Title: Geographies of Mass Supervision: Governance, Health and Race in Contemporary Philadelphia

Dirk Kinsey is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University. His work is centered on the application of feminist and critical race approaches to understanding urban social and political systems, with a special emphasis on incarceration, health and wellness. Dirk’s current research examines the growth of community supervision outside of prison settings, and the institutions, policies and practices that shape these systems. This project seeks to understand the geographies of community supervision in Philadelphia, including the role of community supervision in producing and reinforcing specific spatial configurations at the urban scale and how these spatial configurations are experienced by those under supervision. In addition, this project focuses on health inequities experienced by supervised populations and the specific dimensions of supervision that impact individual and community health.

Title: Land of Men for Men without land: Agricultural commodity investment and land use change in a frontier region. Drivers, spatial dynamics and land use decision making in the Colombian Altillanura

Jerónimo Rodriguez’s research examines land use change associated with agricultural transformation in frontier regions, integrating Earth Observation, Geographic Information Systems, and Machine Learning methods with quantitative and qualitative methods. Applying a Land Systems Science approach, he analyzes the drivers, consequences, and future scenarios of land transformation and develops land cover monitoring solutions aimed at improving decision-making processes and contributing to sustainable development and biodiversity conservation.

For over 20 years, the highly biodiverse tropical savanna landscapes of Eastern Colombia have undergone intense transformation, and discussions on how to manage this transformation and its implications have been ongoing. While the establishment of capital-intensive agriculture is defended as a way to achieve economic development and promote job creation, frequently these processes are also associated with negative social and environmental consequences including livelihood disruption, exclusion and dispossession and biodiversity loss. Jerónimo’s research aims to advance the understanding of how direct land-use decisions, agricultural and regional development policies interact with environmental conditions to drive land-use change trajectories.

He utilizes remote sensing and spatial analysis to assess the location, spatial extent, and intensity of land-use change, which are critical inputs to inform land-use decision-making in the Eastern Plains. The Harris-Webber Fellowship is critical to Jerónimo’s research as it allows him to focus exclusively on a critical stage of his dissertation research, including much-needed fieldwork.

Title: From Underground to Overground—How the Delhi Metro is Shaping Land Use

Karkun Sen’s research focuses on the role of mobility infrastructure in transforming urban land and shaping urbanism in Delhi’s urban megaregion in the past thirty years. The study examines the magnitude of urban change impacts of the Delhi Metro Rail (DMR) system, which has developed and expanded its geographic coverage since 2002. Prior research suggests its expansion may have triggered new ways of deriving value from land and property markets and transformed neighborhoods. This study employs multiple spatial-temporal methods (such as remote sensing, GIS, and archival materials) to investigate transportation-land connections around the development trajectory of the rail transit system. This study will contribute to a broader understanding of the process of transportation-led urbanization. Findings from this study will be crucial to understand the impact of mass rail transit systems that have attracted large infrastructure investments and are being developed in the style of DMR on other urban geographies in India.

The semester-long Harris Weber fellowship, awarded by the College of Liberal Arts, Temple University, has provided immense support for conducting the preliminary research and developing the research design. The author is grateful for the generous support from the fellowship for this work.

Title: Co-victims of Gun Homicide: Black Women Navigating Spaces of Trauma

Alisa Shockley’s research will examine how African American women who have lost a loved one to gun-violence (co-victims) perceive their neighborhood and navigate their everyday spaces following their loss. This research will chart new pathways to theorize how racism, poverty, and trauma compound and how Black women craft survival strategies as they navigate landscapes of trauma. The research will take place in Philadelphia, PA among African American women, ages 18 and over. I will use a Black feminist standpoint, qualitative GIS, and participatory photo mapping to center the knowledge and experiences of Black women. My research will advance the field of geographies of trauma and will illustrate the impacts of limited mobility or immobility on trauma and inequality. The results of the research will be shared with the participants and organizations specializing in mental health and counseling for families of victims of gun violence, and will contribute to public health policy.

Heck’s research will examine contemporary water infrastructure redevelopment projects in the St. Louis region where flood mitigation strategies have played a historic role in shaping regional economic development. Her research will examine projects addressing pluvial flooding from aging storm water infrastructure in St. Louis and projects addressing fluvial flooding from overflows on the Mississippi River. Her research questions center on how historic infrastructural projects shape contemporary redevelopment efforts focusing on how uncertainty and risk are calculated in times of changing storm and precipitation patterns leading to increased flood risk from climate change. Using qualitative methodology and archival research, her research aims to explain how historically uneven investments in infrastructure continue to shape water governance policies and projects today. Her research will contribute to scholarly and practical questions that lie at the intersections of infrastructure and equity by evaluating contemporary water infrastructure projects and their implications for social equity and environmental justice.

Stinard-Kiel’s research will look at a new shift in social services toward ‘trauma-informed care’. She will be looking at how trauma-informed approaches have been gaining traction over the past decade, particularly when it comes to service provisions for youth in disadvantaged urban areas. Her research will examine how practices and discourses around trauma are being deployed by social workers, schools, and government agencies and what kind of broader structural and political impacts they may be having. The research will involve ethnographic fieldwork in Philadelphia and New Orleans to examine how trauma-approaches play out in these two urban contexts. The results of the research will be shared with social service organizations and are likely to impact the future of trauma-informed urban policy.

Jung’s research will examine how urban sustainability is defined, conceptualized, and translated into practice in Seoul, one of the Asian megacities, by observing the processes of the decision-making and practices of two major urban policy, focusing on sustainable urban form and public space. Her research questions center on decision-making processes for urban sustainability policy, asking what factors were crucial for the discourse around urban environmental policy decision-making in Seoul. A mixed method including in-depth interviews and spatial analysis will be used for this research. By examining urban sustainability issues in Asian megacity context, this study will contribute to the development of urban theory on the definition and conceptualization of urban sustainability by adding new perspective from Asian megacities in the current west-oriented literature on urban sustainability. Also, this study will provide a valuable case study of the processes and the effects of urban environmental policy practice for other Asian megacities.

image of Ritwika Biswas

Biswas’ research will examine the factors that restrict or enhance Indian women’s access to urban spaces and their mobility and therefore their ability to exercise their rights of full citizenship. By examining the issue from a feminist geographic perspective, the research aims to move beyond a focus on fear of crime as limiting women’s mobility to analyze the interconnectedness among various socio-cultural gendered norms, and urban policies and planning that hinder or support women’s mobility. Drawing on qualitative methodology and mapping, the study will take place in the metropolitan city of Kolkata involving women and men aged 18 to 65. The results of the proposed research will likely make important contributions to Indian urban policies and academic debates.