Detroit, Eminem and Chrysler’s Geographic Imagination

Like many geographers, I found myself intrigued by the Super Bowl advertisement that Chrysler ran, a two-minute piece featuring musician Eminem and trumpeting the city of Detroit.  It’s an interesting ad for a number of reasons.  Certainly part of the intrigue comes from Detroit’s position as the butt of jokes, and the focus of umpteen photo essays of its landscape of decline.  The left points at the city as evidence of the failures of capitalism, while the right claims its decline was caused by strong labor unions and too-big civic governance.  Either way, with a city population rapidly declining — down below 900,000 by latest estimates, less than half its 1950 peak — and the associated economic and fiscal problems, we can all agree that Detroit has its problems.

A lot of the debate over this ad thus far has been about the Detroit imagination presented in the ad.  Some praised the ad as being (finally) a positive piece about a city that desperately needed it, and truth of life in the city for disbelievers.  Others said the ad was full of falsehood, empty praise for a place beyond broken.  Of course, we should all remember that Chrysler’s presentation of this place, whether “true” or “false” was a message with a purpose, and that purpose is to sell cars.  The most powerful tool that advertisers have is the evocation of emotional response, and doing so effectively sells product.  I mean, think about it: the other advertisement to gain rave reviews from this year’s Super Bowl was the “Little Vader” piece from Volkswagen, one of Chrysler’s competitors.  Why?  Well, who hasn’t imagined themselves trying to use The Force, or hasn’t seen their kids doing the same and wished it’d come true if only for an instant?

Two effective car commercials, neither of which featured much about the cars on display.  That’s not an accident.  Cars themselves don’t typically arouse the same emotions as childhood memories.  Chrysler tapped into something different, an emotional response that is perhaps nearly as powerful: the tendency to root for the underdog.  It happens in sports — what basketball fan hasn’t cheered for a tiny 16-seed school in the NCAA tournament who find themselves tied with Duke as the clock runs out? — it’s used in movies and television, and Chrysler’s asking you to root for the underdog with your next car purchase. It’s an interesting emotion to ask for, and the ad does so effectively, by presenting an imaginary that’s on track with what we’ve seen in those photo essays, to a point.  The ad brings something different to the mix: that amongst these ruins, there’s still 900,000 people, and those people are proud of their city with all of its faults.  I’ve always rooted for Detroit, but at the end of the first viewing, I was genuinely excited to see the big comeback this ad was inherently promising.  I don’t think I was alone.

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“Imported from Detroit.”  That’s the advertisement’s tagline, and it’s from this line that I think we can sense a certain disconnect.  Of course, there’s the obvious one, that something from Detroit is obviously not imported, because this city is still part of the United States, though it’s an obvious hat-tip to Italian automaker Fiat’s freshly minted ownership of Chrysler.  In that alone, it seems nothing more than a clever play on words.  I think there’s more to it, geographically speaking.

I think the concept that these cars are “Imported,” in a way, necessarily distances Chrysler from urban geographic imagination that it’s promoting in this commercial.  Certainly, Detroit has its problems and the ad embraces those to a point, strictly for an emotional response.  By suggesting that something could be imported from Detroit, a political, economic and ultimately spatial separation is suggested through language.  It’s implied that Detroit’s many problems, those which give it the underdog status, are distant from those viewers who are supposed to be rooting the city on.  Those problems, while scary, don’t actually threaten the viewer/consumer.  Indeed, to threaten the viewer/consumer with images of economic instability undermines the goal of the commercial (spending) by prompting thrift, and the purchase of a brand new car is never a thrifty decision.

But as Foucault reminds us, in any discourse, what is left unsaid is just as important as what is said.  In this case, Chrysler conveniently discards causality in this advertisement.  Regardless of your opinion of the genesis of Detroit’s decline, I think we can agree that Chrysler played a big role.  Chrysler automobiles have never been known as terribly reliable, nor very high quality.  This reputation had drastic, long-term consequences: the company nearly collapsed in the late 1970s, before being rescued by Lee Iacocca. Despite inventing the minivan and buying the plucky Jeep brand in the 1980s, Chrysler again nearly died in the 1990s before being purchased by Daimler.  Even Daimler, the folks behind Mercedes-Benz, couldn’t save the company, unloading Chrysler to a private capital company in the mid-2000s before being it was purchased in bankruptcy by Fiat.

