The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
We have grappled with some of the key concepts that geographers use to understand human uses of the environment. We have unpacked ideas like Overpopulation, Scarcity, and Nature, and found that they are much more complicated than they might seem at first. This week, we will put our advanced understanding of human-environment geography to use!
This week's topic is the Commodity Chain. You have only one assigned item to read, watch, and complete your regular assignments for: a multimedia presentation of the commodity chain of a T-Shirt.
At the end of this week, you should be able to:
Let's dive in!
Watch the National Public Radio production about how Planet Money Makes a T-shirt. [1]
A Commodity is any product or activity that is produced by human labor for the purposes of being sold in a commercial market. Commodities can be accumulated for a period of time (some are perishable while others can be stored for virtually centuries), exchanged as part of transactions or purchased on specific markets (such as futures market). Some commodities are fixed, implying that they cannot be transferred, except for the title. This includes land, mining, logging and fishing rights. In this context, the value of a fixed commodity is derived from the utility and the potential rate of extraction. Bulk commodities are commodities that can be transferred, which includes, for instance, grains, metals, livestock, oil, cotton, coffee, sugar and cocoa. Their value is derived from utility, supply, and demand, which is established through major commodity markets involving a constant price discovery mechanism.
A Commodity Chain (sometimes known as a "supply chain" or "value chain") is a network of production, trade, and service activities that cover all stages from the transformation of raw materials, through intermediate manufacturing stages, to the delivery of a finished good to a market.
Commodity chains are what link specific production systems in particular places to a global, highly interdependent economy.
A commodity chain is a common tool that geographers, economists, and other social scientists use to understand the journey of a particular resource, from when it is first extracted through processing and refining, to when it is sold and consumed as a finished product. Some commodity chains also study of the "afterlife" of a product by looking at where it goes (and how it might take new forms of value) as an after-market waste product. This tool is especially useful for tracing the connections between the places and people involved, and the impact that our demand for a particular commodity has on the environment.
Keep these definitions in mind as you work through all five chapters of the following multimedia presentation. Make sure that you watch the videos and scroll down to read all the text in each of the five chapters:
You are expected to know the material contained in both the text and the videos. The links within the reading that take you to external sources of additional information are not required (but you are encouraged to explore them; they are certainly very interesting!).
Click the image below to link to the multimedia presentation: (Click the CHAPTERS icon in the lower left corner of your screen to watch all the five chapters.)
As you work through the material, pay especially close attention to the geography of this commodity chain:
As part of the process of writing your Final Essay, you will write an annotated bibliography that summarizes some of the literature you will be drawing on for the final paper (approx. 2-3 pages double spaced). The annotated bibliography should include at least 10 resources that you intend on using in the final paper, and a 2-3 sentence summarization of each resource.
You will also be required to provide feedback in the form of a peer review to two of your classmates.
I have included an example annotated bibliography below the deliverables information.
You should begin working on your annotated bibliography so you not rushed when it is due in week 7. Your bibliography should be submitted as a word document or a pdf file.
Before the end of week 7, submit your bibliography to the Final Essay Component: Bibliography assignment in the Lesson 7 module in Canvas. Check the calendar for specific due dates.
NOTE:
If your submission is late, you will NOT be assigned anyone to peer review and you will miss out on the 20 available peer review points. Also, no one will review your work, so please be on time.
Peer Reviews:
After the Tuesday night due date has passed for your initial bibliography submission, please return to the Final Essay Component: Bibliography assignment page in the Week 7 module in Canvas and click on the "Peer Review" link to see who you have been assigned to peer review.
This article introduces the concept of “energy landscapes” a combination of spatial planning and energy modeling. Using Austria as a case study, the authors indicate that finding places to place RE farms is more complicated than just finding the place with enough energy potential. Meaning the authors believe that taking political-social and economic restrictions into account is all a part of a move toward RE.
These are Brewer’s original thoughts that eventually turned into ColorBrewer. There are great examples in maps of the color schemes that she identified including the concept of color scheme usage in maps such as sequential, diverging, and qualitative.
This article outlines a study to evaluate which data classification scheme is best. Their conclusions are inconclusive although quantiles are generally agreed to be the best with a lot of caveats.
This article specifically studies different types of ways to use participatory mapping to identify land-use conflicts. The authors use several different methods to determine land-use conflicts. They surveyed people from both urban and rural areas. In their analysis they used both a simple density and clustering methods to demonstrate how to the choice of method can influence areas identified as conflict areas. The authors conclude there is not much difference between the two.
This is a critical overview of the work in cognitive cartography. He states that cognitive cartographers are adept at finding new ways to study cognitive issues in cartography as the cartographic technology changes, and as ways to study it improve. There has also been extensive study of mental maps (i.e. cognitive spatial thinking). However, there has been little research to reduce "the tensions that have existed for decades between the empiricist and the critical perspectives.
This chapter talks about how prejudices against certain groups are a moving window, specifically in how prejudice is a continuum between completely acceptable to be prejudiced or completely unacceptable. In general, the authors state that legislation has mostly concerned groups that are moving from acceptable to unacceptable, and in general, psychologists are interested in these groups as well. This is called the "normative window", "a window of time in which social norms are shifting toward the equal treatment, the normalization, and the reduction of stigma and exclusion of a group, but for which the entire process has not yet been completed, and for which complete social agreement about the standing of the group has not yet been achieved." (p. 56)
This is a review of current research to show how visuals are a key communicative tool for visualizing climate change and for stimulating imaginations of climate futures. It divides the moments of communication in the cycle: the moment of production, the moment of the visual, and the moment of consumption.
This article is a very short summation of why Raisz thinks showing the "physiography" is more important and is different than showing simple contours. He gives a list of how each of the different physiographic regions should be drawn and indicates everyone can draw them with a bit of practice.
This article explains adaptive management and how GIScience and interactive online maps can be used for better management of lake level rise and fall in the Great Lakes for the NOAA Lake Level Viewer. Their goal is to use wireframing to plan out UX design for both representation and interaction. They use competitive analysis and focus groups to determine what to test in the user testing phase (the focus of this article). They design two sets of wireframes: high fidelity representation and low-fidelity interaction and use cognitive walkthroughs to test their designs.
This article outlines two studies assessing whether identity with a group predicts the potential for attitude change, i.e., they wanted to test whether students who found their identity as students of the University of Buffalo as essential to their identity would be more likely to do the same thing and have the same attitude as other students vs. students who did not find that their identity was linked to their status as a student of UB. The results indicated " in-group identification moderated consensus effects" (p. 674).
This week featured a dramatic commodity chain that showed us how complex the journey of a simple T-Shirt can be. Hopefully, you were able to recognize the relevance of key concepts from past weeks along this commodity chain: moments where those involved in making the T-Shirt encountered resource scarcity, or competing ideas of nature, or agricultural technology.
All assignments will be submitted in Canvas, check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
Well done! Now on to Week 7!
Links
[1] http://apps.npr.org/tshirt/#/title
[2] http://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2010.522615