Me Me Me Meme

A few weeks ago, I noticed a little chart like the one to the left. A friend had posted it about her own profession, and I thought it was clever. Within a couple of days, I noticed quite a few more online, and another friend declared that this meme had gone from unheard-of to overdone in record time. I agreed, but a few days later felt compelled to jump on board.

I had to admit that I did not exactly know what a meme was -- I thought it referred to this particular style of graphic. As I started to investigate, I learned that a meme is similar to internet viral content, except that each user changes it as he or she copies it, adapting it to individual messages. A meme, then, is like a micro-genre or a heuristic devise that can convey a wide variety of ideas in broadly similar packaging.

I learned the distinction from the Know Your Meme web site, where I also found an interesting article about what this particular meme with a cumbersome name tells us about the way we view ourselves and the what we think about the way others view us.

I made my own version using simple cut-and-paste methods with my browser and PowerPoint (and shirking my usually scrupulous academic habits to get the photos quickly, losing the attributions in the process). A few days later I learned that this particular meme can now be spread using a simple utility at UthinkIdo.com, which now hosts my Teaching Geography graphic. (2023 UPDATE: That site is gone, but I captured the image and am reposting it now.)




This little fad has been particularly interesting for me as a geographer, because I teach two senior-level university courses -- one for geographers in general and another specifically for teachers -- in which I push students to examine what it means to be a geographer, and in particular a geography teacher. Some of the ideas in the graphic I eventually created arose from discussions with students in the teaching class (thanks!).

The meme phenomenon is certainly facilitated by internet technology, but memes circulated quickly and widely in an earlier generation via office photocopiers, as documented in  When You're Up to Your Ass in Aligators (1987) by Alan Dundes and Carl Pagter. The term meme predates this work, having been introduced by biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 in The Selfish Gene.

One Shot Coffee Education

To learn about coffee, you can take one or both of my classes, come to one of my public lectures, explore my coffee web site, browse the coffee holdings in the Maxwell library, or sign up for classes through the Barista Guild of a America. Or you can just study the infographic below, lifted shamelessly from Daily Shot of Coffee. Which raises one more possibility: subscribe to Daily Shot for ongoing coffee education.

I would quibble with only two items in this graphic. One is the suggestion that arabica and robusta are the only species of coffee (genus Cofea). In reality, robusta is the most common varietal of canephora. Two other species are grown commercially, though the amounts are tiny and some experts consider liberica and conillon further varietals of robusta. Most agree that these are terrible coffees! My friend Freddy in Nicaragua informs us that there are about two dozen species, most of which are not commercial, some of which are found wild in the Americas, indicating that the genus was present prior to the emergence of the Atlantic Ocean.

The other is the rather confused terminology used for civet or Kopi Luwak coffee. These are not varietals, but rather a very rare method of harvesting and processing coffee -- using the palm civet digestive tract. Almost all of the 500-600 pounds of coffee collected in this manner each year comes from Indonesia.

Safe Zone

One of the privileges of working at Bridgewater State College (now University) has been learning about -- and participating in some small ways -- in the Pride movement. We have tried to create a campus on which students and employees of all genders, gender expression, and sexual orientations are free to work, study, and participate fully in campus life. We have, for example, provided scholarships for students whose families have cut them off financially because of sexual orientation or gender expression.

I know that this work has been worthwhile, because students and even visitors have told me so. I know that students have completed their education here who might not have been able to at other schools, and I am proud of that.

Last month, an out lesbian student was assaulted for having written an editorial against California's Proposition 8. The crime remains unsolved, so it has not yet been determined the extent to which this was a crime motivated by her words or by her identity, but in either case, it was a serious affront to a community that has prided itself as a safe and affirming campus. I was offended by that action, as it threatened to undermine what we have done so much to create. I was ultimately gratified to see the way in which student leaders were able to rally the campus and surrounding community.

Those who carried out the assault could have had no idea what their cowardice would unleash. Rather than creating an unsafe space in the center of our campus, as they had hoped, they motivated the rest of us to reaffirm the entire campus as a place of safety and even affirmation.

