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Congratulations to PhD students Cathy Carter and James Wilson, who won AAG research awards at this year's AAG Annual Meeting in Denver. Both awards
carry a prize of $250.
Cathy Carter won the research award for the Geography of Religion and Belief Systems (GORABS) AAG Specialty Group. Her award-winning
presentation was based on her doctoral research entitled, "The Role of Theology in the Production of Space in Shaker Societies."
ABSTRACT: Social space is produced by societies according to the spatial practices that exist
within the society. The produced space is a set of relations between objects
within the space. The set of economic relations, for example, corresponds to
space in which manufacturing and trade can take place while the set of political
relations characterizes the space in which governments operate. Theology is
also a relation that exists within a society’s space, but the space it defines is not
well studied and the nature of theological space is not well understood. In some
cases, theology is the dominant factor in the production of the space within
which a community interacts. The relative importance of theology to its
concomitant space is expressed by the architecture, icons and symbols
produced by the society. This research studies the nature of theological space
and its production by examining the spatial practices of the religious sect
known as the Shakers. This 19th century millennial sect worked to establish
heaven on earth, building nineteen communities across the northeastern and
Midwestern United States. These early planned communities were built
according to the precepts of the Shaker theology.
More information on this paper and her other works can be found on Cathy's website at www.glue.umd.edu/~clcarter/
James Wilson won the Andrew Hill Clark Award for the best paper presentation by a doctoral student. His presentation was entitled, "Historical
and Computational Analysis of Long-Term Environmental Change: Forests in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia."
This award is given out by the Historical Geography Specialty Group.
ABSTRACT: When, where and why were the forests of the Shenandoah Valley cleared or
allowed to grow back? It is commonly believed that the maximum amount of
forest clearance in the region was reached in the late nineteenth or first
part of the twentieth century and that the forests then began to grow back
due to the abandonment of marginal farmlands. Many studies of long term
changes to the forests of the United States have been based on different
combinations of variables contained in the agricultural census. A local
analysis of census data for the North River watershed in the Shenandoah
Valley indicates that the maximum amount of cleared farmland occurred later
than has previously been believed, potentially calling into question the
driving forces behind changes to the forests. Geo-historical and
geo-computational approaches were combined in order to determine if the new
analysis was valid and to further examine the causes and characteristics of
forest changes in the watershed.
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