Like other Detroit brands, Chrysler was unwilling to compete with imports on quality and value through the latter decades of the 20th century.  The brazen ignorance of the Big Three automakers, including Chrysler, to changing demand and their seemingly incompetent and belated attempts to adapt proved costly to both their reputations, and to the city. The old business model no longer worked, destroying the companies’ solvency.  Instead of competing through innovation, the automakers sought profit by slashing costs, building products of diminishing quality, automating the workforce and outsourcing jobs.  Beyond all of those factors that pundits bicker about, the loss of those good-paying jobs is what put Detroit on life-support.  Chrysler was one of the guilty parties, and building decades of junk cars didn’t entice consumer demand and bring jobs back.

By the 1990s, damage was already done, to both Detroit and to Chrysler.  Residents streamed to the suburbs, leaving Detroit with a further diminishing taxbase to fund its social needs and sending the city into further down the seemingly endless cycle of decline.  Chrysler’s reputation hit rock-bottom, and its sales suffered. Chrysler wasn’t alone in its tarnished image; though less effected by the quality fallout, both GM and Ford lost millions of customers to imports.  By 2011, being labeled as a “domestic” car was a liability for the automakers.  GM promoted its cars as “German-inspired,” while Chrysler labeled its new 200 model, one that’s marketed as better than the cars it used to sell, as “Imported from Detroit.”

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The ad’s effectiveness is unquestioned. By the end, even skeptical viewers want to see Detroit succeed, making the ad’s argument, that Chrysler’s success is Detroit’s success, seem palatable.  Constructing a geographic imagination of Detroit as a soulful, proud place that just needs a hand proves to be an effective, if exploitative, device for selling.  Certainly Detroit’s decline is sad, the ad tugs at those heartstrings and makes you root for that comeback so those proud folks who live there can have a city worthy of such braggadocio.  However, by mobilizing this imagery of this city, and tagging the ad as “Imported from Detroit,” Chrysler seeks to distance itself from culpability for the city’s long decline.  It isn’t the same Chrysler that helped pull the rug out from this place, the tagline reminds you.  It’s a different Chrysler that’s learned its lesson, now featuring “imported” cars that will somehow enrich a downtrodden sorta-American city with its profits.

In essence, the geographic imaginaries Chrysler presents are a spatially cognitive dissonance.

Mapping (Geo-)Autobiography: Travel

A lot of travelers — and especially geographers — like to keep track of numbers of places they’ve been…. countries, states, continents, capitals, everything. It’s a nice way to reflect upon past experiences, and yes, of course, brag to one’s friends about those travels.

A couple of my colleagues, Nick Wise and Emily Fekete, produced what they called “County Life Maps” earlier this year, highlighting the counties they had visited in the United States, and urged me to do the same. I was more than willing to oblige, and so I came up with this (kind of hideous looking) map to share with them, showing that I had visited 1340 counties in 46 states:

I know, not my best cartographic work, but it was done in a half-hour’s time using an open-source GIS on OSX (that was back before I discovered Parallels and was still experimenting with that stuff).

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about the importance of autobiographical geographies (“geoautobiographies?”) and how they shape personal experience, memory and perception. It is difficult to write about these geoautobiographies without going into tremendous depth because sharing the full richness of a personal sensory experience is a difficult task to verbally express.

So, I thought, what about making some maps? I’ve done it a little bit in my brief exercise in impressionist geography (“50 States, 50 Words“) and well…. making maps to express an autobiographical experience — in this case, travel — isn’t too easy. Sure, the map above shows counties that I’ve visited. It doesn’t show where I’ve visited in those counties, how often I’ve visited those counties, how long I spent there, or how recently I had visited. It’s a pretty one-dimensional display in that way. Okay for what it is, but it needs more detail.