Changing Education Paradigms

One of the great privileges of my life has been that for most of my life (so far), I have been surrounded by excellent and even extraordinary educators. One of the great frustrations of recent years -- the past 18-20, really -- has been the ascendancy of non-educators whose "reforms" make good teaching increasingly difficult. In two articles last year -- Accountability and Kids Rule -- I argued that nobody is really measuring the success of "reforms" that aim to measure teacher performance.

The reforms are arrows in the quiver of class warfare, as often punitive measures are advocated for public educators at all levels that would never be tolerated in private schools. Having brooded on these contradictions and hypocrisies for many years, I was glad that a friend shared Sir Ken Robinson's rather elegant explanation (in a form known as an animate) of the divergence between what we say we want out of education and what we put into it.



This is worth taking the time to watch carefully a time or two!

Pleas of Dr. Robinson

With apologies to Anne Bancroft, Paul Simon, and Art Garfunkel. 

During dinner with Parris Glendening a few years ago, someone asked the former professor and former Maryland governor which title was appropriate. Feigning modesty (as I would probably have done), he replied that he had heard one should use the “higher” title, with the clear implication that “Governor” was therefore preferred to “Doctor” or professor.

I was reminded of this last evening as I sat in rapt attention during a ceremony in which former Irish President (and Dr.) Mary Robinson did my profession the favor of receiving geography’s highest honor, the Atlas Award. Despite the etiquette breach – and how deeply privileged I felt simply to be in the audience – I could not resist the pop-culture reference in the title of this blog post.

President Robinson was the first female president of Ireland and the first head of state to visit post-genocide Rwanda. She then served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. She is also a founding member of The Elders and recently received my country's greatest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It was not lost on her that the twenty-first century has opened with geography recognizing the lifelong leadership of two women – her friend Dr. Jane Goodall received the inaugural award in 2010.

President Robinson now leads Mary Robinson Foundation -- Climate Justice, an organization whose very name captures in two simple words the profound message that she brought to the 8,000 geographers assembled in New York City for our annual meeting. (Only a few hundred were in the room, but her words were clear and we can consider ourselves advised of how she sees our role in the world at this critical juncture between humans and the earth we inhabit.) Climate Justice describes a critical intersection between science and ethics. While politicians and pundits in the United States fritter away their time in ever more vitriolic and delusional dismissals of the obvious, physical and human systems are colliding in ways that are both severe and profoundly unjust.

Robinson spoke of Climate Justice in terms of three geographies: the Geography of Vulnerability, the Geography of Responsibility, and the Geography of Politics and Power.

See more on my CLIMATE PAGE

She mentioned, for example, already-growing gaps between those who are harmed by climate change and those who stand to benefit in certain ways. Growing seasons in tropical low latitudes -- where economically underdeveloped countries are concentrated -- are being shortened by drought, in contrast to longer growing seasons in upper-mid latitudes. As if to put a coda on her speech, I saw daffodils flourishing near the hotel the following morning, even though it is still February!

President Robinson argues that the juncture at which we find ourselves requires “in-depth evaluation of what we mean by equity in development.” She is encouraged that at the recent climate summit in Durban the European Union, the Least-Developed States, and the Small-Island States led the way toward a successor to Kyoto, in the form of a $100,000,000,000 annual Green Climate Fund. (See what The Economist, Nature, and my blog had to say at the time.)

Delivering on that commitment is even more important, in her view, than is reaching overall greenhouse gas commitments. That is to say, reaching a target such as 350 ppm carbon dioxide may be necessary, but not sufficient if equity is not forcefully addressed. even if we could reach Kyoto targets, it would be an insufficient response, because of the inequities in the geographies she describes.

At the end of her remarks, President-Doctor Robinson called geographers to account, admonishing us:
“You understand how our planet works.”

You can now listen to President Robinson's address in its entirety.

NEW (November 9, 2021): Some notes on the video.

TwiST -- Just Like This

(Apologies to Chubby Checker)

As I recently posted, this morning I had the privilege of participating with a remarkable group of colleagues on a panel discussing geography as a Diversity Discipline. Amy Work, for example, is both GIS Analyst and Education Coordinator at a fascination organization at Cayuga Community College, known as The Institute for the Application of Geospatial Technology (IAGT).

