Spotlights

2022

Current work includes a study of the National Historic Trail system, a public history program launched by the U.S. Congress in 1978 that uses linear trails to narrate historic movements that produced the U.S. nation-state. She is especially interested in how Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities have used this system to disrupt colonial and white supremacist narratives of American history and tell their own stories, and how those subaltern histories structure political-economic goals such as the restoration of treaty rights and creation of truly public spaces.

Laura is greatly impacted by her mentor and friend, Laura Pulido, qualitative social scientist at the University of Oregon and winner of multiple AAG awards, most recently the Enhancing Diversity Award. It was Laura Pulido who first introduced Barraclough to the concept of landscape, pushes her constantly to stay true to her evidence, and has helped her to become a better writer -- all while modeling how to maintain integrity in the academy. Dr. Pulido is one of the co-editors of the People’s Guide series. The first book in the series, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles, authored by Pulido, Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng, received AAG’s Globe Award for Public Understanding of Geography.

George Sanchez, Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity, and History at the University of Southern California, is another mentor whose advice Laura turns to, particularly when struggling with writing. Sanchez told her to "write the paragraph you can write today," and don't worry about what comes before or after, and to commit to that practice every day. Laura applies this advice to more general professional and personal situations as well. “Just do whatever pieces you can do today; the rest will come together over time” is a perspective she has gained with seniority. “I do see how a little steady work each day adds up to great things.”

Students at Yale have the opportunity to learn from Laura urban history and policy, mobility studies, critical race studies and critical Indigenous studies, and history and politics of the U.S. West. Clearly dedicated to teaching, when asked what she was most proud of, her response was, “I'm most proud of the moments when I've been able to be very present and supportive of my students. When I see my students doing well, I feel grateful for their success and proud of whatever small part I've been able to play in that success.”

Laura’s favorite landscape would have to be the hills she grew up in around Los Angeles, CA. She is a proud single mother to 11 year old son Alessandro, who accompanies her on most research trips. They recently returned from fieldwork in Virginia and Maryland, where Laura studied the National Park Service’s use of Indigenous Cultural Landscapes to restore Native relations to land and water in the Chesapeake Bay. Highlights of the trip were the amazing public art in Richmond, Virginia and ice cream at least once a day!

At present, april is writing a paper on the webcast series Verzuz to explore how Black music curators cultivate digital sites of Black virtual care and sociosonic wellness during the coronavirus pandemic. In this work, she applies a Black feminist and digital geo-ethnographic approach to examine how Black Twitter produces cartographic reproductions of Black digital footprints (hashtags). By mapping coordinates of Black virtual care, nostalgic connectivity, and digital shelter, april seeks to elucidate how Black Twitter is able to “music” and sound themselves out of the fantastical horror of covid-19 through digital pursuits of melodic restoration. She is also collaborating on two projects with her husband Roderick E. Jackson who is a PhD Student in the African American Studies Department at UC Berkeley. These projects include a paper: “Black Scale: Overpass Methodologies Through Black Soundwalking in Chicagoland” and a “coffee table book” entitled: “Developing Black Visuethics: The Black Eye, Subjective Intimacies, and the Geographies of Ocularization and Sound in Chicagoland.” At Berkeley, april was appointed as the first Berkeley Black Geographies Fellow and recently published a Black Geographies Library Guide with her colleague Robert Moellerth through the Berkeley Black Geographies Project. She is also organizing a Black geographies graduate summit and conference with several students from UC Berkeley and Stanford University.

When april struggles, she thinks about every Black person who has been denied due to their racial and geo-coded identity. “Everything that I do is, has been, and always will be for them. I have a today and possibly a tomorrow because of my ancestors so that’s enough for me to press on.” After dropping|getting kicked out of four community colleges, april earned her bachelor’s degree in Black geographies from Mount Holyoke College graduating Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude and she completed an award-winning undergraduate thesis on the Black house music and cultural community in Chicagoland. As she’s excelled professionally, april has remained, “a homegirl from Chicagoland that my family and friends still recognize.”

april’s latest research, currently in review, is co-authored with Robert Moeller and introduces the overpass, a Black multi-scalar methodology, that foregrounds the multivalent geographies of embodied persons and the scalar processes of racial capitalist development. Through a geomusicological and geosonicological reading of Beyoncé’s “Haunted,” they consider the “sense” in a Black sense of place and how the geographical, music, and sonics of Blackness texturize this framing through what they identify as a “Black sense of scale” and the ways Blackness produces various scales, but are also shaped by them.

april is also a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Theta Chapter of Massachusetts, the Geographic Society of Chicago, the Society of Ethnomusicology, and AAG. She is a graduate student representative for the Black Geographies Specialty Group with AAG and Chair of the Undergraduate Student Affinity Group with AAG.

If you’d like to get in touch with april to learn more about her work or potentially collaborate, her email is april-l-graham@berkeley.edu.

