Comeaux Lectures

Dr. Entwisle has over 20 years of national and international experience in population based research, including the design and conduct of five longitudinal surveys. She has devoted her career to defining, measuring, and assessing social, spatial, and biophysical contexts at various scales and is particularly interested in neighborhoods and health, broadly defined. Dr. Entwisle is currently PI of the National Children's Study (NCS) Vanguard Center in Duplin County and PI of the NCS Study Center for additional counties in North Carolina. The National Children's Study (NCS) is an unprecedented effort to learn about and improve children's health. The Study, the largest of its kind ever conducted in the United States, will measure the effects of behavioral, biological, environmental, and social influences on children's health. Dr. Entwisle's vision is an NCS Study Center that inspires research specifically relevant to children in North Carolina as well as in the country as a whole.

Places -- local social and spatial contexts -- influence nearly all aspects of people's lives, not least of which is their health. Obviously a family's economic disadvantage impacts the health of its members, but does living in a poor neighborhood disadvantage residents above and beyond family factors? If so how? Attempts at answering this and related questions have inspired a vast literature on neighborhoods and health. However, the conceptual frameworks, data sources, and statistical machinery prominent today were mostly in place two decades ago. Progress requires a new perspective on the interconnection of people and places, the incorporation of an explicit spatial as well as social perspective, and the innovative use of spatial data and tools.

Dr. Clark's research over the past two decades has been concerned with the internal changes in US cities, especially in the changes that occur in response to residential mobility and migration. He has conducted both micro scale and individual studies of tenure choice, and large scale studies of demographic change in the neighborhoods of large metropolitan areas. The latter studies examine the nature of the population flows between cities and suburbs, white flight and the impact of legal intervention on the urban mosaic. He has also been particularly concerned about the relative roles of residential preferences and housing affordability in the way in which segregation has emerged in metropolitan areas. He is currently investigating the interaction of class, race and geography in metropolitan areas, as well as continuing his studies of international migration. More detail on Dr. Clark's UCLA web site

The post industrialized world is now the destination of much of the world’s immigration. These population flows have created large stocks of new immigrants in Europe and North America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and with policies which privilege family migration it is likely that the flows will increase simply as a function of existing immigrant stocks. Unlike past immigration, the movements may be unhinged from economic opportunities and the nature of the flows and the outcomes are far less predictable than those from previous population movements. There are questions, often not asked, about immigrant unemployment and un-assimilated populations, about gangs and drugs, but also celebrations of the contributions of new immigrants to their host societies. Do we know how it will all be played out in local communities, which after all is the critical question for those communities and neighborhoods?

Thomas J. Wilbanks is a Corporate Research Fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and leads the Laboratory’s Global Change and Developing Country Programs.

A past President of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), he conducts research on such issues as sustainable development, energy and environmental technology and policy, responses to global climate change, and the role of geographical scale in all of these regards.

Co-edited recent books include Global Change and Local Places (2003), Geographical Dimensions of Terrorism (2003), and Bridging Scales and Knowledge Systems: Linking Global Science and Local Knowledge (2006). Wilbanks is a member of the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources of the U.S. National Research Council (NRC), Chair of NRC’s Committee on Human Dimensions of Global Change, and a participant in a number of other NRC activities. He is serving as Coordinating Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report?s Working Group II (vulnerabilities, impacts, and adaptation) chapter on “Industry, Settlement, and Society”.

Geographic scale is a factor in many aspects of sustainable development, because of the varying spatial dynamics of key processes and because of varying scales at which decision-making is focused. In a world where the meaning of “global” and “local” is being reshaped by technological and social change, a significant challenge for sustainable development is realizing potentials ? impressive in concept but often elusive in practice ? for actions at different scales to be complementary and reinforcing. Climate change adaptation is suggested as an example.

Director, Hazards Research Lab

Carolina Distinguished Professor

Department of Geography, University of South Carolina

What makes people and places vulnerable to environmental threats and how does this change over time and across space? Vulnerability is a multidimensional concept and embodies concepts such as threat exposure, coping capacity, resilience, and adaptation. Vulnerability science is an emergent interdisciplinary perspective that builds on the integrated tradition of risk, hazards, and disasters research. It incorporates qualitative and quantitative approaches, local to global geography, historic to future temporal domains, and best practices. It adds technological sophistication and analytical capabilities, especially in the realm of the geo-spatial and computational sciences (making extensive use of GPS, GIS, remote sensing and spatial decision support systems), and integrates these with perspectives from the natural, social, health, and engineering sciences. The environment, individuals, and societies have varying levels of vulnerability that directly influence their ability to cope, rebound, and adapt to environmental threats. At present, we lack some of the basic scientific understanding of these fundamental concepts, as well as models and methods for analyzing them. Using examples derived from recent disasters, the role of the spatial social sciences in advancing vulnerability science through improvements in geo-spatial data, basic science, and application are presented.