In particular, she described a summer program known as the Teaching with Spatial Technology Workshop, or TwiST, in which 50 to 100 people from many parts of the world and many professions come together for an intensive, week-long program in which they learn basics of geotechnologies such as global positioning systems (see our GPS article on EarthView) and geographic information systems (GIS).

The varied participants include faculty members from many disciplines on the community-college campus with which IAGT is affiliated. This has helped to create real foment about geography in general and geotechnologies in particular, among teachers -- and even administrators -- from many fields. The college library now maintains a collection of GPS units, for example, in part so that students in an art class can compare their freehand sketches of outdoor spaces with drawing based on GPS waypoints.

Some other fascinating examples really illustrate the diverse applications of geographic thinking in general, and geographic technical tools in particular. An professor of English, for example, who takes students on literary tours of London was able to replace her cumbersome collection of paper-based materials with and iPod-based map containing articles about each site on the tour. (Yes, I'm already thinking about how to do this for my annual Nicaragua tour!) Other examples abound, from criminal justice to resource conservation.

I am further inspired and look forward to a time in the near future when my own department could have the capacity to support this kind of interdisciplinary professional development for our campus and region. IAGT has created a model to which we can aspire.

Diversity Discipline

Most years, I do not attend the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, preferring the lower-key, familiar regional meetings, which I have attended in several North American regions. I attended in 2010 when it was held in my home town, mainly because we had the opportunity to bring EarthView to the meeting.

This weekend I have attended the national meeting in part because I missed our regional meeting in Montreal and in part because it is reasonably close -- a pleasant train ride away in New York City. The main reason for the decision, however, was an invitation from a geographer I have never met but whose writing I have greatly admired. Professor Sarah Goggin and I are both contributors to Geo Hot Topics, an educational blog maintained by Wiley publishers. We share a strong interest in helping people to understand the power of geographic thinking, so when she invited me to join a panel on geography education, I was both honored and convinced that this would be a good use of my time.

The session, entitled Geography and Diversity, met this morning, and was followed by another session by the same title. Sarah chaired both sessions, which were distinguished by their subtitles -- "Showcasing 'Diversity Discipline' among Administrators and Interdisciplinary Campus Colleagues" was followed by "Teaching to Cultural and Learning Diversities in the Lower-Division Geography Classroom." In other words, we began with a discussion of how to champion geography as a way to promote the diversity aspirations of our colleges and universities, followed by a discussion of how that actually plays out in classrooms.

We decided to spend only a few minutes discussing the article, deciding that A Diversity Discipline is more appropriate, even if we are tempted to think we represent The Diversity Discipline. All kidding aside, these were two very valuable sessions.

I chose to open my remarks with the photo above, taken just a few days ago. When a student on our campus was attacked -- apparently by fellow students -- for an editorial she wrote in support of same-sex marriage, the campus rallied, defending the right of members of our community to be who they are and to express their views freely. The response exemplifies the value of social media -- a well-attended, well-covered event was organized over the course of a holiday weekend -- and the many ways in which geography and geography students are deeply involved in multiple discourses on and around our campus. Defenders of free expression and individual dignity included people from many disciplines and backgrounds, which was the true beauty of the event. As one of the student speakers later suggested, however, geography was very well represented!

I spent some time discussing the legislative and networking efforts of our Massachusetts Geographic Alliance, which in many ways parallel national efforts. At long last -- in my view -- the Association of American Geographers is creating more effective messages about the contributions of our field, and is working with a variety of partners on a national legislative approach that has great promise.

We also discussed the passion for learning geography that we find among our own students and among the thousands of younger students we have reached through Project EarthView. At the conclusion of my remarks, I shared a photograph that had just been shared with me by one of our majors. It represents a passion for learning about the earth; its simplicity belies the complexity of the relationships we know each globe represents.

Outsourced Horrors

The Mexican poet Octavio Paz famously lamented: "Alas, poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States!" The Valentine's Day fire killing hundreds of prisoners in Comayagua, Honduras suggests that the smaller countries of the region are imperiled by proximity to both Mexico and the United States.

As I wrote last March, President Obama has joined a century-long, bipartisan succession of U.S. Presidents who care little about how U.S. policies affect the people of the region. During the 2009 coup in Honduras, Brazil did far more than the U.S. to uphold due process, and our failure ultimately enabled for the presidency to be stolen. 

