Being almost done with my group project for ENVS 220, Urban Green Spaces and Development in Portland, I have learned a lot about conducting situated research with limited resources. First, I am pretty proud of the work my whole team put in to put this project together, and I think it turned out pretty well. […]
ENVS 220 Reflection
Environmental Analysis (ENVS 220) has been a large contributor to the growth and change that I’ve gone through this semester. One of the biggest changes for me has been adapting to a bigger and more stressful workload, and 220 has had all to do with that. With all the parts of 220 existing simultaneously, labs, […]
Ecotypes and Identities
Reading a whole bunch of different articles about various “Ecotypes”, or environmental values, has been certainly interesting, but it also left me wondering what the point of it was. They all seemed to say the same thing: there are x number of boxes to lump environmental identities into. Either you can be bright, light, or […]
Methodology and Green Spaces in Portland
For our project on urban green spaces in Portland, it was a struggle to define exactly what focus question we would be testing and the best possible methodologies for research. Despite being advised to not let “the tail wag the dog” and let our methodologies define our research, it was hard not to. We have […]
Race and Awareness at Lewis and Clark Protests
This week, our campus was faced with the reality that racism is alive and well on our perfect little campus on the hill. And people reacted. Being a part of an intro anthropology class, we became aware of and discussed issues of race that have always been present on our campus but really made themselves […]
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Integral Theory
Over the weekend, I finished Haruki Murakami’s wonderful novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It is a book about a lot of things, but most importantly it’s a commentary on human suffering and a portrait of modern Japan. This may not directly stand out as an environmental text, but I found several interesting parallels between the […]
Defining a Framing Question – Urban Greenspaces
This past week in lab, we explored several possible topics to study in our situated projects. One of the biggest problems our lab teams collectively faced was how to frame our topic with a huge, global question. It was easy enough to bring the problem outside of Portland, but it was a challenge to address […]
Interviews – Conducting Qualitative Research
Conducting and analyzing interviews was a weird process. Never having been involved in the social sciences until now, I was unaware of just how different interviews are from surveys or any other research method. Coming from a natural science focused background, I am so used to pure quantitative research. The had to be mathematical proofs […]
Refining My Concentration
As with the whole concentration process so far, editing my concentration has been more difficult than planned. I mean just editing a rough draft couldn’t be that hard, right? Well according to all the time I put into it this past week, not quite. I had felt pretty good about my concentration draft when that […]
ENVX Symposium – Elizabeth Demaray and Rock Graffiti
Elizabeth Demaray, the keynote speaker for the Environment Across Boundaries Symposium, blew me away with her unique and utterly fascinating ideas. She uses art to convey complex ideas about the boundaries between the built and natural world, the humorous and the serious, and the pragmatic and impractical. She described one of my favorite examples of […]