Graduate Paper Abstracts

Promoting Successful Campus-Wide Sustainability Through Hands-on Education

Maelynn Dickson, CSU Fullerton

Current conditions of CSUF’s waste-management are at a point where improvements need to be made. Several studies have been conducted on campus that examine how well waste is being managed and sorted by students, faculty, and staff. Through these studies, recommendations have been suggested to Facilities Management on ways to improve current conditions. However, several years surpassing that information, only two recommendations have been implemented. Therefore, this research aims to address waste-management at a localized level – CSUF’s Humanities building – before and after new educational solutions are introduced, to identify current irregularities and conditions in the campuses waste-management system, and to implement education towards successful recycling/waste-management strategies.

NOISE POLLUTION, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, AND URBAN GREEN SPACE: A CASE STUDY OF SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA

Lauryn Duoto, San Jose State University

Noise pollution is estimated to rise significantly in the residential areas of San Jose, which has had a 7.7% increase in population since 2010, leading to an increase in traffic from highways, air, and public transit. Chronic noise pollution is accompanied by health side effects that result in annoyance, stress, cardiovascular disease, tinnitus, and sleep deprivation. These health hazards are prominent in residential locations that are dominated by vehicular traffic. Throughout residential locations the side effects of noise pollution are prominent throughout ethnocultural minorities and low-income areas that have previously gone unnoticed in San Jose, California. This project identifies demographically based neighborhoods that are vulnerable to noise pollution within the city of San Jose, while also addressing the availability of urban green space. This research analyzes noise pollution and census tract data through ArcGIS to explore the relationship between ethnocultural minorities, socio-economic status, urban green space, and noise pollution.

A tale of two farmers in the legal Green Rush: new California agricultural geographies in commercial cannabis cultivation

Lucas Reyes, CSU Long Beach

Reefer, ganja, weed. Marijuana has been given many names that connote an underground existence, but in mainstream understandings cannabis has rarely been identified as an agricultural crop. California now joins a growing number of states to legalize adult (recreational) use of cannabis over twenty years after pioneering its medical use. Illegality kept the economic impacts of cannabis agriculture in the shadows; in 2008 conservative estimates for California total $20 billion in wholesale value. If, as suggested by California Assemblyman Wood, cannabis is, “going to be treated as an agricultural product,” a critical examination of cannabis as agriculture is needed. Attending cannabis agriculture and business conferences as well as conducting interviews with perspective, current and former growers in northern California’s Emerald Triangle and central San Joaquin valley, the goal of this research is to examine differing motives for and concentration of cannabis agriculture by following the stories of two different farmers.

Temporalities of Toxic Exposure: Vulnerability to Pesticides in Agricultural California

Mayra Sanchez, UC Davis

This paper focuses on how a group of farmworkers and environmentalists who urge government agencies a full ban of chlorpyrifos—a reproductive and neurodevelopment toxic insecticide—articulate their vulnerability to the various toxic temporalities of chlorpyrifos. This paper argues that a focus on temporality can help us re-trace how neglected communities care for the invisible and dispersed environmental harm across space and time. Drawing from ethnographic data from concerned communities in California’s northern Central Coast, this paper follows how they draw attention to their vulnerability to this toxicant that shed light on how such uneven and unjust exposures are configured. I suggest that such re-mappings can help us envision more caring and socioenvironmentally just worlds.

Landscape Change in the Central Valley: Where Fiction Meets Reality

Stacie Townsend, UC Davis

Fictional literature has played an intrinsic role in fueling our collective public knowledge and sentiment about places. However, treatment of California's many varied landscapes in fiction has not been evenly investigated by scholars. Particularly, the literary landscape of California's Central Valley has been under-examined for its contributions to geographic knowledge of the state. The purpose of this research is to deconstruct the creation and perpetuation of California's Central Valley as a physical landscape and geographic construct using a literary content analysis of California fiction. How can geographers come to better understand the historical trajectory of the human and physical landscapes of California’s Central Valley via the region’s representations in fictional literature? This research focuses on the prevalence of contradictory depictions of this region’s locales; the differences in writing and authorship concerning the region’s physical environments; and, finally, how landscape change has been represented in writings about the Valley.

Instrumental Victimhood: How nations frame victimhood narratives in the pursuit of political violence

Dustin Tsai, UC Davis

This paper introduces a theory that seeks to explain how everyday people can be manipulated into perpetrating acts of political violence, ranging from isolated acts of terrorism to systemic ethnic cleansing campaigns. Highlighting dominant political narratives in the former Yugoslavia, Germany, and contemporary East Asian geopolitics, I identify a distinct socio-political pattern that has emerged in these disparate cases. I argue that states and nations operationalize forms of 'instrumental victimhood,' a victimized narrative of a nation’s collective history, as sharp political tools for nation-building projects and aggressive nationalist campaigns in the leading up to periods of war and political turmoil; these highly propagandized narratives also take on a salient gendered component that is integral to their promulgation. I further argue the preponderant role this rhetoric continues to play in shaping discourse behind nationalist movements today, such as the resurgence of far-right identitarianism in the European political landscape in recent years.