Now, to be fair, I couldn’t add more detail to these displays at the county level without spending a considerable amount of time and energy, doing significant autoethnographic research with my family, recording each vacation and each trip with impossibly significant detail that memory simply doesn’t permit. So, I’ve zoomed out to the state level for this little exercise in geoautobiographical cartographic visualization, and used states in the U.S. Sure, I’ve been outside the U.S., but I am fairly proud of my depth of travels within this country.

So, let’s start out with states I’ve visited. Simple enough:

Black means yes, light gray means no, easiest map to ever make. I’ve been to 46 out of 48 states. I’m hoping to get to New Hampshire and Maine this summer. Alaska and Hawaii are probably more distantly in the future. Of course, this map suffers from the same problem as the “County Life Map” in that the data is treated as a container binary — meaning, the map either has a “yes” or a “no,” with no room for additional detail in terms of spatial differentiation, frequency, or temporal occurrence.  I made it this ugly ugly black to point out the flaw of this binary.  In other words, a state I lived in for 24 years (Indiana) gets the same symbology as states I visited once for 35 minutes (Delaware).

How to remedy? How about looking at intention behind the visit.

Obviously, the number of options have increased, though I’ve used a qualitative symbology again because it’s difficult to make an intention quantitative. Instead of two classes, I’ve got four: have lived there, have visited as a destination, have visited but not as a destination, or have not visited. Part of the goal of choropleth maps, though, is to differentiate spatial data. In this case, over 75% of our data points are in the same class: states I’ve visited as a destination.

Let’s go quantitative, then. How about number of visits, which I’ve reckoned from an approximation of number of times I’ve set foot in the state. It’s a difficult thing to put together, though my memory of travels is probably better than any autobiographical memory, and in some cases these are best guess estimates.

Now, looking at this map, a couple of things stick out to me. For one, it just doesn’t feel right. Most experienced cartographers will tell you that, if they’re familiar enough with the data, the map has to present that data in a way that “feels” right. That’s one reason I think that cartography course should never, EVER be eliminated by GIS courses, but I digress. Point is, this doesn’t pass the feel test. Why? Number of visits seems to privilege proximity to home; indeed, small trips or even the running of errands can easily take someone to a neighboring state. At the same time, though, it also privileges drive-through states. I’m not saying these states are like McDonald’s, it’s just that some of these states (Tennessee, Georgia) just happen to be on the routes to destination points (Florida) and hence received two visits from me during each family vacation. One reason it doesn’t feel right, though, is that much of the traveling I did, especially as a child, was to drive somewhere and stay at that destination for a week or more. In this case, those destinations only get one visit per trip, even though the experience of being there measures far more in my autobiographic narrative. So, let’s look at how many times each state was a destination for a trip.

 

This map is a bit more reflective of my travel patterns, I think, because it manages to display that quality of intention in a quantitative fashion (number of visits). But then again, I think this is too raw. Sure, Kentucky may have been my destination seven times, but I’ve been there many many more times. Shouldn’t the fact that most of my visits to Kentucky are drive-throughs impact how I look at the state? Sure. So, here’s a map looking at percentage of times each state was a destination, out of total visits.

But I’m still not happy with it, because it doesn’t necessarily speak to how much impact the state had on me during my visit. Certainly the five destination-aimed trips to South Dakota are significant, but isn’t it more significant that I’ve chosen to spend 51 days of my life there during those four visits?

So, let’s try number of days spent in each state. Again, details are fuzzy, so in some cases, it’s an estimate, though I’m pretty confident in those estimates:

Now, this map “feels” much better. Florida and Colorado are lit up significantly, as they should be. Family vacations to Nevada, Washington DC, Michigan and Chicago also show up. Okay, maybe I should account for the fact that, after I made the effort to visit these places, I obviously spent different amounts of time in each. To do this, I went ahead and figured the number of days per visit, to combine the two quantitative maps into one normalized data set:

 

I like this one as well, because it highlights some important trips in my life. Sure, the old favorites of Florida and Colorado are still apparent, but now too are the longer times I’ve spent in the southwest, which was particularly important to forming my world views during my adolescence. These maps aren’t bad…. but they’re not everything either. Though South Dakota and Iowa also show up strongly (as they should; I spent 30 days in each for music camps during high school) they do not reflect the fact that it’s been a significant period of time since those long stays (South Dakota in 1998, Iowa in 1999).

