UT Geography Symposium 2020

Our keynote speaker, Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd, discussing the disconnect between atmospheric scientists and the public on weather and climate knowledge!

Come check out the AR Sandbox at

The simtable is fired up and ready to go! Come check it out at !!

The GeoSym 2018 Conference Schedule has been released! Check it out here and join us tomorrow and Friday.

GeoSym2018_Program_Final.pdf

Geography is so much more than maps and capitals! Come learn more about cultural landscapes, biogeography, socio-economic geography, GIS, population geography, climate, environment and more at the 2018 Geography Research Symposium, which starts tomorrow!

For those travelling to UT from outside Knoxville, or those without campus parking passes, we recommend parking in the Volunteer Hall Garage (behind College of Law off of White Avenue), which has hourly volunteer parking ($1.00/half hour with a maximum of $10.60). Daily visitor permits can be purchased for $5.00 at the Parking and Transit Services Office (2121 Stephenson Drive). For more information about parking at UT, you can visit the UT Parking Office’s Website at https://parking.utk.edu.

For information about other parking and transportation options in Knoxville, here are some helpful links:
City of Knoxville Parking website: http://www.knoxvilletn.gov/residents/traffic_transit/parking
Park Downtown Website: http://www.downtownknoxville.org/parking/?t[]=37
Free Knoxville Trolley (Orange Line Downtown to Campus): http://www.katbus.com/178/Free-Trolley

GeoSym is this week! Please join us on Thursday afternoon at 3:40pm in Panhellenic Building Room 206 for a special panel session: "Navigating white supremacy on campus." The panel will feature experts in geography and other disciplines on race and racism, as well as graduate and undergraduate students from across campus.

This year's GeoSym Conference (Feb 15-16, 2018) boasts a great variety of geographic research that is sure to interest people from diverse theoretical, methodological, and applied backgrounds! Interested in the relationship between heritage sites, population demographics, and large scale mapping? Come hear UTK alumna Sarah Elizabeth Walters talk about her work on the Population Density Tables project at Oak Ridge National Lab.

Here is a sneak peak of her work:

The bounded, oft-protected nature of Heritage Sites – both cultural and natural – necessarily influences, if not directly impacts, the development and placement of settlements and key-infrastructure, as well as directs and/or restricts the movement and distribution of people across the landscape. A wide variety of factors/considerations (e.g. religion; cultural affiliation; historic or geologic value) dictate that Heritage Sites are unique in their ability to draw large numbers of people to (sometimes remote) areas that might otherwise be of little interest. Heritage Sites also have an exceptional (sometimes unique; often near symbiotic) relationship with surrounding communities. As Heritage Sites are frequently the target of illegal/terrorist activity, and/or are specifically chosen to effect destabilization or erase the territorial claims of a previous regime, the resulting, often-singular, economic dependence created has, from a humanitarian perspective, the real potential to render a region’s people more vulnerable than those supported elsewhere through multiple and diverse means of economy. While the Population Density Tables (PDT) Project – part of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Geographic Information Science and Technology Group – has categorized several Heritage Sites, the influence of Heritage Sites on human dynamics indicates that systematic increase in the number of related records in the PDT database will serve to enhance and expand the utility of existing purposes and framework, while also providing a baseline for future research. Once a framework has been established and built-out, for example, changes affecting surrounding communities may serve as primary indicators vis-à-vis shifts in demographics and/or population distribution within the larger socio-political landscape.

Keywords: PDT; ORNL; UNESCO; Heritage; Population; Social; Political; Demographics; Culture; Archaeology; Nature; Tourism

Geography and the Grateful Dead? Yes! Learn more about cultural landscapes and memorialization at "The Music Never Stopped: Naming Businesses as a Method for Remembering the Grateful Dead," presented at by Hannah Gunderman (FB: Hannah Carilyn) of UTK Geography!

Does Tennessee have enough treatment facilities to manage the current opiate-addiction crisis? Check out today's featured poster by UTK undergraduates David Leventhal, Meghan Russell, and Kali Williams. Their poster presentation titled: "The Geography of Op**te Addiction, Overdose, and Treatment in Tennessee" will be presented as part of the GeoSym Undergraduate Poster Competition.

Interested in dendrochronology and wildfire reconstruction? Check out today's featured presenter: Matthew Kerr of the UTK Department of Geography, and his research on the use of annual growth zones in paramo shrubs to estimate recent wildfire in Costa Rica! Matt's talk titled: "Annual growth zones in stems of Hypericum irazuense: a new fire proxy in highland Costa Rica" will be featured as part of a full dendrochronology session at GeoSym 2018!