All lectures are presented fully online via Zoom every Friday at 3:30 PM. The link to join the meeting is https://go.wisc.edu/l880yf except when otherwise indicated. Alumni, friends and the public are always invited to attend.
September 13th– GeoMachina: What Designing Artificial GIS Analysts Teaches Us About Place Representation
Krysztof Janowicz, University of Vienna
Questions surrounding the computational representation of place have been a cornerstone of GIS since its inception. During the rise of generative AI, it seemed for a moment that a breakthrough would be in sight, but, maybe unsurprisingly, things took a different turn. Much like declarative GeoAI approaches from the past two decades, representation learning encounters similar obstacles. This talk will report on the conceptual lessons learned in designing and benchmarking autonomous, artificial GIS analysts, provide a brief overview of place representation paradigms studied over the past 20 years, and discuss the potential of neuro-symbolic (hybrid) AI to advance our field.
September 27th– Letting Nature Pay Its Way: The Past, Present and Future of Payments for Ecosystem Services
James Salzman, UCLA and UC-Santa Barbara
Recent decades have witnessed a huge increase in attention to and excitement over Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES)-programs that exchange value for land management practices intended to provide or ensure ecosystem services. PES comprises a range of very different programs operating at local, regional and national levels. Taken together, there are now over 550 active programs around the globe and an estimated UW $36-42 billion in annual transactions. Salzman has worked with governments around the globe for the past two decades to design PES programs. Drawing from these experiences and research, he explains the rise of PES and the enthusiasm for this approach, provides an empirical assessment of the trends and current status of PES across the domains of water, biodiversity, and forest and land-use carbon around the world, and suggests which PES mechanisms are likely to grow in the coming years.
October 4th– Theory and Explanation in Geography
Henry Wai-chung Yeung, National University Singapore
Published by Wiley in its RGS-IBG Book Series in September 2023, Theory and Explanation in Geography is one of the few provocative monographs in recent decades that engages deeply with the epistemological debates on theory and method in Geography. This in-person event with the author invites readers and interested participants to examine critically the book’s main tenets and prospects for reflexive theory development as the key to the future of the discipline. The session provides an opportunity for the author to respond to comments and for the audience to engage in further discussions. After an introductory overview of the book by the author, the interactive discussion can potentially address wide-ranging issues, such as epistemology, styles and practices of theorizing in different critical approaches and “isms”, relational thought, processual thinking, mid-range explanatory theories, causal mechanism-based approach to theory and explanation, situated knowledges, “theorizing back”, and so on.
October 18th – Beyond Maps: Integrating Place and Space for Community Resilience
Kevin Mwenda, Brown University
Geospatial analyses can be valuable in identifying potential drivers of changing vulnerability outcomes across various regions. However, more work is needed to incorporate the place-based perspectives of people living in vulnerable areas, such as livelihoods and other lived experiences from individuals, households, and communities. How can we model vulnerability outcomes with a spatial lens while also acknowledging people’s ‘sense of place’? This talk will provide examples of collaborative research that aims to integrate platial perspectives to mitigate spatial uncertainty. In doing so, it will explore how household surveys and community-level interviews, combined with high-resolution imagery, can be used to identify ‘hot’ spots of vulnerability within communities and even reveal ‘bright’ spots of resilience.
November 1st – Big holes, shiny satellites, solar shields, and people on the move: Rethinking the extractive imperative of the present
Julie Klinger, University of Delaware
Human activity – its ambitions, problems, and solutions – exceeds the planetary but is also inescapably grounded in specific places and times. Whether we are discussing space exploration, the energy transition, warfare, or development and disaster recovery, these activities rely on hardware, and hardware is comprised of minerals, metals, and materials wrested from the Earth by human labor and their automated proxies. Drawing on several examples from around the world, this talk rethinks the immensities of present challenges and ambitions through the labor and land use practices of extractive supply chains that link Earthly and extraplanetary geographies.
November 8th – Water & Wall Street: Water affordability and infrastructure finance in US Cities
Martin Doyle, Duke University
The intersection of finance and urban infrastructure has been a central theme across geography. In the case of water, public infrastructure intersects finance and capital through the mechanisms of municipal bonds and household water bills. We developed a nationwide database of water utility rates and then quantified household water service affordability. We present an analysis of 255 utilities in 4 different metropolitan regions and demonstrating how demographic sorting spatially distribute affordability challenges.