So, now to add the temporal aspect. Year of last visit is the first step:

Of course, as is expected, it gives us nothing for frequency, but everything for currency.

I can add one detail to it, and that’s the qualitative attribute of intention. Here is a a map showing year of last visit as a destination, as that second step:

In each of these maps, you can clearly see my major trips for the year: Indiana to visit family, Washington DC for AAG 2010, Pittsburgh for our anniversary, and Kansas for GPRMAAG and to visit Emily.

But are these the most current? Because we are talking about experience, mental mapping and perception, shouldn’t I also include considerations for places I have concrete plans for visiting during 2011? That certainly affects how I’m thinking about places and even perceiving them.

This one shows the states I’ve already made plans, ones that are pretty much concrete, for visiting in 2011:

Yeah, it looks like I’ve got a busy year coming up, and I do…. but many of those states that I’m visiting in 2011 are a result of the long-way trip we’re taking to get to AAG 2011 in Seattle (Amtrak to San Francisco, rental car up the coast to Seattle with some dear friends, then Amtrak back to Cleveland). Everything else is from probable conferences. Of course, one of the very plans I mentioned way back at the beginning (a trip to New Hampshire and Maine, to finish out the lower 48 on my list) isn’t highlighted because it’s not set in concrete just yet.

Once again, though, the future plans map, like the visits map, prioritizes drive-through (or in this case, rail-through) states. What if it’s destinations only?

(Cartographic notes: All data classes broken using Jenks Natural Breaks Optimization method of classification, and colors provided for my colorblind ass by the incredible ColorBrewer resource. The base map is one I personally made a very, very long time ago.)

Video: I Need an A

So, I’ve been snowed in a while, and it’s right at the end of the semester, when the weeping comes from underachieving students via e-mail. And that, plus XtraNormal, equals my venting response. For all teachers everywhere….

Yes, I have heard just about everything this young lady says. I changed some aspects of the details to protect the guilty parties, but I have had people make up family deaths, draw pictures on exams, write essays insulting me, write really juvenile papers… and still demand an A.

UPDATE: Thanks to wide response from a number of people wanting to use this idea in their syllabus, I’ve provided a family-friendly version.  It’s posted below.

Geographic Literacy: Our Job Isn’t Finished

This week is Geography Awareness Week, a designation that started in 1987 via presidential proclamation to promote geographic literacy in education and in the general public.  Each GAW has a theme; this year’s is freshwater, which isn’t a terribly interesting topic to me personally.  But, as an educator and a geographer, geographic literacy is something I find to be quite important.

Many semesters, in one or more of my teaching affiliations, I am assigned sections of World Regional Geography.  This course, which typically emphasizes helping students achieve a broad familiarity with all areas of the world using the geographic perspective of space and place, is usually a difficult one to teach.  Quite simply, the goal of this course is to provide a baseline of geographic literacy for students as part of a broader university education.   However, there is just too much real estate and too many details to cover, and to do anything or anyplace some form of justice in coverage, the semester moves far too quickly.  Add to this that many students walk in believing that the geography course is nothing but the memorization of maps, and instructors of World Regional Geography have a real challenge on their hands.

