Interrogating Place, Space, Power and Identity: An Examination of Florida’s Geography Standards

In this paper, we examine Florida’s sixth-eighth grade geography standards to determine the potential for teaching critical geography, a field that interrogates space, place, power, and identity. While 57% of the standards demonstrated evidence of critical thinking, only six standards foster higher levels of critique consistent with critical geography.

A youth vision of the city: The socio-spatial lives and exclusion of street girls in Bogota, Colombia

This dissertation documents the everyday lives and spaces of a population of youth typically constructed as out of place, and the broader urban context in which they are rendered as such. Thirty-three female and transgender street youth participated in the development of this youth-based participatory action research (YPAR) project utilizing geo-ethnographic methods, auto-photography, and archival research throughout a six-phase, eighteen-month research process in Bogotá, Colombia. ^ This dissertation details the participatory writing process that enabled the YPAR research team to destabilize dominant representations of both street girls and urban space and the participatory mapping process that enabled the development of a youth vision of the city through cartographic images. The maps display individual and aggregate spatial data indicating trends within and making comparisons between three subgroups of the research population according to nine spatial variables. These spatial data, coupled with photographic and ethnographic data, substantiate that street girls’ mobilities and activity spaces intersect with and are altered by state-sponsored urban renewal projects and paramilitary-led social cleansing killings, both efforts to clean up Bogotá by purging the city center of deviant populations and places. ^ Advancing an ethical approach to conducting research with excluded populations, this dissertation argues for the enactment of critical field praxis and care ethics within a YPAR framework to incorporate young people as principal research actors rather than merely voices represented in adultist academic discourse. Interjection of considerations of space, gender, and participation into the study of street youth produce new ways of envisioning the city and the role of young people in research. Instead of seeing the city from a panoptic view, Bogotá is revealed through the eyes of street youth who participated in the construction and feminist visualization of a new cartography and counter-map of the city grounded in embodied, situated praxis. This dissertation presents a socially responsible approach to conducting action-research with high-risk youth by documenting how street girls reclaim their right to the city on paper and in practice; through maps of their everyday exclusion in Bogotá followed by activism to fight against it.^

Cultural perceptions of space and place in the South Florida *environment

Public opinion polls in the United States reveal that a great majority of Americans are aware and show concern about ecological issues and the need to preserve natural areas. In South Florida, natural resources have been subjected to enormous strain as the pressure to accommodate a growing population has led to rapid development. Suburbs have been built on areas that were once natural wetlands and farmlands, and the impact today shows a landscape where natural places have all but disappeared. This dissertation examines the intersection between the perceptions that individuals living in the South Florida region have with respect to the natural environment and local ecological problems with where their relationship to nature takes place. ^ The research is based upon both quantitative and qualitative data. The principal methodology used in this research is the ethnographic method, which employed the data gathering techniques of in-depth interviewing and participant observation. The objective of the qualitative portion of the study was to determine how people perceive and relate to their immediate environment. The quantitative portion of the study employed telephone survey data from the FIU/Florida Poll 2000. Data collected through this survey provided the basis to statistically test responses to the research questions. ^ The findings show that people in South Florida have a general idea of the relationship between the human population and the environment but very little knowledge of how they individually affect each other. The experience of private places and public spaces in everyday life permits people to compartmentalize cultural values and understandings of the natural world in separate cognitive schemas. The appreciation of the natural world has almost no connection to their personal sense of obligation to preserve the environment. That obligation is only felt in their home space even though the South Florida environment overall struggles desperately with water shortages, land encroachment, and a rapidly expanding human population whose activities continuously aggravate an already delicate natural balance. ^

Filtering the international gender paradigm: Perspectives of gender in Barbados

My work presents a place-specific analysis of how gender paradigms interact across and within spatial scales: the global, the regional, the national and the personal. It briefly outlines the concepts and measures defining the international gender paradigm, and explores the filtration of this paradigm into assessments and understandings of gender and gender dynamics by and within Barbados. It does this by analyzing the contents of reports of the Barbados government to international bodies assessing the country’s performance in the area of gender equality, and by analyzing gender-comparative content of local print news media over the decade of the 1990s, and the first decade of the 2000s. It contextualizes the discussion within the realm of social and economic development. The work shows how the almost singular focus on “women” in the international gender paradigm may depreciate valid gender concerns of men and thus hinder the overall goal of achieving gender equality, that is, achieving just, inclusive societies.

Theorizing suburban public space in Kendall

The purpose of this study was to determine whether public space in the suburbs has the same settings as that of a central city or if it has its own characteristics. In order to approach this problem the area of Kendall was thoroughly studied by examining aerial maps, historic images and writings of local historians such as Donna Knowles Born. Heavy emphasis was placed on the transformation of the original one-mile grid characteristic of the city of Miami. As the area of Kendall was being developed, the grid was transformed into an irregular and organic method of laying out a street system that directly affected pedestrian life. It became evident, therefore, that Kendall is primarily geared toward automobile movement, thus affecting the setting of public space. This also restricted social events forcing them to concentrate in specific places like the malls. These findings demonstrated that malls are centers of social interaction concentrating many social activities in one place. In other words, a mall serves as a common meeting place in the otherwise vast spread of the suburbs. This thesis also explains how public spaces in a suburban context can affect the community by working as filtering agents between the immediate context of a particular site and the overall city. The project, a "Wellness Center and Park" for the Kendall area, was an exploration of these filtering agents and the transitions they engendered. The research upon which this project was based recognized the important role of the site's history as well as extrapolating as to its future potential.

Spatial Articulations of Race, Desire, and Belonging in Western North Carolina

The sociocultural mythology of the South homogenizes it as a site of abjection. To counter the regionalist discourse, the dissertation intersects queer sexualities with gender and race and focuses on exploring identity and spatial formation among Black lesbian and queer women. The dissertation seeks to challenge the monolith of the South and place the region into multiple contexts and to map Black geographies through an intentional intersectional account of Black queer women. The dissertation utilizes qualitative research methods to ascertain understandings of lived experiences in the production of space. The dissertation argues that an idea of Progress has been indoctrinated as a synonym for the lgbtq civil rights movement and subsequently provides an analysis of progress discourses and queer sexualities and political campaigns of equality in the South. Analyses revealed different ways to situate progress utilizing the public contributions of three Black women interviewed for the dissertation. Moreover, the dissertation utilizes six Black queer and lesbian women to explain the multifarious nature of identities and their construction in place. Black queer and lesbian women produce spaces that deconstruct the normativity of stasis and physicality, and the dissertation explores the consequential realities of being a body in space. These consequences are particularly highlighted in the dissertation by discussions of the processes of racialization in the bounded and unbounded senses of space and place and the impacts of religious institutions, specifically Christianity. The dissertation concluded that no space is without complication. Other considerations should be made in the advancement of alleviating oppression deeply embedded in United States landscapes. Black women’s geographies offer epistemological and ontological renderings that enrich analyses of space, place, and landscape. The dissertation also concludes that Black women’s bodies represent sites for the production of geographic knowledge through narrating their spaces of material trajectories of interlocking, multiscalar lives.