2021

Her work is situated within a scholarship that considers a crucial but often overlooked place of the diasporic Asians and settlers of colour in global settler colonial studies. She is interested in “Asian settler colonialism” developed by Kānka Maoli scholar-activist Haunani-Kay Trask and Asian settler allies such as Candace Fujikane, Jonathan Y. Okamura, and Dean Saranillio in Hawai‘i. Desiree is also influenced by Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd, Asian Canadian scholar Iyko Day, legal scholar Leti Volpp as well as Asian American Studies scholars such as Lisa Lowe, Lisa Yoneyama and Keith Camacho. Collectively, their scholarship theorizes Asian North American positionality and proximity to settler, military, capital logics across disparate geographies. This scholarship inspires Desiree to ask,

• How can we study and geographically map intersecting logics of settler colonialism through analysis of Asian and Indigenous crossings, land and labour in the Americas?

• How do we take into account previous and distinct, but inextricably connected histories of colonization, western imperialism and militarism in Asia-Pacific and the Arctic, that shape Asian migrant and Indigenous subjectivities in North America?

Currently, Desiree is currently working on her dissertation and anticipated manuscript, “Internment Camps on Indigenous Lands: Settler Colonialism and the Vestiges of War in Hawai'i, Southeast Alaska and Interior British Columbia.” In this work, she uses historical methods (archival research) and field-based methods (landscape archaeology and architectural documentation) to study surface and subsurface ruins at three former Second World War internment camps in Hawai'i, Alaska, and British Columbia. Engaging with “Asian settler colonialism” as a theoretical framework, she argues for a heritage politics that is attuned to competing and overlapping Asian settler war memories of unjust incarceration and Indigenous (Pacific Islander, Alaska Native and Coast Salish) land claims.

Through this project, Desiree expands a traditional U.S.-Canada comparative perspective by taking into account former U.S. Territories in Oceania and Arctic Alaska. To date, there is no published book that considers the interrelationship of Asian and Indigenous peoples in Pacific Canada, Oceania, and Alaska in wartime and in the aftermath.

Desiree uses the word “omnivert” to describe herself; she’s a healthy mixture of an introvert and an extrovert. Her favorite landscape is the Sierra Nevada mountains and alpine lakes. One skill she would really like to learn is patience.

Keep your eye out in the next year or two for Desiree’s book. In the meantime, if you’re interested in her work, she can be reached by email at desiree.valadares@berkeley.edu.

One of Mitchell’s current projects is building a Landsat time-series over a watershed in southern Ontario and comparing results with tree ring chronologies. Landsat time-series from 1972-2018 over forest sites have been converted to percent canopy cover based on hemispherical photograph collection and compared against standardized and detrended ring widths. Preliminary results from this current project show significant relationships between Landsat and tree rings at 9 of 16 sites, with relationships strongest at coniferous sites. Both Landsat and tree rings show similar patterns of growth-decline, with growth in the 1980s and strong decline since about 2010.

Mitchell is most proud of his first published paper, "Landscape variability of vegetation change across the forest to tundra transition of central Canada" (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2018.08.002) published in Remote Sensing of Environment. He published this work following from his MSc at Queen's University with Drs. Paul Treitz and Ryan Danby. Mitchell started this degree after an arts degree in Environmental Geography from the University of Toronto and was excited to explore northern Canada and do field work, but he didn’t know much about remote sensing. Of this accomplishment, Mitchell says, “To learn many important skills "on the job" and have it manifest into both a published paper at one of the top remote sensing journals in the world and the 2018 National Best Master's Thesis Award from the Canadian Remote Sensing Society was strong validation of my research skills and the path I have chosen.”

When asked what skill he lacks but would love to learn, Mitchell replied with learning to speak Tamil so that he could better communicate with his girlfriend’s mom! His favorite landscape is the Eastern Townships of Quebec, which he drives through when traveling from Toronto and where he grew up in Maine. If he could trade places with anyone for 24 hours, Mitchell would swap with a professional soccer player so that he could experience at the highest level the sport he plays and frequently watches.

If you would like to reach out to Mitchell, you can contact him at mitchell.bonney@mail.utoronto.ca. He is also on Twitter @ZZMitch.

Eligibility and Nominations

All members of the LSG are eligible for the Member Spotlight! This is meant to be an inclusive, community-building initiative and we want to feature our diverse members. We have a range of questions designed for all stages and careers and are flexible in what we present. We especially encourage nominations of members from marginalized groups.

To nominate someone, please fill out the Member Spotlight Nomination form below. We also encourage self-nominations!

Those selected will have a write-up created about them which will be shared first in the AAG LSG community forum and then on our website and our Instagram and Twitter accounts. We are happy to share publications, resources, materials, and link to websites and social media accounts in an attempt to further connect LSG members.

Online Nomination Form