Gaviotas!

And browsing around, checking on a book I'm using this session in Environmental Lit, ENVS 272, online, I found an opportunity I couldn't pass by.

The book is Gaviotas, A Village to Reinvent the World, by Alan Weisman. The book describes a community build from scratch on the pampas/grasslands of Colombia. Not a utopian community, but one that pursues practical applications of how to live, including work on water production and solar energy devices. One accident in their struggle to provide for themselves, they imported pines to use for the resin, and seem to have grown a framework for a native rainforest to recover.

In any case, there's a trip for visitors over Thanksgiving. I'll have to skip one Biogeography class, and get someone to cover for me with two Evening classes on 11/23, and someone to take care of the dogs, and I'm kind of broke, but, I'm going.

Check out Friends of Gaviotas

bob

Scotland

Next summmer, Columbia College will expand from just London Study Abroad courses, to several other cities--Madrid, Florence, Sydney, Oxford, and Stirling, Scotland. I've never been interested in being in London longer than it takes to shuttle between airports, but would love to teach 3-4 weeks in Florence.

Alas, the Florence session completely overlaps with our Study Tour to France, in May 2011, and I'm already committed to that. I have a course I've used in Sydney, on a study trip--Exploration and Exile. It would be worth doing again, and the summer session has an optional extra 9 days to New Zealand. But the cost to students is about $7000, and since I have to recruit at least 7 students to secure my spot, well, that just won't happen these days.

So I negotiated in my head to try for Stirling, Scotland. I'm still formally an English teacher, so literature needs to be the core of what I do. It turns out that the University of Stirling publishes a Stevenson journal, and has a Scottish culture program, as well as a strong environmental bent. So I designed a course to focus on Scottish cultural identity, with a blend of literature, geography and environmental concerns. Don't know if it will happen (has to go through a committee here, approval by a committee at this inter-college consortium, I have to get 7 students, and have to abandon my dogs for another 4 weeks, and won't have the income of teaching two oncampus Evening courses that summer...), and I can't figure out how to do an attachment rather than a link, so here is the whole thing:


NEW COURSE PROPOSAL FORM Date Received

University/College if different from Maryville___Columbia College____________

Course Title ___Cultural Identity: Scotland_______________________

No. of Credits___3______

Prerequisite for the course

ENGL 112 (a composition course)

Course Assignments (Briefly Stated)

an on-going blog
interviews
weekly written and oral reports
an overview essay

Course Description

This course will use readings in literature, cultural history and geography, along with participant-observation, to work toward defining main elements of Scottish cultural identity.

Proposed Instructor Robert E. Boon

Evaluation and Grading for the Course

Blog participation 30%
Classroom discussions 10
Weekly reports 30
Overview essay 30

Textbooks/ Books

individually chosen novels by Sir Walter Scott and Robert L. Stevenson

Scotland as We Know It: Representations of National Identity in Literature, Film and Popular Culture, Richard Zumkhawala-Cook, 2008

Scotland: The Autobiography 2,000 Years of Scottish History By Those Who Saw It Happen, Rosemary Goring, 2008

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It, Arthur Herman, 2002

other texts/excerpts will be provided by the teacher (such as select poems)

Recommended:

Lonely Planet Scotland

Semester/Session and Year of Implementation Summer 2011, Stirling, Scotland, July 9 to August 6

Signature of the Maryville Chair or Program Director, (Date)¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬

************************

Pre-trip:

Each student should select and read one novel by Sir Walter Scott and one novel by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Read a general outline of Scottish history, online.

Selections from How the Scots Invented the Modern World

Begin our course blog (as an ongoing journal of our learning process)

In Scotland:

Reading:

Poetry online or provided by the teacher
Essays on Scottish culture, lit and geography
Scotland: The Autobiography
Scotland as We Know It
students should also examine Scottish newspapers and magazines, as available

Discussions:

During class time, we will discuss not only the various pieces of literature, but continually evaluate our personal experience/interactions as we try to define “cultural maps” that define the Scots. We will consider what it means to be a participant-observer, and will necessarily examine our own initial stereotypes and media impressions.

Field trips:
These trips will have to be negotiated among the program, the students (what they can afford), and other classes that we might be able to coordinate with. Ideally, we would take weekend excursions to the Isle of Arran and to the Orkney Islands, with shorter bus/train trips to both cultural and natural sites. We will decide on various sporting events, art/music festivals, and may even decide to go to church one Sunday.


University of Stirling:

The University itself has the very interdisciplinary Stirling Centre for Scottish Studies I will invite teachers from this Centre, not to give formal lectures, to visit and talk with my class.