Of course, we all know that maps are not the end-all, be-all of geography; far from it, maps are only a small part of what geographers do.  At the same time, though, maps are useful tools that are crucial, especially to beginning students, in helping represent the world and provide a basis for understanding the more interesting aspects of our field.  With all of this in mind, I’m bringing forth an activity that I do on the first day of every World Regional Geography course I teach.  After we go over the syllabus, I hand each student a blank piece of Hammermill copy paper and give them the following instructions:

1. Draw a map of the world.
2. Label what’s important.

The open-ended instructions serve several purposes.  First and foremost, it brings a wide variety of responses, displaying the full range of geographic literacies amongst members of the class.  In this way, it’s a proxy, giving me a general idea what hand I’ve been dealt, so to speak, and what knowledges I have in the classroom to build upon.  Of course, as we already said, maps aren’t everything, but letting students draw one from scratch gives us a pretty decent idea what’s in their brains.  Secondly, it gives me a nice segue into an introductory lecture about what geography is, what the course is going to be, and so forth.

Sometimes, I get a few fantastic maps.  Usually, they’re somewhat putrid, as could be expected from a group of folks who’ve (perhaps) never had a class stressing anything approaching geographic literacy.  What’s interesting, though, is to look at these maps and read a bit more into them.

What you’ll see below is a few samples from a composite set of students in my World Regional Geography courses since 2008.  In that time, I’ve taught around 650 students in those courses at three campuses of two universities, all of which were in Northeast Ohio.  From there, I’m keeping all other details moot.  I’ve categorized these maps according to what I think they display, and provided some comments.  Click on any image for a bigger one.

The Really Rough – Sure, I said a lot of these maps are bad.  But there are many different kinds of bad, ranging from having no idea about much of anything on the earth’s surface, to having obviously heard of places before but just having no idea where those places are.  Let’s start with the roughest, and work our way to better ones.

No specificity of any places

 

Some knowledge of just the United States, identifying Canada, but nothing else

 

We’ve got continents, but they’re nowhere near the right places.

 

Lots of places identified, but they’re all a mess.

 

Africa’s to our south, and Mexico is connected to the US by the Panama Canal.

 

This person second guessed themselves…

 

And this one apparently had ice cream cones in mind that day.

 

Missing Continents Not Named Atlantis – I think it’s really interesting to look at some of these maps and notice that, apparently, in the minds of some of these folks, a few billion people just don’t exist.

In some cases, we only get North America

 

In other cases, we only get the western hemisphere

 

Missing both Africa and Asia was surprisingly common.

 

In fact, Africa was the most common omission.

 

Sometimes Africa was joined in its disappearance by Europe, South America and Australia.

 

Yes, believe it or not, Europe even disappeared… more often than Australia or Antarctica, in fact.

 

Peculiarities and Oddities – Sometimes, what shows up on these maps… well, it leaves you scratching your head, or just in wonder.

This one was submitted by a Chinese student.  I found it refreshing the difference of detail, and how fuzzy the Americas were.

 

We now know how to get to Brandon’s house.  We also have the International Space Station and Mars as points of reference… but no Europe.

 

This student had already labeled bodies of water as the Atlantic and the Pacific, and hence didn’t exactly know what to call that expanse between Europe and North America.

 

Ahh, Texas… the testicles of the United States.  And Russia is Dumbo’s geographic incarnation.

 

One recurring theme with this assignment is the usage of insets for Alaska and Hawaii, common on U.S. maps, even when they’re unnecessary.  Are we doing an adequate job of explaining exactly how maps represent the earth if this kind of confusion runs rampant?

 

We’ve got another Alaskan inset, but notice the very thick border to separate Mexico from the U.S.?

 

Intentionally Funny – Some students try to have a little fun with their maps.  I give them props.

 

This one provides the location of Viking Land and the Bermuda Triangle

 

The location of Hogwart’s (complete with a game of quidditch).

 

Tom Hanks and Wilson, marooned in the southern Atlantic

 

Some rather blunt descriptions of places, including a patriotic motif for the U.S.

 

Some Pretty Good Ones! – Just when you’re about to bang your head into the wall, declaring that there is no reason to bother, you get a few like these that give you a glimmer of hope, and keep you fighting the good fight, preaching the gospel of geography to another semester of young minds.

