UConn Hosts Just Transitions Symposium

May 23, 2024

UConn hosted a collaborative platform that brought together scholars, students, and experts from various disciplines. The Just Transitions Symposium aimed to explore themes and strategies for a sustainable and equitable global future, emphasizing the importance of diverse voices and disciplines in addressing climate change.

The idea for the Just Transitions Symposium stemmed from a faculty reading group that explores just transition themes, many of which have their roots in the social sciences and humanities, explained Professor and Head of the Department of Geography and Chair of Atmospheric Sciences Group Anji Seth.

Professor of Geography Carol Atkinson-Palombo drew a parallel between the symposium and this year’s UConn Reads selection, Braiding the Sweet Grass by Robin Wall Kimmerer:

“Thinking on how Wall-Kimmerer frames it, we don’t know what will spark the change, but we need to gather the materials and momentum to fuel the transformation. That is consistent with our role as educators, we are gathering this information to set the stage to think about this transition seriously.”

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Weixuan Lyu Wins AAG Peter Gould Award

April 20, 2024

Congratulations to Weixuan Lyu, a Ph.D. candidate in Geography, for winning the Peter Gould Award from the Health and Medical Geography Specialty Group (HMGSG) at the 2024 American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting. This highly competitive award is meant to promote written scholarship by students across the health and medical geography field. Weixuan’s awarded paper is entitled: Beyond Spatial Proximity: Conceptualizing the Perceived Food Activity Space.

Weixuan has also been awarded the Student Travel Award from AAG Environmental Perception and Behavior Geography (EPBG).

Big News for Geography: CLAS adds Two New Departments

March 21, 2024

The UConn Board of Trustees voted at its meeting on Feb. 29 to establish a new department merging the Department of Geography with Urban and Community Studies and providing an administrative home for Environmental Studies.

The new Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community and Urban Studies (GSCU) will draw on existing research and teaching strengths to address interdisciplinary issues in geography, environment, and sustainability.

The other new department is the Department of Social and Critical Inquiry, which will join four units:  American Studies Program, Asian and Asian American Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program.

Both new departments will be effective as of July 1, and they are set to launch at the beginning of the fall semester.

Learn more on UConn Today.

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New Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community and Urban Studies Forms in CLAS

The new unit will address interdisciplinary issues in the areas of sustainability, resilience, health, and social inequities.

The UConn Board of Trustees voted at its meeting on Feb. 29 to establish a new department merging the Department of Geography with Urban and Community Studies and providing an administrative home for Environmental Studies. 

The new Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community and Urban Studies (GSCU) will draw on existing research and teaching strengths to address interdisciplinary issues in geography, environment, and sustainability. 

It will also strengthen the cross-college Environmental Studies program by giving it an administrative home in which to center its advisory board, with membership of faculty across CLAS and the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources, the department leaders wrote in their proposal to the Board. 

By conducting community-engaged research and teaching on the urgent environmental, social, and geographical challenges faced by communities around the globe, the GSCU department plans to address questions related to sustainability, resilience, health, and social inequities.  

These questions will be addressed from local to global scales under the impacts of climate change and global urbanization, the department’s leaders say. 

“The new department enables problem-focused education and research, crossing boundaries between traditional disciplines,” explains Anji Seth, department head and professor of geography. “For example, problems of urban environmental justice can be addressed by students and researchers through community engagement and with geospatial data analysis tools.” 

Over time, the new department will increase its current contributions to the State by training students for jobs at Connecticut government agencies, municipal planning agencies, local businesses, and non-profit organizations. 

The GSCU department serves approximately 200 undergraduate student majors, 100 minors, and 25 graduate students. Geography’s online and entrepreneurial graduate programs in Geographic Information Sciences (GIS) and Master’s in Energy and Environmental Management also serve 100 students and professionals in Connecticut and across the country.  

The department will officially form as an administrative unit on July 1, 2024.  

This story is from UConn Today.

Letter from Ken Foote: Announcement of New Department Home for UCS

Urban and Community Studies is now part of a new Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community and Urban Studies.

Over the last three years, our program, the Department of Geography, and the Environmental Studies Program have had very productive talks about bringing our programs together under one roof. The time seemed right to bring these programs together in ways that will strengthen all three.

As we wrote in our proposal to the UConn Board of Trustees that was approved last week, the new department will conduct “community-engaged research and teaching on the urgent environmental, social, and geographical challenges and opportunities faced by communities around the globe in the twenty-first century. Our world class faculty address questions related to sustainability, resilience, health, and social inequities from local to global scales under the converging impacts of rapid climate change and increasing global urbanization,” and that the new department will be “deeply committed to cultivating an inclusive environment for our diverse community of faculty, staff, and students. As part of this commitment, our vision and initiatives are centered around values of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion…to identify pressing environmental and social justice issues facing societies today.”

The creation of this new department will not alter the degree plan you are currently following in our program.  Your degree requirements are governed by the catalog year in which you declared the major or minor.

The name of the program will change on July 1st, but the majors and minors we support will continue to be offered as you move toward graduation.

Over the next 2-3 years the faculty and staff of the new department will work to create new course offerings, perhaps also new or revised majors, minors, and graduate programs, but these changes won’t happen immediately. For now, I just wanted to share this good news and what it shows about UConn’s commitment to our program.

Please let me know if you have questions about these changes. I can be reached by email at ken.foote@uconn.edu

Ken Foote, Director

Urban and Community Studies Program

Quinn Molloy: Blending Geography and Engineering to Explore Transportation Inequity

March 4, 2024

Recent graduate Quinn Molloy (PhD, 2024) found that found that Black households spend more on transportation than white households.

The study, published in the journal Transportation Research Record by recent Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies graduate Quinn Molloy ’24 Ph.D., evaluated the impact of car dependency on equity and sustainability in the United States.

Molloy and her colleagues wrote about their findings in their analysis “Black Households Are More Burdened by Vehicle Ownership than White Households.” They showed that while the country’s transportation system comes at a high cost all around, it is especially burdensome for Black Americans. 

“It is intuitive that people in the United States who have had systemically suppressed income, who have had to bear the larger burden of transportation infrastructure running through segregated neighborhoods have different and worse outcomes when it comes to transportation spending,” Molloy says. “It’s not so surprising.”  

Molloy, who took an interdisciplinary approach to her dissertation working with Carol Atkinson-Palombo, a professor of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies; and Norman Garrick, an emeritus professor in the College of Engineering, said working across the two disciplines allowed her to look more holistically at how infrastructure “impacts people in the real world and how things like transportation planning and transportation engineering are not math puzzles.” 

“They are human beings with lives that are impacted by the world that is built for them, and that is really important,” Molloy says. 

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