After the trip:

Complete blog entries.
Complete a major overview paper, critically examining issues of Scottish cultural identity.




Resources for the teacher:

Geography, Science and National Identity: Scotland since 1520 (Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography), Charles W. J. Withers, 2006

The Historical Geography of Scotland since 1707: Geographical Aspects of Modernisation (Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography), David Turnock, 2005

Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition, Alastair McIntosh, 2008

Chicago

The Honors program at Columbia College is in distress—trimmed back to a bare scaffolding. Sad, since I’ve taught over a fourth of all the classes they’ve offered. I thought I’d missed the proposal stage this year, but it turns out they didn’t even solicit ideas.

Still, sometime, I’d like to develop this class with Amy, a Communications teacher, and the brand new head of Honors. Something like: Chicago, Arts and Culture. We’d read novels, poems, plays, some history, more about how the city itself works. But the highpoint of the class would be a long-weekend trip to Chicago, by train. I’ve never traveled by train, in the U.S., and I’d guess most of our students haven’t either. So the train trip from St. Louis to Chicago would be part of the learning experience. But so would planning the trip and exploring this major city.

Some voices/topics we could explore:

Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Sinclair’s The Jungle, Wright’s Black Boy, Hansberry’s A Raison in the Sun, more than a few films, more into Jane Addams, a look at the Daly machine and the 68 Democratic Convention....

And we might include books like:

Chicago: A Biography, by Dominic A. Pacyga, 2009

or

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, by William Cronon, 1992


I’d hope the class would provide students not just exposure to literature, but also a starting point for culture studies, perhaps geography, and the experience of researching a place and going to see more—direct experience to match against all the reading and web.

If the school would pay for at least a good chunk of the hotel bill, this could provide a model-incentive for a sinking program. I’d like to expand to do a longer trip by train through Denver-Boulder to San Francisco, on the Beats. And then there’s New Orleans...

bob

Visitors to class, 9/15/10

Joe Hobbs came in to talk about his fieldwork, mostly with Bedouin groups in the Egyptian Sinai. His emphasis is on documenting indigenous knowledge, before it disappears. He does, however, stress that he tries to collect everything—animals, water, trees, stories. He carries a plant press and brings out specimens not yet recorded. It sounds like an ideal career, though my imagination has never been sufficiently captured by one culture for me to get immersed in the language, to spend study years abroad in one country. (Ah, I guess that’s a bit untrue—I’m captured by Missouri, and would know its heart.)

Joe also spent time in Madagascar, working in caves, when the politics of Egypt denied him entry and permits for his central interest. Going to Madagascar has been high on my travel list for a long time, but it isn’t exactly a tourist spot, and I’m most fascinated by the lemurs, not in a sufficiently scientific way, but that I want to go see them, “know” them, these distant primate cousins. Know them before they are destroyed by human expansion. And I don’t know how to say to anyone that this is not a frivolous thing, to make this connection and come back and try to tell people about it.



Joe’s work overlaps with what I know about folklore collection. And it seems to equally overlap with anthropology, except for the mindset of the researcher, and the journals he publishes in. He gets knowledge that I don’t think is available to statistics. Certainly hermeneutic/interpretive, not a quantitative science. Hmm—how is a hermeneutic study that different from an unrhymed, unmetered poetics?

Our other visitor was Larry Brown, in to talk about his study of White Nationalism, especially in the Missouri Ozarks. I would have questioned how this differs from pure sociology, but he described his work looking at “their expression in the landscape”—the settlement stock/values already in the area, the relative isolation which fosters this mindset, the economic conditions influenced by the relatively unproductive land that leads to lower income in the area. He works in “mental mapping” of their ideas in relation to their place. Interesting.

Larry mentioned a book by Don Mitchell, A Place for Everyone. I didn't find that book, but these are interesting: The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space, 2003 This Amazon.com commentary:

In the wake of recent terrorist attacks, efforts to secure the American city have life-or-death implications. Yet demands for heightened surveillance and security throw into sharp relief timeless questions about the nature of public space, how it is to be used, and under what conditions. Blending historical and geographical analysis, this book examines the vital relationship between struggles over public space and movements for social justice in the United States. Presented are a series of linked cases that explore the judicial response to public demonstrations by early twentieth-century workers, and comparable legal issues surrounding anti-abortion protests today; the Free Speech Movement and the history of People's Park in Berkeley; and the plight of homeless people facing new laws against their presence in urban streets. The central focus is how political dissent gains meaning and momentum--and is
regulated and policed--in the real, physical spaces of the city.

