GEOG 368 Geography Field Seminar
What is the Field Seminar?
The GEOG 368 Field Seminar is a graduation requirement for all geography majors at the University of Wisconsin -- Eau Claire. GEOG 368 is offered every semester, and sometimes in the summer. Department of Geography and Anthropology faculty rotate responsibilities for teaching and leading the field experience, typically building the course around a research interest or disciplinary specialty. Prior to the travel restrictions of the Covid era, GEOG 368 could include a 7-10 day field component anywhere in North America. In fact, the last time Kaldjian taught GEOG 368, he took students for two weeks to Istanbul, Turkey. In spring 2020, Dr. Faulkner had to cancel 10 days in Hawai'i. In Fall 2020, Dr. Wilson stayed in Western Wisconsin. For information on past GEOG 368 courses, click on any of the following links
The purpose of the geography field seminar is to give students an opportunity to experience field work and to "do" geography. They practice observational, data gathering, analytical, technical, rhetorical, and other skills that are associated with field work and the generation of knowledge. Different iterations of the course may emphasize different features of field-based research. For our course, our approach was qualitative and we emphasized the importance of guiding our questions, supporting our work, informing our ideas, and interpreting our observations with the great body of work found in the research literature. Between all of the students in our course, they read and wrote annotated bibliographies on over 100 articles for the course.
Another important element of the field seminar is to introduce students to the uncertainty, serendipity, creativity, adaptations, collaborations, relationship-building, senses of accomplishment, joys of learning, and other less tangible benefits of field-oriented inquiry. Due to the Covids and the proximity of our field work, we conducted all of our field travel by bicycle. For some students, it meant refreshing skills neglected since middle or high school. For all of us, it meant active participation in our own mobility and new encounters with the community we were studying. Traveling in a pack of 15 people was a new and exciting experience for many students.
One serendipitous event of our field works was the encounter with Wisconsin's Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes at a local ice cream shop. When he learned that students we all seniors, he had three words of advice, "Stay in Wisconsin."
Past GEOG 368 Field Seminar Websites
Geography of Community
With the rapidly changing and culturally shifting socio-economies and technologies of the last few decades, much attention has been given to the concept of community, its demise and fragmentation, and what can be done to build and strengthen it (consider Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, 2000, and Peter Block’s Community: The Structure of Belonging, 2008 & The Abundant Community, 2010). From “senses of community” to “community development”, “imagined communities” to “communities of practice”, from neighborhoods to nations, community has been examined from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives: sociology, psychology, geography, political science, urban affairs, planning, law, architecture, health, sustainability, and tourism, among numerous others.
Cutting across almost all these examinations of community is explicit and implicit recognition of the geography inherent in community. This is seen in references to such things as space, place, scale, landscape, and the natural and built environments. In Spring 2021, the Geography Field field seminar examined the academic literature to identify, document, and acknowledge the myriad ways in which a geographic perspective and awareness enhances an understanding of community and efforts to build and support it. We then examined how geography supports community in Eau Claire, WI.
For a range of geographic characteristics that support community, click here.
Conceptualizing Community
Our attention is to location-based community, the place of our physically grounded lives. This is a locally shared geography where our daily activities play out and much of our well-being is determined. It is the place from which we cannot simply log-off, unsubscribe, or hit the mute button. We recognize the importance and power of virtual and imagined communities and of communities of practice, profession, identity, and need. Communities can transcend space and scale and people are often members of multiple communities simultaneously. The Internet can serve a bridging function and resources and relationships outside the local community can offer critical support and meaning in our daily lives, but our local community is where we pay rent, eat food, seek health, and grow up. It is where children play and clean air and water matter.
Definition of Community
Community as we use the term is a set of spatial proximities and complex network of social relationships in geographical space typically found at the neighborhood, city, and county scales. It is where people of diverse backgrounds share a sense of place, belonging, identity, interdependence, care, and common good with those around them and as part of a larger, dependable, and stable structure. Healthy and abundant communities promote and sustain trust, social capital, belonging, safety, care, social cohesion, collective accomplishment, and the ability to positively influence their environments and one another. Whether neighborhood, rural town, or urban center, a community’s well-being and cohesion reflects the health of its relationships.