Robert W. Kates is a geographer and independent scholar in Trenton, Maine, and University Professor (Emeritus) at Brown University.

Having failed retirement, he is Co-Convenor of the international Initiative for Science and Technology for Sustainability, an Executive Editor of Environment magazine, an affiliate of Clark University, College of the Atlantic, Harvard University, and a Board member of Maine Global Climate Change, Inc.

He is a recipient of the 1991 National Medal of Science, the MacArthur Prize Fellowship (1981-85), and Laureat d’Honneur, International Geographical Union (2004), and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Academia Europaea.

Author, editor, and co-editor of 24 books and monographs, his most recent books include the Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead (2002), and with the AAG Global Change and Local Places Research Group, Global Change in Local Places: Estimating, Understanding, and Reducing Greenhouse Gases (2003).

In the last two years, the notion of economic security has crept into the policy arena; however, the forces of change that have generated interest in this phenomenon may be traced to a second wave of economic transformation that attended the restructuring of the US economy beginning in the late 1980s. Changes in firm ownership and in the organization of production systems have resulted in subtle but important changes in the nature of spatial interdependence between states within the US. Reductions in the real costs of transportation have created conditions that have resulted in states being far more dependent on what happens outside their borders than was the case twenty years ago. This paper provides a spatial perspective on the link between trade, fragmentation of production systems and economic security. Using some new analytical methods, this integration will be presented in a stylized form to highlight the challenges that states will face in the next decade.

Michael F. Goodchild is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Chair of the Executive Committee, National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA); Associate Director of the Alexandria Digital Library Project; and Director of NCGIA’s Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science.

He received his BA degree from Cambridge University in Physics, and his PhD in Geography from McMaster University. After 19 years at the University of Western Ontario, including three years as Chair, he moved to Santa Barbara in 1988.

Dr. Goodchild was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2002, and has won numerous other awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. He serves on the editorial boards of ten journals and book series. Beyond authoring over 300 scientific papers, Dr. Goodchild has published books on environmental modeling with GIS, accuracy of spatial databases, scale in remote sensing and GIS, geographic information systems and science, uncertainty in geographical information, and other topics. His current research interests center on geographic information science, spatial analysis, the future of the library, and uncertainty in geographic data.

Three stages are evident in the development of GIS since its inception in the 1960s. Initially, GIS was seen as an analysis engine, able to do things that humans find difficult, impossible, or too tedious to do by hand. The advent of the WWW in the mid 1990s created a new set of opportunities, and brought a new view of GIS as a set of tools for communicating knowledge of the planet in the form of geographic data. The priorities and metrics of this new communication paradigm were sharply different from those of the old analytic paradigm. I argue that a third perspective is now emerging, driven by technologies such as location-based services, that emphasize the ability of GIS to augment what humans perceive through their senses. This new perspective is illustrated by current research on applications of GIS in the field, and wearable technologies.

Michael Conzen is Professor of Geography at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1976. He was educated at the universities of Giessen, Cambridge, and Wisconsin, and holds advanced degrees in geography and American history. His special interests center on the cultural, historical, and urban geography of the United States, together with the history of cartography and landscape evolution. Recent work has focused on a critique of American cultural homeland studies, the conceptualization of American urban morphology, and the evaluation of regional heritage park developments. His writings include books on the making of the American landscape, frontier farming, Chicago mapmakers, the Illinois & Michigan Canal heritage corridor, and a forthcoming study of the geographical basis of American urbanism.

America’s landscapes reflect the powerful shaping forces of nature and culture. In some regions the contribution of nature, especially through topography, dwarfs the impact of humans, in others the human impress is profoundly evident. At the broadest scale of generalization, a number of key cultural traits, ideologies, and social values can be identified that to some degree characterize all American cultural landscapes and distinguish them from those of other world regions. They are rooted in the competitive colonization history of the territory that became the United States, in the unique historical relationship there between land and labor, and in the perpetually experimental relationship between multiple forms of capitalism and government. But beyond such universal characteristics the cultural impact varies by region, not only in its different balance with nature but also the different time depth, cultural settlement mix, and technological history of localities. These regional variations present a stiff challenge in identifying, describing, and measuring their essential components and in suggesting any territorial demarcations that would result.