Using geography as a common framework...

attribution Jack Dangermond

“GIS is the only technology that actually integrates many different subjects using geography as it’s common framework.” Jack Dangermond

I proudly admit I have been evolving my latest professional incarnation from graduate work as a bench scientist. My thesis was sufficiently technical, Constraints of Landscape Pattern and Fish Mobility on Ecologic Genetics of Lake Trout (Salvelinus namaycush) and Arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus) in Arctic Watersheds and perhaps foreshadowed my current work in geospatial analytics. In a nutshell, I analyzed the population of native species constrained by sequential glacial events.

The lessons from this time were both personal and professional. I defended my thesis while my husband was recuperating from heart surgery. The kindness of my thesis advisor calling my husband to let him know I had successfully defended, warms my heart 20 plus years later.

If you learn nothing at all from exploring new topics, technical or otherwise—look for the hidden details. Read the resource or reference pages. Be wary of agnotology.

I was reading an article found after a colleague recommendation and after reference diving was rewarded with a gem of an article from the Antipode archive.

“Who’s Going to Man the Factories and be the Sexual Slaves if we all get PhDs?” Democratizing Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute by Rich Heyman (Department of Geography and the Environment University of Texas at Austin)

The antipode online is a useful introduction to radical geography. My interpretation is the extension beyond geography as an isolated discipline but an evolving appreciation and alignment with the edges of political history and societal reform. If the topic interests you, Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50 — is a nice place to put a pin.

Being intrigued by both quantitative and qualitative geography I thought you might be too!

Here is the intro to the article:

The story is familiar: in the 1960s many geographers began to feel a disparity between the concerns of academic geography and the profound social and political struggles of the day, around civil rights, poverty, and opposition to the war in Vietnam. This realization forced a break with quantitative geography and led to the rise of a “radical” geography that, according to one of its foremost promoters and historians, Richard Peet, “focused on diffusing a new set of academic values in the form of a different system of disciplinary topics, such as poverty, social justice, and underdevelopment, rather than the grave consequences of the gravity model, like central place theory and the discovery of profit-optimal locations”—Rich Heyman