Interdisciplinary environmental research: Reconciling disparate geographic and temporal scales of data Part I. Reading seminar

Type: Panel
Theme:
Sponsor Groups:
Organizers: Rebecca Lave, John Baeten, Lisa Kelley
Chairs: John Baeten

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Description

One clear implication of the Anthropocene paradigm is that if the world around us is co-constituted by physical and social processes, the way we study it must be similarly eco-social. It is no longer possible (if it ever was) to understand the environment through traditional physical or human geography approaches. To satisfactorily explain what is happening at our field sites, we need to take an interdisciplinary approach -- which often requires reconciling data sources at disparate geographical and/or chronological scales. Integrating these sources in practice can be complicated, not least given disciplinary distinctions in how scale is both conceptualized and operationalized.

These sessions will begin with a reading seminar focused on texts circulated in advance, followed by a panel on methodological approaches used to engage with and work through these complexities. The discussion will focus, for example, on efforts to balance global or national policy discourses with localized policy impacts; how historical datasets might be used to inform contemporary environmental monitoring; and what to do do when different scales of data contradict each other.. Readings and panelists come from fields such as Critical Physical Geography, Historical Geography, and Land Cover Science.

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Agenda

Type	Details	Minutes
Introduction	Lisa Kelley University of Hawaii - Manoa	10
Panelist	Rebecca Lave Indiana University	10
Discussant	John Baeten Indiana University	10
Discussant	Heidi Hausermann Colorado State University	10
Discussant	Robert Wilson Syracuse University	10
Discussant	Rinku Roy Chowdhury Clark University	10