Inaugural Editor Sarah Melotte welcomes you to Confluence
Just north of campus in the heart of downtown Denver, Cherry Creek and the South Platte River intersect, forming the confluence after which this journal is named. Like a river, the scholarly identity of our department is never a finished product but rather a continuous process.
Students and scholars have sculpted this identity over twenty years of geographic thinking. Circa 2002, the geography program became the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, with the name itself suggesting a confluence of two adjacent fields. The department has since belonged to a community of scholars either in the natural or social sciences whose work focuses on some aspect of the human / environment interaction and the challenges we confront regarding that theme. A confluence is thus an appropriate representation of our scholarship as it merges multiple disciplines.
Confluence is the culmination of a need to recognize the outstanding student scholarship that has emerged from our department over the last two decades. The faculty have nominated, and the editorial board has accepted 10 manuscripts for this inaugural issue. These manuscripts have undergone a peer-review process that engaged current and former graduate students, with the editorial process being run exclusively by students.
As Dennis Cosgrove famously states, “geography is everywhere”; anything that happens in a place (which is virtually everything) can be subjected to a spatial analysis (Cosgrove 1989). The pieces in this issue represent the diversity of form that spatial analyses can adopt, whether they be qualitative and theoretical, or exclusively concerned with physical geography and the environmental sciences.
Issue 1 opens with PhD student, Amy DePierre’s, “Ecological, Egotistical, and Interstitial Space”, inspired by Yi Fu Tuan’s 1977 book, Space and Place. DePierre’s writing is a primer for how one may think about space and place, a moving introductory piece for our first issue.
MA Student, Delaney Callahan’s, “Characterization of Jaguar Utilization Distributions in the Brazilian Pantanal” is a robust statistical analysis of the spatial ecology of jaguars. Anna James follows up with another joint statistical and wildlife analysis in her piece, “Characterizing Avian Species Richness Patterns in Colorado.” The final ecological piece is MSES alumnae Caroline Hildebrand’s, “The Common Mycelial Network (CMN) of Forests” in which Hildebrand studies the fungal networks that preserve the integrity of forest systems.
Following Hildebrand’s project are three human geography pieces concerning the experiences of marginalized individuals and communities in Colorado. “Denver Encampments and COVID-19: A Geographic Atlas” is an atlas by undergraduate alumnae Lucy Briggs. Undergraduate alumnae Kristy Gantzer’s “A Refugee Is…” then explores the experiences of an Eritrean refugee in Denver. Her project contains beautiful artistic pieces by Alyssa Tamborski and an accompanying statement. Created by Landscape Architecture graduate student, Aletha Spang, “Contested Storytelling in Public Space: An Analysis of Art and Equity in Pueblo, CO,” interrogates the stories that public art portrays about Pueblo and the consequences of leaving some stories untold.
Continuing with the theme of the emancipatory potential of art is my piece within the discipline of critical cartography. In “’Ground Truth in the Loam:’ Literary Mapping as Emancipation,” I challenge the traditional authority of institutions to demarcate space and the ways in which creative storytelling can participate in a counter-cartography. Closing the human geography scholarship is another paper that engages with Tuan’s Space and Place by PhD student Hillary Quarles. “Digital Space and Place,” imagines the potential of Tuan’s thought to engage with the concept of digital space, though the modern concept did not yet exist at the time of his writing.
Issue 1 then concludes with “The Transformation of Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge,” a video essay by undergraduate student Brian Genge. Created with original photography and videography, Genge’s work is a visually beautiful description of ecological healing at one of Denver’s most iconic outdoor spaces.
This body of student scholarship demonstrates the creative and technical acumen of a department that operates at the confluence of the human and environmental sciences. We are thrilled to debut this identity with the world in its newest form!
Source:
Cosgrove, D. (1989). Geography is Everywhere: Culture and Symbolism in Human Landscapes.
In: Gregory, D., Walford, R. (eds) Horizons in Human Geography. Horizons in
Geography. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19839-9_7