Monday, September 28, 2009

2010 Saarinen Student Paper Announcement

Saarinen Student Paper Competition

The Environmental Perception and Behavioral Geography Specialty Group announces the 2010 Saarinen Student Paper Competition. The EP&BGSG will award a $200 prize for the best student paper, illustrated paper, or poster (graduate or undergraduate) presented in either environmental perception or behavioral geography at the 2010 AAG Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Entrants in the Saarinen Student Paper Competition must also submit a maximum 25-page (double-spaced) version of their work. Papers must be based upon original research done as an undergraduate or graduate student and must be written entirely by the applicant. The winner will be announced at the Environmental Perception and Behavioral Geography Specialty Group business meeting at the 2010 AAG meeting. Attendance at the EP&BGSG meeting is not required to receive the Saarinen Student Paper Competition award.

All submissions will be judged on written clarity, methodological soundness, contribution to the field of EP&BG, and their presentation at the meeting. The Academic Directors of the EP&BGSG will judge all entries. The deadline for receiving your Saarinen Competition application form and your paper submission is Friday, February 12, 2010.

To apply for the Saarinen Student Paper Competition, fill out an application form available here.

Send completed application form and manuscript to:

Dan Montello
Geography Department
University of California Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4060

For questions contact Dan Montello via telephone (805 893-8536) or e-mail.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

AAG Washington Call for Participation 2

*Session: EMOTIONAL GEOGRAPHIES OF CONFINEMENT*

Movement and mobility have long been at the forefront of an 'ableist' geographical tradition. However, with the recent proliferation of geographies of difference, new attention is being directed toward human experiences of immobility and confinement, in which 'normal' rhythms of movement have been disrupted or disabled. The aim of this session will be to explore how emotion is constituted in the spaces and subjects of confinement across a broad range of contexts. This session seeks to accommodate papers exploring the emotional subjectivities of confinement as well as the spaces, flows, and networks of affect in situations of confinement. By conceptualizing confinement in its most abstract sense, as a condition of being constrained by boundaries and limits (/con fines/), this interdisciplinary session seeks to induce unifying threads of affect and emotion from diverse experiences of confinement. These experiences could include imprisonment, institutionalization, mental illness, physical disability, impairment, and similar forms of spatial isolation or social difference.

Questions that could be considered in this session include:

· How does confinement reflect upon the relationships of (dis)unity in such dialectics as inside/outside, mind/body, known/knowable, and thoughts/things?

· How are emotional experiences of confinement expressed and communicated? To what extent are they representable?

· What role do borders, boundaries, limits and frontiers play in the emotional worlds of confinement? How might those in confinement cope with, rearrange, or transcend these constraints?

· What is the significance of spaces and times 'beyond' confinement? How do memory, imagination, and affect mediate containment and allow for extension of the self into these 'beyonds'?

Please submit an abstract conforming to AAG guidelines *by **Wednesday,

**October 14, 2009*, to Mason McWatters: masonmcwatters@mail.utexas.edu

AAG Washington Call for Participation

Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers Washington D.C., April 14-18, 2010

Call for Participation


Sessions: Geovisualization / Geovisual Analytics, Cognition, Behavior, and Representation

Organizers: Sara Irina Fabrikant (University of Zurich), Amy Griffin (University of New South Wales-ADFA), Kirk Goldsberry (Michigan State University), Sarah Battersby (University of South Carolina), and Jin Chen (GeoVISTA Center, Penn State University)

Specialty Group Sponsors: Cartography, GIS, and Environmental Perception and Behavior

Content
We invite papers on computational, statistical and cognitive aspects of geovisualization, geovisual analytics and geographic research to be included in a series of sessions at the 2010 Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting.

Specifically of interest are theoretical and empirical contributions exploring computation, geovisualization, navigation and wayfinding, cartography, education, and methods specific to cognitive research.

This includes (but is not limited to):

1. Geovisualization and geovisual analytics design, implementation and use

2. Application of geovisualization and geovisual analytics displays and tools to understand spatial cognition, reasoning, and inference and decision making

3. Methods for and application of cognitive theories and methods to understanding issues in geographic research (including fMRI)

4. Human-geovisualization interaction research

5. Wayfinding and navigation

6. Cognitive map design research

Participants
In addition to geographers, GIScientists, cartographers, and cognitive or behavioral geographers we are also looking for speakers from a broad range of disciplines, including but not limited to psychology, cognitive science, education, HCI, etc.

To be included in this session, please:

1. Register and submit your abstract online following the AAG Guidelines (http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/).

2. Email your presenter identification number (PIN), paper title, and abstract to Kirk Goldsberry (kg@msu.edu) by October 21.