Abstract
To build our collective capacities to engage in CPG research and practice, we need to proliferate a new generation of critical physical geographers. To do this, we must train students who can think, conduct research, and share findings in ways that are critical, open-ended, and transdisciplinary. But what does this look like in practice? This chapter outlines five central themes which supported an education rich in the principles of Critical Physical Geography for two graduate students: an inclusive pedagogy and collaboration, an interdisciplinary setting, an applied project, an acceptance of a dynamic ontology, and an open-ended epistemology. The conclusion section highlights which of these practices were the most critical, as well as the possible limitations to similar research. In the end, the graduate students left this research project with a broader understanding of their own research and armed with a practical and diverse set of skills for a changing job market.
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Notes
- 1.
We use “proliferate” here drawing on inspiration from J.K. Gibson-Graham (2006). We intend to evoke the sense of a multiplication of small, individual efforts, with no requirement for either exact replication or expansion of one particular kind of effort. While Critical Physical Geography is critical, it is diverse and its boundaries and its definitions are unpoliced; we support that spirit in our vision of proliferation, in which each new iteration can be started or nurtured with a seed or encouragement or resources from others but grows in its own place and context in its own way.
- 2.
We note that our recommendations (Vogel et al. 2016) aimed to guide policy, not management. Complex and open-ended recommendations might be frustrating for landowners, small town governments, and other on-the-ground managers who often find it easier to work with something more formulaic. To guide policy, however, there was no good way to be formulaic: there are so many different policy-making institutions—six states just in New England, each with 5–10 relevant agencies, and about 12 relevant federal agencies—that we could not prescribe one thing that would work for all of them. The few things that would make a difference for all of them (e.g. FEMA maps that would include fluvial hazards, or changing FEMA flood mitigation funding requirements and processes) were simply not politically viable in the near term, and hammering too hard might make our entire effort simply dismissed. Thus in our policy recommendations we came up with fundamental things like “develop and implement fluvial hazard assessment, mapping and user access systems” which different state or federal agencies, nonprofits, or legislators could develop in their own way. Any specifics and formulas needed by on-the-ground managers, in other words, would ultimately come from policy-makers, not us. We offered ideas about specific approaches by finding and describing examples of how one state, or community, or set of agencies, or a nonprofit, made something work.
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Acknowledgments
RiverSmart was made possible by grants from the UMass Center for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (McIntire-Stennis Project 231297); the US Army Corps of Engineers Institute for Water Resources (grant 11488334 with administrative help from the USGS); and the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (grant 11447848).
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Gillett, N., Vogel, E., Slovin, N., Hatch, C.E. (2018). Proliferating a New Generation of Critical Physical Geographers: Graduate Education in UMass’s RiverSmart Communities Project. In: Lave, R., Biermann, C., Lane, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Physical Geography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71461-5_24
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