So, there you have it.  Though some of our students come into our classrooms with a pretty good geographic literacy, we should be AWARE (haha) this week that many more of our students are in need of that exposure.   If some students are capable of constructing decent representations of the earth on the first day of class, then every student in the room is potentially capable of doing the same thing, with a little help.  For the future generations to become productive and contributing citizens of the world, we need to help bring our students to a better familiarity with the world around them…. which coincidentally enough, is what Geography Awareness Week is all about.

Geographic literacy is a so important that we must not lose focus on that objective, we must realize that our job is never finished, but that our job isn’t impossible if we work together all levels of educators to emphasize its importance.  And then, if we keep working at it, I’ll get more students with maps like those at the bottom of this entry than those at the top…. and I’ll be able to bring in far more details to understanding the world than just the basics.

Program Note: This is going to be my last blog for until at least next week.  I’m defending my dissertation tomorrow morning, and I’ll be taking the weekend off to relax and enjoy (hopefully) being completely finished.

50 States, 50 Words

Call it “Impressionist Geography.”

Impressionist painting, a largely Parisian art movement from the latter portion of the 19th century, dealt largely with rather pedestrian subject matter on a specific day and time, as it was seen and interpreted by the artist. A number of these paintings were focused on capturing the every-day scenery, as opposed to the exceptional or posed subject matters found in work from the Romantic era.  This has been seen by many art historians as a direct answer by painters to the newly developing medium of photography.  L’Absinthe by Edgar Degas, and Paris: A Rainy Day by Gustave Caillebotte are some notable examples. Other works would interpret a particular scene repeatedly  from one day to the next, creating a series of works with dramatically different results that depended not only on the subject matter itself, but the changing mood and life experience of the artist.  Claude Monet’s Water Lilies is probably the most famous example of this process.

What, then, is the point of this way of thinking? I am certainly not a Parisian painter living 150 years ago. The works by Degas, Caillebotte, Pissarro, Manet and others, those capturing life’s banal moments, serve as interesting windows into the past, as does the photography to which these artists were responding.  But here, I want to branch off specifically to Monet’s approach.  Monet focused on water lilies for most of the end of his career, creating some 250 paintings in the series, each unique and different.  While I could care little about water lilies, looking through the series as a progression gives a window not into the past itself, but into Monet’s life and experience.  Even if I don’t know Monet from Neptune — which, I don’t — it’s still interesting to see how those painting change as his experiences do, and to make inferences about his life.

We basically get to have an interview with a man who no longer exists… and just like any conversation, we project ourselves into forming an interpretation of what he presents.  Sure, his lilies are “pretty” and they certainly brighten the rooms of the galleries in which they hang today.  But to me, the true effectiveness of any work of art, or even any effective visual communication (this map is certainly no work of art…) is whether or not it makes you think about something.

This map is intended to be like one painting in a series of water lilies. The map above is inherently individual, autobiographical, and yes, impressionist. To create this map, I made a list of the states and used free association to compile the very first word I thought of for each state. I specifically tried to avoid city and town names, as well as human toponyms for the physical environment, though a couple of national parks are there.  And so, we have a one-word impression of each of the 50 states, as they existed in my head on the morning of November 9, 2010 at 8:35 am.  It’s a compilation of my experiences to-date, my thoughts, my mood, my brain’s function, my memory, my values, and even my social relationship as it exists at that exact moment in time, and it’s a snapshot.  And what is more banal to a geographer than a map of his or her home region?  If I made the a list of words for each state today, three days later, it would probably be slightly different.  If I was in a more negative mood the third time around, it would probably be even more different.  And so on.

This seems, on a glance, to be nothing more than a narcissistic exercise, suitable considering the innate self-loving evident in most personal blogs.  Is this any different than keeping a stash of old photos of oneself around?  Facebook provides an easy depository for this now, where you can click on your own profile picture and see an album of how you’ve changed, in visual appearance, since the album feature was created in 2006.  You can see your long-haired hippie phase, your goatee phase, and many more… and wow, haven’t you come a long way in just four years?  Such a map provides a snapshot of my brain, a one-time freeze-frame of my mental geography and what that says about me.  If nothing else, I can look back on the map in the future and see where I’ve been, so to speak.

