Geography Education

This more clearly shows the regional restructuring of the global economy than just about anything I've ever seen, especially manufacturing.  The 8 largest and busiest ports in the world are all in East or Southeast Asia (and 11 of the top 13).  A quick glance at the historical charts will show that most of these were relatively minor ports that have exploded in the last 20 years.  

Tags: transportation, globalization, diffusion, East Asia, industry, economic.

Teaching about human trafficking and child slavery can be very disconcerting and uncomfortable.  How much of the details regarding these horrific situations is age-appropriate and suitable for the classroom?  The BBC is reporting on events with sensitive stories to both give a human face to the story, while protecting the identity of under-aged victims (to read about the production of this comic, read Drawing the News.)  I encourage you to use your own discretion, but I find this comicbook format an accessible, informative and tasteful way to teach about human trafficking in South Asia to minors.  It is a powerful way to teach about some hard (but important) aspects of globalization and economics. 

As geographer Shaunna Barnhart says concerning this comic, "It moves from trafficking to child labor to pressures for migration for wage labor and the resulting injustices that occur. There's differential access to education, gender inequality, land, jobs, and monetary resources that leads to inter- and intra-country trafficking of the vulnerable. In the search for improved quality of life, individuals become part of a global flow of indentured servitude which serves to exploit their vulnerabilities and exacerbate inequalities and injustice. Nepali children 'paid' in food and cell phones that play Hindi music in 'exchange' for work in textile factories - cell phones that are themselves a nexus of global resource chains and textiles which in turn enter a global market - colliding at the site of child labor which remains largely hidden and ignored by those in the Global North who may benefit from such labor."

Tags: Nepal, labor, industry, economic, poverty, globalization, India.

This is yet another example of the uneven impacts of globalization. 

Tags: transportation, globalization, diffusion, remote sensing, industry, economic, unit 6 industry.

Cultural groups are different around the world, but so are the sub-altern cultural expressions of those who feel that they are on the fringes of society.   I remember seeing the emo kids in Mexico City (one of the groups listed) congregate at the same metro station in 2005 and was fascinated by the dynamics between the subculture and the dominant culture.  Given the prevalent of machismo and Catholicism in Mexico, the cultural dynamics between the groups was incredibly tense.  This is an interesting glimpse into foreign counter-cultures.  

Tags:  culture, globalization, popular culture, unit 3 culture.

As a geographer native to the San Diego region (with family on both sides of the border), I found this article very compelling.  Relations across the border are economic, cultural and political in nature, and the merger of those varied interests have led to an uneven history of both cooperation and separation.  Herzog analyses three distinct factors that have shape the landscape of the California-Mexico border zone: urbanization, NAFTA, and global interruptions (9/11).    

Tags: borders, AAG, political, landscape, California, unit 4 political, Mexico.

Global health has substantially improved in the last two decades.  This article explores the improvements in global health that have been made this year, and the attached interactive feature allows users to explore the changes in global health risks.  Click here for the Guardian's version of this same data and interactive.  

Tags: medical, historical, spatial, technology, development.

This series of maps shows the great leaps and bounds that were made during the 19th century in transportation technology in the United States.  This impacted population settlement, economic interactions and functionally made the great distances seem smaller.  This is what many call the time-space compression; the friction of distance is diminished as communication and transportation technologies improve.  

Questions to Ponder: When someone says they live "10 minutes away," what does that say about how we think about distance, transportation infrastructure and time?  How is geography still relevant in a world where distance appears to becoming less of a factor?  

Tags: transportation, models, globalization, diffusion.

The disconnected portions of the this map tell us as much about the world we live in as the highly illuminated ones. Might this be a version of the "Black Marble" image that would reasonate more with today's teenagers?  For the methods behind the creation of this map as well as a high resolution version of the map, see this post.

Tags: social media, map, visualization.

Coordinating a meeting across time zones can be confusion logistical task and one that people rarely can do off the top of their head or consulting some resources.  It is, however, fundamentally a geographic task.  Our friends at the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute put together this collection of 5 maps (and this time zone converter) to help global collaboration.

In an era where globalization has rendered distances a minor barrier to diffusion, some have erroneously concluded that geography is no longer relevant to economic development and urban planning.  Nothing could be farther from the truth, but that doesn't mean that the 'old rules' of space and place aren't be re-written.  This is a nice article that discusses the continued importance of spatial thinking and geography for urban planning.

Tags: urban, planning,  economic, urbanism, globalization, unit 7 cities.

France is famous for trying to slow the linguistic diffusion of globalization's most powerful online language (which also happens to belong to their age-old cultural and political rival).  France has a commission dedicated to removing new words that have English origins since 1996 with the goal of introducing words with have linguistic roots in French. Recently then have done away with the Twitter term #hashtag to #mot-dièses.  This video criticizes this cultural practice and it is also derided in this NPR article.   However this does not mean that France is immune to cultural pressure to change linguistic traditions.  There was been a movement to alter the term Mademoiselle on official documents with a new title that allows women the freedom to choose the form of address that they prefer (and not to force them to reveal their marital status--think Ms. vs Miss).

Questions to Ponder: Why (and how) do languages change over time?  Is it possible to keep a language 'pure?'

Tags: language, culture, globalization, unit 3 culture, France, gender.

In times of ecological hardships and global economic restructuring, many children of nomadic herders are seeking employment out of the rural areas and in the urban environment.  The cultural change that this represents is for Mongolia enormous and is captured wonderfully in this photo gallery.  Pictured above are the ger (yurt) camps that ring the capital city Ulaanbaatar.  Ulaanbaatar houses a permanent population of displaced nomads. During the winter, Ulaanbaatar is the second most air-polluted capital in the world due largely to coal burning.

Tags: Mongolia, images, indigenous, culture, globalization.  

This map might appear to be completely trivial and it probably is.  Still, there are interesting historical and colonial patterns that can be seen in this technological culture region map. 

Questions to Ponder: Will there one day be a single format?  When?  What are barrier to that happening?  What does this tell us about the extent of globalization?