and my good friend/colleague Savannah Collins, chose to hold the Symposium a bit earlier in 2016 than they did in 2014, for a couple of reasons. We wanted to make sure that it happened early enough in the semester to avoid any of the stresses that build up toward spring break. We also wanted to make sure to give our participants a good breather in between this and AAG (which will be held earlier than usual this year, the final week in March, in San Francisco), all while providing a window during which to edit and improve their paper talks where needed beforehand.

One of GeoSym’s greatest strengths, as a small conference, is to provide a platform for more embryonic and ambitious research, where researchers can share their ideas in a lower-pressure environment, not subject to perceived pillorying from a room full (depending upon your time slot) of high-pressure academics at one of the biggest conferences in the world. While we were walking to dinner on Friday evening, our keynote guest Dydia DeLyser told me how remarkable and refreshing it was to see so much early-stage research coming from so many early-career researchers, who often wait until completely sewing their projects up before daring to bring it to a paper session. I told her how happy that made me to hear.

Speaking of Dr. DeLyser, she was everything I had spent the past year or two hyping her up to be. From the moment she landed in Knoxville, she was engaging, excited for all of our work, and of course encouraging. Her keynote talk was every bit as groundbreaking (materialities are already beginning to gain steam as a concept in cultural geography) as we had hoped, and the well-attended keynote audience on Saturday afternoon certainly thought so. We made a video of Dydia’s talk, as well as the closing ceremony (of sorts; we were pretty informal about it), now up on the UTK Geography Youtube page for anyone who either missed it or just wants to relive the moment, shaky audio and all.

We were also fortunate to have Matt Cook (our committee’s webmaster) and Dr. Liem Tran, both photography enthusiasts, on hand to capture the proceedings. Their full collaborative photoset is here, but I’ve pulled a few of the highlights to paste below here.

Savannah and I help check people in on Friday morning.
Helen Rosko presents her SEDAAG-award (TM)- winning research on the Moonshine industry.
The panopticon setup of the Panhellenic building made for some good photo ops.
It wouldn’t be GeoSym without a cake. An improvement on the Power-T one we had in 2014.
Janna Casperson and Emma Walcott-Wilson are clearly excited for Dydia’s writing workshop.
Donghee Koh tells Matt Miller to talk to the hand as Brooke Pearson helps check people in.
The bulk of our committee, with Dr. DeLyser. A couple people were missing for reasons you’ll understand if you watch the video. L-R Helen Rosko, Hannah Gunderman, Njoroge Gathongo, Dydia DeLyser, Myself, Matt Cook, and Matt Kerr.

Conferences this Spring: GeoSym2016 (2/5-6), SEMSEC (3/4-6), and AAG (3/27-4/2)

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An update to let you all know where and when you can find me and my research this Spring Semester.

GeoSym_flyer11x17.jpgGEOSYM 2016
The University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN
February 5 – 6, 2016

This is not only a chance to see me present some of my research on France, but also visit my first conference as an event coordinator. My good friend and colleague Savannah Collins and I are currently in the home stretch of pulling the final schedule together for the papers, panels, and workshops. It’s been a challenging and already rewarding process, and we’re excited to welcome over 50 scholars, including our keynote Dr. Dydia DeLyser, to the symposium. I had wanted Dr. DeLyser to feature at this event ever since I became the chair of the 2016 event over two years ago now. Her talks on the geographic history of neon light restoration at AAG 2013 and 2014 were as entertaining as they were fascinating. For this conference, she will be presenting on the Geographies of Materiality, focusing on the restoration of three Indian Motocycles [sic]. Our schedule and other details are posted at our Facebook event here, and will shortly be added to the official page on our department’s site here.

 

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SEMSEC
Society for Ethnomusicology, Southeast and Caribbean Annual Meeting
Southern Academy of the Performing Arts
San Fernando, Trinidad
March 4-6, 2016

This sounds horrible, I know. Not that I post a whole lot anyway, but I’ll try to minimize the amount of beach photos on social media so you don’t all get jealous and start plotting my demise. No matter where the conference is held, I’m glad to be able to make my return to SEMSEC with my French DC/punk research in between eating my weight in doubles and sneaking in some scuba diving. Also, if anyone knows where to find the good dusty Calypso records, I’m all about that, too.

 

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AAG
Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting
San Francisco, CA
March 27 – April 2, 2016

I’m excited to see a lot of the usual suspects this time around, even some of the less-than-usual suspects, making the trek across the globe to one of the our coolest and most expensive cities. I’ll be presenting my paper at 6pm on Wednesday, April 30th. I’ll also be performing in the Second Annual GeoSlam! Event. More info on all this as it draws closer.

I’ve got some planning and budgeting to do.

[UPDATE: Deadline Extended!] Submit for the 2016 Tennessee Geography Symposium at UT (Deadline 1/1)

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** UPDATE: DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 1/15 FOR ALL SUBMISSIONS**

Dear colleagues near and far (as well as those I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet),

This is just a call and reminder that the deadline for (free!) submissions to present at the second biennial University of Tennessee Interdisciplinary Geography Research Symposium (or GeoSym) is approaching! Please take a few minutes by Friday, January 1st, and visit our page and form to submit your abstract for your paper, your panel, or your poster (Undergrads have until 1/15 to submit for our poster session).

This February 5&6, we’ll be welcoming keynote speaker Dr. Dydia DeLyser of Cal State-Fullerton to our event. Her presentations have been a highlight of every event I’ve seen her speak at, and her research in the field of cultural geography continues to be groundbreaking. In short, she is not to be missed. Here is some more background on Dr. DeLyser:

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Also, if you haven’t yet, please RSVP to our Facebook event and invite anybody on campus or in the region who may be interested. The more interdisciplinary we get, the better the program.
I’ve kept relatively mum about it on this site thus far, but I’m honored to be one of the chairs of the coordinating committee for GeoSym this year. Anyone who was at the event in 2014 knows and I can’t emphasize enough, this is our event as an organization of Geography graduate students and in representing our discipline on the UT Campus and in the Southeastern Region. It also provides an excellent opportunity to run your research in preparation for AAG or any other conference you may have coming up this Spring. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me or co-chair Savannah Collins (scolli15@vols.utk.edu).
On behalf of the GeoSym coordinating committee, I hope you’re all having a great Holiday season and have a happy and healthy New Year!

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Dr. William Moseley (Macalester College) delivers his keynote speech at the inaugural UT Geography Symposium in 2014. (Matt Cook Photo)