I am purposely not providing any further explanation to the words as they are chosen.  Why?  Because if you look at this map, even if you don’t know me and don’t know a thing about me, you’re going to see these words and begin connecting the dots. You’re going to have your own perception of why I chose the words I chose, and you’re going to come up with other possibilities for your own map. It’s inevitable, because maps draw us in, and make us think.  You’re going to know me a little better than you did before, and whatever ideas you scratch from this map about me will be absolutely 100% true; “knowing” someone is only a compilation of impressions and perceptions about that person, because we can never truly be in their heads or walk in their shoes.

At the same time, while figuring out how you perceive my thoughts, with a little self-reflection, you’ll realize that you’re projecting your own thoughts, feelings and experiences into your interpretation, and then you learn more about yourself in the process.

Playing with Wordle: My Dissertation

My dissertation’s finished, or at least it’s to the committee and the defense scheme is going along as planned. We’re looking at an October 29 defense, after which time I will be Dr. Shears, thank-you-very-much. Of course, all of this assumes no problem. Haven’t heard anything yet from anyone, and they’ve had the draft for right at two weeks now, so I figure no news is good news.

At this point, even if there are problems that I’ll need to fix, they are going to be minor ones. My adviser wouldn’t’ve let me get this far otherwise. With that in mind, it’s time to give everyone a sneak peek of my dissertation.

No, I’m not going to post the 299-page document on here for people to read… who would touch it? (And remember, that’s after I decided to cut a big chapter that basically doubled my analyses.) Nope, I’m going the Wordle route. Wordle is a nifty little tool that anyone can use to make word clouds, based on number of times a given word appears in a text. Using this, I’ve created visual representations of my dissertation, which should give anyone who’s interested an idea what’s there.

You can click on the pictures to get a much larger version, which I recommend so that you can see all of the detail…. if that’s the sort of thing you’re interested in.

This one is representative of my entire dissertation. It includes the 350 most commonly used words, excluding ones like “the” and “and.”

Of course, the document is made up of five fairly distinct chapters.

Chapter One: Introduction

 

Chapter Two: New Orleans

 

Chapter Three: Hurricane Katrina

 

Chapter Four: Discursive Spaces of Safety

 

Chapter Five: Conclusions

 

Yeah, whenever I get the thing defended, revised, 100% finished and submitted, I’ll post a PDF file of the thing on Issuu so everyone can read it.  Might as well try to get more than just my committee looking through this thing, right?

Calling All Geographer Tweeps!

I’m trying to put together something of a master list of geographers and people who do geography that also use Twitter.  I figured it could be useful 0r something.

You can find the list at http://twitter.com/AndrewShears/geography-people Please, please, PLEASE contact me with appropriate additions. I’d like to make this as all-inclusive as possible, because I think one of the problems that geographers too often have is that we ignore the other subdisciplines within our field.

Eventually, when it becomes “more complete,” I’ll publicize the list using the website integration tools that Twitter provides.  I would have put one of those nifty little windows in here with the list syndication displayed live on this page… but then, WordPress decided to suck and strip out all relevant code.  Jerks.

(cross-posted on my Teaching Geography blog).

Grabbing those parts, Cashing them in for scrap

So, my PhD and dissertation are 99.9% complete. It’s about time, right? Editing and defending are the names of the game, which sound easier than they are.

Now what? Well, there are no job prospects. I get that and if you’ve read, well, basically any of my updates for the past three years, you get that too. It sucks to be go through 11 years of higher education and then have few options for the future. Blah, blah-blah, blah blah. Yeah, it’s time for me to get over it. Like John Lennon says, “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” It’s time for me to make other plans, and to move on with life… and ultimately realize that as things currently stand, there’s not a place for me in the academic world for now.