Ah, and this book by Mitchell: Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction

More to look at.

bob

An Almanac

I’ve started my “yard photos,” hoping to picture every day of a year, and briefly talk about what bit of nature I see or hear. This to be my own beginning “almanac” of birds and plants and frogs and weather. Of course, it will from the start be incomplete, because I know I’ll be out of the country now and then. Maybe the folks who take care of my dogs can be convinced to snap a few shots, or take time to listen to the world. And how to record all this—what sort of file, website, blog? Don’t know.

Projects

for 9/3

Naively, I’m still trying to place myself in this new field. I brainstorm projects, things I’d like to work on, though even as I sketch them here, I realize I don’t have the tools to complete these.

--Look at the way Boone Electric Coop deals with trees. We had another episode of tree-butchery up and down my road recently. Their hired tree service says that now the Coop wants to clear under power lines for a 5 year span, which means they either take the trees to the ground, cut off edges, or take off the tree tops. Lots of this last in front of my yard. When they remove trees from a yard, they do (or used to) offer replacement saplings, in a narrow realm of species—“well-mannered” trees. I’d like to investigate how their approaches have impacted tree health and range of species. And maybe if anyone but me notices.

--Map the churches in this area, though surely someone has done that already. The physical location of churches, memberships numbers, think about whether location itself has anything to do with numbers, ideally (and unlikely) get addresses of members and look at the way members are distributed in relation to the church. And later steps would be interviews to characterize belief systems—politics, ideas about landuse, the environment...

--A similar thing with St. Francis House, a Catholic Workers community that cares for homeless folks. What kind of human networks grow from this center? How transient is this population?

--Continue making a documentary film about businesses on 9th Street in Columbia, which has become a kind of community. Look at how long businesses have been in place, at links between businesses, at who their patrons are. (Lakota, Panera, 9th St. Video, the Blue Note...)

--Sketch out my own version of a geographic education. Presumptuous, of course, this early, though in education/teaching terms, I’m not a beginner at all. I wonder whether the lecture-based, topic-coverage approach, as in UMC’s Regions and Nations, is that effective. E.g., Tim, a bartender at the Berg, recalled my teacher from years ago, in a U.S.-Canada Geography class. But what he remembered was that the teacher told great stories, and that the stories made everything else easy to remember. I think I would tap into this basic human love of narrative, as much as possible—with novels, poems, films—and whenever I could, avoid the formal textbook, in favor of whole books. And I’d push writing throughout—about places, nature, unraveling environmental ideas. Hmm. We’ll see.

--Chapter 2 of my text Geography & Geographers starts with this quote, defining geographical imagination: “A sensitivity toward the significance of PLACE and SPACE, LANDSCAPE and NATURE in the constitution and conduct of life on earth. As such, a geographical imagination is by no means the exclusive preserve of the academic discipline of geography..." Gregory, 2000. From that notion, I return to what is maybe always my main ambition—to write a different order of poetry.

bob

Is this Geography?

I still struggle to figure out what the boundaries of this new discipline are. After some readings, I emailed a test idea to one of my teachers.

My email:

Let me try this out--I'm still trying to "feel" what Geography would do in given circumstances.

Say I did a project studying The Berg, framed in terms of land-use. Specifically the Berg as a site of cultural resistance to the insatiable "hunger" of the University to expand and claim all the land on its periphery. (hunger might have to be defined in expansion proposals, long-term plans, property bids, threat of eminent domain seizures, etc.)

A parallel case, The Shack and the various small businesses previously where the Alum Center is now (including a rather popular Sub Shop)--these businesses failed to resist the University demands, despite the cartoon art link and some alumni support. The Berg, even after burned to the ground, remains in place today.

I would speculate that there is a tension in land-use here, between the University and various centers of cultural resistance: The Berg (with extensive alum support), Shakespeares (similar popularity), the 9th St. Methodist Church, and the Missouri Theater (extensive art community support, overlapping with UM faculty). These seem to be centers that limit UMC expansion in this direction, although there have been inroads with the Henkel Bldg (7th St?), new J-school property north of Elm, and the Hitt St parking garage. The former blood bank, behind the Berg, didn't survive, though it's tied up in some dispute between the landlord and the need to widen an alley, move an electric grid, and big expenses.

So, if I looked at how and why the Berg has been able to stay in place--is that Geography? Or have I drifted into naive Sociology, or Anthro, or even the porous domain of American Studies?

The response:

The short answer is yes, absolutely: this is Geography. I like the idea of studying the cultural politics of the University-downtown/residential border in general; you could then pick out places like the Berg as case studies of a broader tension there at the "borderlands." I also think that these "borderlands" also exhibit a cultural politics of walking/pedestrian versus car use ... so you could extend your cultural-geographic interpretation of this distinctive landscape into other areas beyond real-estate/expansionism.

Progress...