NU faculty and students present at American Association of Geographers AGM
Faculty members and students from Nipissing’s department of Geography and Master of Environmental Studies/Master of Environmental Science program recently travelled to New Orleans for the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting (AAG), April 10-14, 2018. It was a fantastic opportunity, especially for students, as the conference hosted over 8,000 presenters, discussing the latest in research and applications in geography, sustainability, and GIScience. The AAG Annual Meeting is an interdisciplinary forum open to anyone with an interest in geography and related disciplines.
Chair of the Historical Geography Specialty Group (HGSG), Dr. Kirsten Greer, Canada Research Chair in Global Environmental Histories and Geographies of the Semi-Periphery, and Assistant Professor of History and Geography, chaired the 2018 Distinguished Historical Geographer Lecture by the Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography,Craig Colten, Louisiana State University. Dr. Greer and her GIS technician, Megan Prescott, presented their work on the University of Chicago Professor, Robert S. Platt (1898-1980) and his travels to northern Ontario in the 1930s. Greer’s otherEmpire, Trees, and Climate research project team members, Kimberly Monk and Adam Csank, showcased their research on Shipwreck Timbers as Boundary Objects: A Case Study in Critical Dendroprovenancing.
Nipissing Graduate students had a strong presence at the AAG conference. Megan Paulin performed her piece in the session Unsettling Colonial Geographies with Performative Arts Practice, and Keithen Sutherland presented his paper, Family or Bureaucratic Traplines: The Registered Trapline System as a Form of Colonialism in James Bay in a special session on emerging methodologies in historical geography.
Sutherland also was awarded the Historical Geography Specialty Group Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov Award for a Research Project at the Masters Level for his research on the histories of traditional and colonial governmental traplines in the Muskegowuk, Cree territory, Northern Ontario. An Indigenous language speaker of the region, and a trapper and hunter, Sutherland will collaborate with Elders of the Kashechewan community to further develop this research project. He will collect oral histories and will also access archival materials (maps, photographs, and correspondence) from the Ontario Archives.
Other faculty member participation at the conference included a co-authored paper Comparison of unmanned aerial system images and satellite imagery in monitoring crop conditions: a case study in Northeastern Ontario, Canada, by Chunhua Zhang, Algoma University; Dr. John Kovacs, professor of Geography at Nipissing; and Dr. Dan Walters, associate professor of Geography at Nipissing; and a poster by Dr. Sean O’Hagan, associate professor of Geography, titled 100 years of Interlocking Directorates in the Canadian Urban System.