News Archives | Page 7 of 68 | Social Sciences Newsblog

On the Road

Published April 16, 2021

Industrial Heritage and Archaeology PhD students, Emma Wuepper (SS) and Kyle Parker-McGlynn (SS) presented posters at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers.

Wuepper’s poster explored the material culture of settler colonialism in Copper Harbor and Parker-McGlynn’s asked how space and place could and should be considered within the design of digital heritage.

Mark Rhodes (SS) also organized a poster session on cultural geographies, presented a paper on the living heritage of the Paul Robeson tomato, and sat on an invited panel discussing the role of critical geography at technological institutions.

Social Sciences Undergraduates Join International Geography Honor Society

Published April 6, 2021

By Christine Flood

Five Social Science students joined Michigan Tech’s inaugural chapter of Gamma Theta Upsilon, the International Geography Honor Society.

-Nev Indish (History)
-Brooke Batterson (History)
-Cal Quayle (Anthropology)
-Lynette Webber (History)
-Timothy Stone (Sustainability Science and Society)

Organized by Assistant Professor of Geography Dr. Mark Rhodes, the honor society will promote geography-related activities and connect students with opportunities to share research and compete for awards. The five Social Science students join twelve other undergraduate, graduate, and faculty members in founding the Michigan Tech chapter.

Recent Talks

Published April 1, 2021

By Christine Flood

Sarah Scarlett (SS) and Don Lafreniere (SS/GLRC) presented two talks this week related to the Trois siècles de migrations francophones en Amérique du Nord (Three Centuries of Francophone Migration in North America) project that studies the French-Canadian migration around the continent.

Scarlett spoke at the Centre De La Francophonie Des Amériques and the Québec Government Offices in Chicago, Boston, and Houston. Her presentation was on the micro-histories of Joseph Grégoire, a prominent Lake Linden resident and founder of Gregoryville. The presentation can be seen here.

Lafreniere spoke at the Centre interuniversitaire d’études québécoises about how to utilizing deep mapping techniques to map migrations. He outlined how the Keweenaw Time Traveler can be used as a model for studying populations around the continent.

Lafreniere outlined how the Time Traveler is being used in concert with censuses from the US and Canada to uncover the French-Canadian diaspora in the Copper Country and model migration flows.

In Print

Published April 1, 2021

By Christine Flood

Professor Emeritus Barry D. Solomon (SS) and Shan Zhou (SS) published the article “Renewable Portfolio Standards: Do Voluntary Goals vs. Mandatory Standards Make a Difference?” In Review of Policy Research.

This paper investigates whether an obligation to meet a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) target in U.S. states affects the policy effectiveness. A voluntary RPS target can serve as a political device for signaling a commitment to certain goals, though there is no penalty if the goal is not met.

Alternatively, mandatory RPS targets have varying stringency and uneven enforcement. Our results indicate that the compulsoriness of a state RPS is an insignificant determinant of RPS‐related renewable electricity capacity additions. Factors other than compulsoriness are more important in influencing renewable electricity development, such as state political ideology, income, electricity price and electric market deregulation status.

In Print

Published March 26, 2021

By Christine Flood

Energy and Environmental Policy graduate student Alexis Pascaris (SS) coauthored an article with Chelsea Schelly (SS) and Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) titled “Integrating solar energy with agriculture: Industry perspectives on the market, community, and socio-political dimensions of agrivoltaics,” in Energy Research & Social Science.

Photo Essay: Celebrating Food in the Keweenaw

Published March 19, 2021

By Christine Flood

In collaboration with a class taught by Angie Carter (SS), the Western Upper Peninsula Food Systems Collaborative (WUPFSC) kicked off the Western UP Food Stories Photo Contest last fall.

The students in the course — Communities and Research SS4700 — reached out to local growers, enthusiasts, and anyone who eats to share what local foods in the Keweenaw means to them. Since a picture is worth 1,000 words, they encouraged community members to share their experiences in a visual format.

The course, which is based on transdisciplinary research methods, supports students in creating studies driven by needs identified from community members to ensure that their research would directly serve and empower the community.

The class gathered all the photos on Flickr and some of the winning images are gathered on the University research blog, Unscripted. Check them out at mtu.edu/unscripted . (By Allison Mills, University Marketing and Communications)

In Print

Published March 10, 2021

By Christine Flood

Don Lafreniere (SS/GLRC) and an interdisciplinary group of students recently published an article titled “Schools as Vectors of Infectious Disease Transmission during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic” in the journal Cartographica: The International Journal of Geographic Information and Geovisualization.

The article outlines how to use census and health microdata to follow infectious disease transmission between public school children during a pandemic. The paper leans on data created by public contributors to the Keweenaw Time Traveler project. The towns of Calumet and Laurium served as the case study.

Nancy Langston awarded Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Environmental History

Published February 26, 2021

By Christine Flood

Nancy Langston (SS/CFRES) has been awarded the 2021 Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Environmental History. This award is given to one individual each year who has contributed significantly to environmental history scholarship and recognizes exceptional lifetime achievement in the field.

Langston has published five books and more than 50 peer-reviewed papers, and she has been awarded more than a million dollars in competitive external funding. Her current research, on woodland caribou and other migratory wildlife of the north, is supported with a Fulbright Research Chair, a Mellon Fellowship, a Mandel Award in the Humanities, and an NSF research grant in Science and Technology Studies.

In Print

Published February 24, 2021

By Christine Flood

New publication on the history of oil palm plantations

A new article exploring the history of the first oil palm plantations by Jonathan Robins (SS) has been published in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies.

The article examines the economic, political, and environmental factors that contributed to the early growth of the oil palm industry, which is today the world’s largest supplier of vegetable oil

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-southeast-asian-studies/article/abs/shallow-roots-the-early-oil-palm-industry-in-southeast-asia-18481940/EB9B53BBAF6698ED0EE151BD11CF93E2

In Print

Published February 9, 2021

By Christine Flood

Angie Carter has published an invited essay “Thinking Downstream” in Compelling Ground: Landscapes, Environments, and Peoples of Iowa, a book documenting the exhibit of the same name that has recently opened at the Brunnier Art Museum in Ames, Iowa.

She will take part in a panel “The Changing Face of Iowa Farming” on Tuesday, April 13 as part of the exhibit’s virtual events.

Category: News