No, I’m not going to drop out and work in a factory, though I’ve threatened it before. I’m going to focus on saving a couple of trees while the entire forest burns. If it doesn’t work, I’ll plant some new ones. I’m going to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic in hopes of improving the buoyancy. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to swim like hell. To gut the metaphor like a rabbit on Roger & Me, I’m going to focus on the shortest of short terms while opening options for the long term. I’ve got a couple old projects to finish, and a couple new ones I want to start. Will these better position me for the future? Maybe, maybe not… but they are things I want to do, and that’s an important focus when the big-world picture has been shredded for the time being.

Basically, I’ve been investing considerable time and energy collecting rare and expensive parts for antique Mercedes on eBay the past 11 years. Starting today, I’m cashing them in for scrap. I’m to the point where I need some return on that investment, even if I’m losing from that return.  I must regroup somehow, right?

Without further ado, my summer plans:

Finish and Defend the Dissertation. First and foremost, goes without saying. Don’t need to elaborate.

Write a Commentary Paper on the Colonial Imaginations of World Cup Coverage. This paper, which’ll be around 1250 words, will basically write itself. It will not take long, and I’ll try to get it published as an intervention in Antipode. (refereed publications scoreboard = 3; already had two)

Work with Emily (and maybe Don if he’s up for it) on a paper about Foursquare. Another paper that should basically write itself, around 3,500 words, melding virtual space to activity space, taking the Marxist bend. This should publish in Geojournal or something similar. (refereed publications scoreboard = 4)

Finally put together May 4 paper. It’s so close. I need to just finish the damn thing and put it out. (refereed publications scoreboard = 5)

Cull two articles from the dissertation. I wrote it with this goal in mind, should be relatively easy. (refereed publications scoreboard = 7)

Develop new curricula for online course. According to my students, the online courses I’ve taught have been a smashing success, and they’ve been thrilled with the one-on-one attention they’ve received.. According to the enrollment requirements that Kent State demands to call a class “profitable,” I’ve kept the enrollment too small to make them happy. I’m currently testing some lessons to make a happy medium.

Launch Geography Teaching Blog. There really aren’t very many geography blogs out there, and there are even fewer ones dedicated to the training of students in our craft (I’ve found only one and it appears to be dormant since 2008) . I think I have some ideas to offer the teaching world in terms of lessons and methodologies. I think, too often, academics really ignore this aspect of our duty. Yes, I know we’re supposed to engage in research and so on, but how will the discipline continue if we can’t equip the next generation of scholars? I’d ultimately like to see this blog turn into a community forum for geography teachers and profs to share lessons and ideas. We’ll see.

Start Animal Abusers project. I’ve gotta lay some political groundwork and acquire data before I can really do much with this. I’ll also have to brush up on my coding skills to make this community sourced GIS project work worth a damn.

Shop Dissertation as Book. Yeah, I just got dumped by Georgia this week thanks partially to the oil spill (my environmental justice work now apparently “doesn’t feel current enough”). I’ve got a couple of publishers in mind, though the main goal is an affordable paperback and possibly ebook edition. I don’t care what marque it’s published under. This is a slightly longer-term goal at this point.

Travel. In the downtime, to maintain sanity and freshness.

Keep Applying for Whatever Jobs. I know, seems pointless at this time. But I’ve gotta keep putting myself out there like a sleaze-ball at a dance club. Eventually someone might take me home!

In the meantime, I’ll also be seeking out options for my future. I’ve given a serious consideration to major career changes. Okay, maybe not what most people would consider “major career changes,” (I’m not going to become a masseuse or a lawyer or something), but big for me.

I’ve done some deep looking into and consideration about getting a high school teaching license. There are several programs that are accelerated enough that I could potentially pull it off in a year’s time. There’s also Teach for America, among other similar programs, which offer the opportunity to learn on the job and partial forgiveness of school loans. They’re competitive programs, but jeez, by then I’ll have a PhD, eight years of teaching experience, and many years of volunteerism behind me. If I don’t get accepted by someone, they’d be crazy… though I’ve thought that in the past.

If for some reason a fourth year on the academic job market proves fruitless, those teaching programs don’t work, and I’m right back where I am today in a year’s time… then it’s time to punt. I’ll take nothing off the table if we get that far into this pointless adventure.

Let’s hope we don’t go there.