GEOG 368 Field Seminars in 2014-2015: Oregon & Turkey

The department is happy to report that, in recognition of their high impact on student learning and the central role that field experiences play in a geographic education, the Geography Field Seminar will receive Blugold Commitment Differential Tuition support in 2014-2015.  This support significantly offsets student participation costs and makes them much more accessible to students. It should be noted, however, that international experiences typically cost more than domestic ones.

Oregon
Wheat fields and Mount Hood, Oregon.
Photo by E. Zeitler.
In the fall semester 2014, the GEOG 368 Field Seminar will be a regional examination of Oregon and its various environments, and will combine the the physical, human-environmental, and human aspects of geography.  Dr. Ezra Zeitler will lead the course and program.  The field component to Oregon is tentatively scheduled to run from 26 September to 5 October.  Thus, students will have the opportunity to prepare for 3-4 weeks before the field experience; upon their return, they will draw on the experience and their findings as they develop and finalize their research projects.  

In Oregon, students will spend time in Portland, Bend, Eugene, Tillamook, Salem, and Astoria traveling between the coast and the interior, visiting the Hood & Columbia Rivers, Crater Lake, Mt. Saint Helens.  They will examine and learn about a wide array of cultural and environmental landscapes -- from indigenous to urban,  agricultural to electrical,  touristic to gentrified, and sandy to igneous.  The comparison to the upper Midwest will be rich.

To learn more, or if you are interested in participating in the Fall 2014 Field Seminar to Oregon, please see Dr. Ezra Zeitler.

Turkey
The Sultan Ahmet Mosque and the Hagia Sophia, where the
Bosphorus Strait meets the Marmara Sea.
Photo by P. Kaldjian.
The Spring 2015 GEOG 368 Field Seminar will be an international field experience to Istanbul and its surrounding areas. I will draw on my years of research in the region, relationships with its people and places, and experiences leading UWEC immersion trips to Turkey in 2011, 2012, and 2013.  This will be a slightly different GEOG 368 experience.  We will study and prepare the entire spring semester (2015) for the trip and then travel for 3-4 weeks in May/June, right when the semester is over.  The preparatory semester will include studying rudiments of the Turkish language, learning about Thracian and Anatolian geography, place, culture, history, and daily life, and preparing our research projects.

The field component will be a largely urban experience, and we will spend time examining various elements of the region's physical geography, Istanbul's food systems, rural-to-urban migration, Turkey's various ethnic subgroups, the city and region's long history, intersections with globalization, political-economic change, and ongoing and dynamic human-environment interactions.  We will also travel into Turkey's interior, up to the Black Sea, and into the former Ottoman region of northern Greece.

 To learn more, or if you are interested in participating in the Spring/Summer 2015 Field Seminar to Turkey, please see me (Dr. Paul Kaldjian).  Course fees for this program should be estimated by the end of the summer.

Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 31, 2014 at 1:59 AM

    Wow! Thank you! I always wanted to write in my site something like that. Can I take part of your post to my blog?
    Lapel pins

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

UW-Eau Claire Geographer 2016 Regent Scholar

Image
Dr. Joe Hupy with teaching his field methods class The Department of Geography and Anthropology is excited to learn that our colleague Dr. Joe Hupy has just been selected as one of three 2016 UW System Regent Scholars .  The Scholarship is intended to encourage and reward cutting-edge undergraduate research and collaboration that has the potential to spur regional economic development and entrepreneurial possibilities.  The scholarship comes with summer funding to support research and scholarly activities while stimulating innovation and industry outreach.   Specifically, Dr. Hupy's research involves using Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) for economic and environmental applications in the mining, and has the potential for much wider geospatial applications in construction, insurance, real estate, and beyond.  For more details on Dr. Hupy and his work related to the grant, see the UW-Eau Claire news article .  To learn about how to geographically apply UAS, you may want to take
Read more

So, who was Henry Kolka, anyway?

Image
Some weeks back, the Department of Geography and Anthropology was happy to announce our student scholarship winners (see earlier blog post). After that, a few of us in the department started wondering about the scholarships and who they are named after. It seemed strange to honor current students with awards named after people of whom we knew little. Who was this Henry Kolka and how did we end up with a scholarship named after him? It seemed shameful not to know. Well, one thing led to another, and Bob Barth's daughter found an obituary of Henry Kolka. And that led to other things.  According to the obituary, Henry Kolka was a professor of geography at UW-Eau Claire from 1943 to his retirement in 1975. He passed away in 1991. No faculty currently in the department was here when Mr. Kolka was, so faculty have no stories of Mr. Kolka. But Yvonne, our secretary, does. She started in 1970 and remembers him as somebody who liked to bring her flowers. Let that be a lesson to me. Back
Read more

4 UWEC students at national geography conference in Florida

Image
This past week, the Association of American Geographers (AAG) held its Annual Meeting , this time in Tampa. The AAG has been hosting annual meetings every year since 1904.  I am not sure what the attendance was in Tampa, but last year in Los Angeles there were over 7,000 attendees.  That's a lot of geographers. Arik Arnevik & Jackson Becker in front of their poster at AAG 2014, Tampa, FL UW-Eau Claire has a long history of student and faculty participation at the AAG Annual Meetings, and we are suspect that we bring as many undergraduate participants as nearly any other school in the country.  This year, in addition to seven UW-Eau Claire faculty participants, we were proud to have four students successfully present their research.   Nate Wick explains details of his research to Ross Guida ('09), now in the PhD program at Southern Illinois University. Nathaniel Wick presented a poster of the research he conducted with recent UWEC geography graduate Sam Krueger
Read more