Example Student Projects from Past Years

Calypso music has long occupied an integral place in the cultural framework of Trinidad and Tobago, and in the 20th century became a major cultural export. This project explores the rise in popularity and the commodification of the traditional Calypso song style, and its musical evolution to Soca, the more contemporary and more globally-popular form. The history of Calypso is long and murky, with its true origins lost to the chaos of colonialism and the African slave trade, and a deep dive is beyond the purview of this project. My aim is to outline a brief history of Calypso and its role as a social tool, and then to explore the expanding international commodification of Calypso and Soca through of the concept of diffusion. There is a deep well of scholarship regarding the geography of music. Using Nash and Carney's (1996) "The Seven Themes of Music Geography" as a framework, I was inspired by the question under investigation from the 1970s onward: "What is 'ma...

Drug trafficking has been around for a long time, but it recently has become a major problem in the forests of Central America. Drug traffickers, or "Los Narcos", are deforesting areas in the Central America region to pave the way for their drug empires. Huge clearings in the middle of nowhere are being noticed and "narco-pistas" (air landing-strips for drug runners) can be spotted in these areas for the mobilization of their product. The landscape is being completely changed due to the drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs) now being present and the deforestation. Honduras and Guatemala are the highest among those that are being deforested due to narco-trafficking. Recent studies have brought proof of the drug-trafficking that is taking a toll on the forests in Central America and new strategies need to be drawn up to alleviate this problem. Los Narcos are deforesting areas in the Central America region to pave the way for their drug empires. Huge clearings in t...

Beyond the class textbook, I used six sources to further my knowledge on Acadiana as a region and to develop conclusions on what defined an Acadian region. The first being The Place with No Edge ( Mandelman 2020), which discusses the role of Cajuns in the Louisiana oil and gas industry and defines their relationship to the environment through their livelihoods. This is important for discussing the role the industry played in bringing Cajuns into a modern Louisiana. In A New Acadia: The Acadian Migrations to South Louisiana  (Brasseaux 1985), I found information on the gradual acceptance of the label "Cajun" within the Acadian community and the factors that defined the name over the years. I used "Acadiana and the Cajun Cultural Landscape" (McKernan 2010) to define the commonly interpreted Acadiana region; this source is also used to see the role of Cajun culture in music, festivals, food, and more. "The Cajunization of French Louisiana: Foraging a Regional Iden...

Deforestation is a major environmental issue in South America’s Atlantic Forest region. Compared to deforestation in the Amazon Basin, this ecologically-significant region receives significantly less attention. In Misiones Province (containing Argentina’s share of the Atlantic Forest), increasing agricultural exploitation for the production of yerba mate (one of the province’s primary agricultural activities) has altered the landscape. This project has two primary goals. The first is mapping the geographies of yerba mate production in Misiones in recent years. The second is to assess if increasing yerba mate cultivation appears to be related to recent forest loss in the province.   Historical & Environmental Contexts Misiones contains the largest remaining continuous areas of the Atlantic Forest and, in recent decades, has seen its cover of primary forest significantly erode (Izquierdo et al., 2008; Izquierdo & Clark, 2011). The province's native forest vegetation varies su...