As both the BBC and NPR have reported, a culture of police violence has grown in Honduras, and the implicit support for the coup is at least partly to blame. The cause of the prison fire at Comayagua is as yet unknown, but it is already known that close to half of the prisoners died, many of them in cells to which no keys could readily be found. In the aftermath, violence erupted between police and relatives of prisoners.

I have written a number of stories on this blog about the drug-related violence gripping Mexico -- including many border areas that I once enjoyed visiting regularly. I have tried to make the case that in many ways, what has befallen Mexico is that the most difficult parts of the U.S. "war on drugs" have been outsourced to Mexico, just as surely as we have outsourced low-paid manufacturing and its attendant misogyny and violence. The BBC reported more than a year ago that Mexico's efforts to quell drug-related violence were, in  turn, pushing the cartel battles into El Salvador. 

The same BBC article mentions that El Salvador in particular was already wracked by the export of gang violence from Los Angeles. Whenever possible, the United States deports violent criminals to their birth countries, even if they immigrated at two years of age and learned all of their criminality here. Blame for violence in Central America rests ultimately with the criminals -- in and out of uniform -- of the region itself. But much of the violence has roots in the United States and Mexico that must also be remembered.

In addition to the BBC coverage cited above, see the New York Times for details of the fire.

PowerPoint Afterlife

Like an ex-smoker crusading against butts, my mini-crusade against bad PowerPoint is probably rooted in my past as an avid user and in-house software trainer for the entire Microsoft Office Suite. As a graduate student and in my early days of teaching, the ability to go from outline BOOM! to presentation was intoxicating. One graduate advisor had taught me how to use slides as a guide in presentations, and another had extolled the virtue of outlines as a good indicator of clear thinking. Then along came PowerPoint, followed by employment that included teaching others to use it, and I was hooked.

Eventually, a colleague in the visual arts was working with me to set up the web site for the Watershed Access  Laboratory and decided that I needed -- and was worth of -- professional help. She called one of my PowerPoint presentations "cute" -- but not in a good way. Then she took me to a day-long workshop led by Yale statistician and visual-communication genius Edward Tufte. Throughout the day, people kept asking Tufte about PowerPoint, and he swatted away their questions like so many annoying insects. A couple years later, however, he put his annoyance into a more constructive form -- an essay that has become my Bible and required reading for many of my students. (If I could require it of professors, I would!)

iStockphoto.com, via Boston Globe

I last blogged about this almost two years ago, when an article in the New York Times inspired me to post Death by PowerPoint. I should have given credit for that title to Eric LePage, an IT professional at BSU with whom I frequently give presentations on this topic.

I was inspired to revisit the subject this week by another article, this time in the Boston Globe, sent to me by a former student who read Tufte's critique in my coffee class -- and who had endured my performance of the Gettysburg Address with Peter Norvig's PPT slides. The Globe photo essay Stop the PowerPoint Pollution is the culmination of questions on the subject posed to readers of its business pages. It builds on an earlier essay by Paul Hellman, PowerPoint Mistakes that Drive People Crazy, both of which highlight the importance of having something meaningful to say before firing up the software!

Fair Chocolate

Regular readers of this blog will know that I spend a lot of time thinking, writing, and speaking about coffee and the difficulty many farmers face in the "free trade" model that dominates this and most other industries. Dependent on a network of intermediaries who pay whatever the market will bear for their perishable product, "free" most often means that farmers and other workers are free to be exploited.

At Valentine's Day, we are reminded that coffee is not the only product for which FREE does not equal FAIR. I've written elsewhere about bananas, for example, and it is becoming better understood that chocolate often passes along quite a distasteful path on the way to being delicious.

The effort to change all this involves not only the offering of alternatives to conventional chocolate through companies such as Equal Exchange, but also campaigns to bring pressure on the conventional companies that continue to profit from slavery and child labor. The UUSC captures the contradictiono and provides a way to put pressure on Hershey.



I am very pleased that my January 2013 study tour in Nicaragua will include a full day with a fair-trade cocao cooperative in Matagalpa.