Kate Sherren

Landscapes - People - Global change

Tag: interdisciplinarity

ResNet AGM 2023

May 8, 2023 /

The L1 team at Jouvence for AGM 2023 (Emily, Lara, Sam, Maka, Evan, Isabel, me, Kiirsti and Brittney)

Last week we had a productive AGM for NSERC ResNet up near Montreal. Around 70 academics, students, postdocs and partners joined for some very full days of reflection, synthesis and planning. My highlight was the ecosystem service assessment we were tasked for the Hundred Aker Wood (see below), Winnie the Pooh’s world from A. A. Milne, during which we identified Pooh’s body mass index as a key indicator for honey production (a clear provisioning service). While it was a wet few days, it didn’t dampen the spirits of the indomitable HQP (highly qualified personnel), who particularly enjoyed the firepit. If you could see the fire better, you’d see they were writing words on the logs for things they’d like to see gone. I saw white supremacy and racism go in. Thanks to PI Elena Bennett and everyone at the Central team for organizing and seeing to all our needs so thoughtfully and patiently.

Isabel takes seriously our task of ecosystem service assessment for Winnie the Pooh’s world.

The firepit, surrounded by students and postdocs (mostly), with L1 folks playing firemaster.

Sea squirts, on the move

April 28, 2022 /

Today, I was exploring the eBook version of Fred Shapiro’s (2006) The Yale Book of Quotations (Yale University Press), trying to verify that oft-used William Gibson quote, “the future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed”. A sleuth blogger, Quote Investigator, indicated it was poorly documented and so it seems to be.  But it was not entirely wasted time. While I was in there, I found this delightful quote, by Daniel Dennett, U.S. philosopher (1942– ), which gave me a big laugh on this grey day:

The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore so it eats it! (It’s rather like getting tenure.)

Consciousness Explained, ch. 7 (1991)

Sometimes I do feel like a sea squirt, but it is also worth noting that sometimes our ‘spots’ do change on us. Every academic home I’ve ever had has either disappeared or been amalgamated in some way during my time. Charles Sturt University’s School of IT and School of Science and Technology (from my days as a spatial scientist) are no more, each collapsed into other multi-campus schools, and ANU’s beloved CRES (Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies) amalgamated with another unit and became the Fenner School of Environment and Society as I transitioned from PhD to postdoc. There are always debates over where such interdisciplinary environmental or geography units ‘fit’ in the university, and that conversation has been ongoing at Dalhousie, too. SRES, where I am now, is about to be picked up and moved to another faculty, like when my son moves rocks on the seashore that have creatures in residence. Hopefully we don’t get left high and dry.

Yan Chen in Singapore

January 29, 2019 /
Yan Chen at NSF-funded workshop in Singapore, January 28-29, 2019.

Yan Chen presenting her IDPhD work at NSF-funded workshop in Singapore, January 28-29, 2019.

Yan Chen is wrapping up a few days in Singapore for the NSF-funded Research Coordination Network (RCN) in Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability (SEES) on Putting Sustainability into Convergence: Connecting Data, People, and Systems. This international workshop has been diverse in attendees and disciplines. Yan reflected, “The most discussed question is how people from different disciplines can collaborate. There are many scholars like me, as social scientists who are using sophisticated data analysis models; while others are engineers working on social issues. We both, at a certain degree, struggle in ‘cultural shocks’ between different disciplines.” It’s been a great opportunity for her to workshop with similarly cross-cutting folks. She described her session as discussing, “data sources, sizes, validity, sharing, proxies, and so on. …. [agreeing] that data or method cannot develop only on the technologies, but has to answer certain questions. For social scientists, finding a good mechanism of data sharing or archiving may be very useful. Also, how to cope with the rapidly developing technologies will be another challenge for us.” Thanks to SSHRC for supporting Yan’s trip, via Mike Smit’s Insight Grant, on which I’m a CI, Assessing the social impacts of hydroelectricity-driven landscape changing using text, images and archives: a Big Data approach.

Planning workshop at McGill

October 25, 2018 /
Hard at work while Andy Gonzalez and Marie-Josee Fortin talk monitoring.

Hard at work while Andy Gonzalez and Marie-Josee Fortin talk monitoring.

Cleared by surgeon to return to work last Monday. Left that afternoon for a two-day trip to Montreal for a workshop to plan a new NSERC project using ecosystem services to aid decision-making in production landscapes. Landscape and thematic teams from across the country joined with engaged partners from across the public and private sector, all inspired by the big vision and strong leadership of Prof Elena Bennett. Thrilled to be co-leading the Atlantic case study for this big new proposal, with such a great interdisciplinary team, and also enjoyed being the SSHRC devil’s advocate in the mix.

 

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