The past month of Environmental Studies has been quite busy. We’ve finished up the skills labs, proposed a concentration, and made an initial ENVS220 Portfolio. There have been four labs, including one on GIS mapping of global water improvement, two based on a field survey of River View Natural Area, analyzed through GIS and a Google Earth Tour, and a narrative analysis of Measure 92 ads. ArcGIS can be a cumbersome program to work with, but I definitely appreciate having it in my analytical toolbox, as GIS is integral to environmental and urban planning in the professional world. Spatial patterns and maps constitute a large portion of the way we construct and understand the world, and GIS is basically the contemporary tool for this side of environmental analysis. Our lab on narrative analysis and the pre-lab reading on narrative in environmental histories were also helpful for furthering my understanding of environmental analysis. While narrative analysis is something that I had a bit of prior exposure to, it was helpful to get attenuated to the ways that progressivist or declensionist narratives are told, and their ubiquity within environmental discourse.
With all the skills labs finished, we have become increasingly focused on pulling together the huge variety of tools learned, taking a step back from the week-to-week slog through new computer programs to assess the reason for all of these labs: creating an understanding of what environmental analysis is. To this end, I created an initial portfolio of ENVS220, in which I summarized each of the labs in terms of how they connect to quality environmental analysis. I integrated the skills labs by running through the ways that each showed a distinct method of analyzing data and commenting on the ways that more situated research (such as that conducted in RVNA) produced far more creative and surprising results than a country-level study of carbon dioxide emissions. In my portfolio, I also mentioned the role of questions to environmental analysis. This side has been missing throughout the skills labs, as we were primarily interested in just understanding the methods, but it has played a large role in my concentration proposal, and will undoubtedly be important when we start work on group research projects next week.
Over the past month, I have also been working on developing, drafting, and revising my concentration. I basically knew my concentration topic from the beginning (cities and transportation), but I refined it from this broad topic into a slightly more focused examination of the politics of transportation. I struggled some with the situated context, as “American cities” was too arbitrary and “post-industrial” was too vague, had too much ideological baggage, and concerned only indirectly with cities themselves, through the national or global economy. I eventually arrived at “gentrifying cities,” and I think that this context brings its own interesting dimension to my topic.