ABSTRACT The transformation of California’s dairy industry is a prime example of structural change in agriculture. The state has been on the leading edge of changes in the geography of food and agriculture for 150 years, and many characteristics of modern large-scale agriculture emerged—or reached their culmination—in California. We examine the spatial transformation of dairy production in California as a window into the potential futures for the dairy industry both within California and elsewhere. We use data from county agricultural reports and USDA Censuses of Agriculture data to demonstrate, through a series of original maps and animations, the dramatic increase in production of milk, the rapid fall in the number of dairies, and the spatial redistribution of the industry over the past 40 years. These visualizations reveal illustrative spatial patterns and insights into rapid changes in the geography of dairy production—and agriculture more generally—within California. Based on these visualizations and analyses, we propose a framework for understanding the intersecting phenomena of dairy transformations in California: regional concentration, industry consolidation, and farm-level intensification. In explaining how these processes are nested, overlapping, and multiscalar, we offer an account of past and current trajectories, while examining the applicability and implications of these findings for other dairy-producing regions into the future.

ABSTRACT In this forum, we focus on precarious international migrant workers and examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in four middle-income economies in the Global South: Ghana, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Thailand. In this way we consider varying geographies of (im)mobilities, responses, and governance. During the global struggle to cope with the pandemic, the world witnessed that the quality of governance at multiple levels played a crucial role. In these uncertain times, it is imperative that awareness, prevention, and resilience improves. Collectively, the four essays reveal a multitude of challenges. We address important issues such as the relationship between sociocultural factors and digital pandemic governance, the need to improve services and support for female migrants, the complex issue of return migration, the specific challenges associated with sudden and temporary immobility, and the increasingly prevalent status of middle-income economies in the Global South as both sending and receiving countries.

ABSTRACT This paper explores how the “politics of the nation” shape migration research. Immigration research inherently intersects with the political dynamics of nation-states; however, beyond this fundamental framework, a myriad of political factors shape the agendas and methodologies of researchers seeking to enter these fields. This paper examines how these politics influence the questions asked and knowledge produced within the context of immigration research through vignettes drawn from fieldwork conducted during an era of heightened politicization and challenges for immigration institutions in the United States. It illustrates how the politics of the nation materialize in institutional contexts, when contentious politics constrain access to data, research spaces, or participants; curtail the openness of potential community partners; or erect barriers to certain types of academic inquiry. Ultimately, this paper calls for a critical examination of how political forces shape and constrain the practice of immigration research, as well as the epistemological costs. Keywords: immigrant institutions, fieldwork, refugee resettlement, immigrant research, politics, politicization

ABSTRACT As members of the Lake Nipissing Beading Project Collective, we reflect on a community-beaded map project that evolved from a partnership between Nipissing University, Nipissing First Nation, and Dokis First Nation, rooted in the traditional lands of the Nbisiing Nishnaabeg on Robinson Huron Treaty (1850) territory. The Lake Nipissing Beading Project (LNBP) emerged in 2020 as a gesture of community care in response to the socio-spatial challenges of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The traveling beaded map installation reimagines, remaps, and remembers Lake Nipissing and surrounding watersheds through a collaborative process rooted in relationality and reciprocity. Critically situating and subsequently “taking back” provincial geospatial imagery, the project presents one attempt to decolonize geographical tools through creative intervention that combines storytelling practices of beading and countermapping. We reflect on the multi-layered histories enlivened through project activities, including those of our community-academic partnerships. We discuss what it means to recognize the beaded map as a living relation and carrier of living stories, re-orienting spatial knowledges toward an intentional ethics of care and community-led stewardship. In doing so the project re-centers Nbisiing Nishnaabeg relationships to, with, and through the lake.

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to scholarly conversations about how to (not) define community in community geography (CG). We draw on Annemarie Mol and John Law’s formulation of a fire topology to reflect on CG research spearheaded by a community-based environmental organization concerned with industrial contamination in northeastern Oklahoma. To explore how, where, and why we came together around a multimedia storytelling initiative aligned with the geohumanities, we trace the events and encounters leading to our collaboration. We then closely examine one of the first digital products to emerge out of our relationships and research: a StoryMap detailing the history and environmental impacts of a BF Goodrich tire factory that operated between 1946 and 1986 in Miami, the county seat of Ottawa County, Oklahoma, while also commemorating the labor and lives of people associated with the plant. Our overview of the StoryMap and its creation also commemorates the geographies of the embodied work experiences in building community around the research informing the StoryMap. Our discussion considers the dynamic and sporadic dimensions of our ongoing CG research, celebrating accomplishments and potential for future endeavors without failing to recognize how the quotidian friction of distance, as well as professional commitments, have stymied or slowed—but not stopped—our collaboration. Keywords: collaboration, StoryMap, Superfund site, environmental activism, geohumanities.

ABSTRACT When we consider what our food systems will look like in the coming years, a significant factor to consider is transportation—the ability to both get to and receive food. Barriers to access can create long-term negative socioeconomic impacts on health, education, employment, and a range of other outcomes. Yet while transportation challenges have been recognized for many years, solutions to them remain vexing. This paper explores issues of food access through interviews with service providers and individuals accessing food assistance in the northeastern United States to understand both barriers and potential solutions. Some of the key challenges they highlight include a lack of transit infrastructure, dependency on personal vehicles, spatial limitations, and what these mean for food access. The responses to such challenges fall into three categories: bringing people to food, bringing food to places people already access, and bringing food directly to people. This work critically examines the context of such dynamics and what they mean in terms of the sustainability and future of the food system. Keywords: transportation, food access, mobility, food security, social service.

ABSTRACT Rapid growth of Amish settlement within Wisconsin over the past 60 years has brought 200,000 acres of land under Amish ownership. This paper studies patterns of Amish landownership within 27 settlements, representing 71 percent of Wisconsin’s Amish church districts, and illustrates differing average land ownership per household and degrees of land dispersal and concentration among the settlements. Average household land ownership ranged from 27.7 to 86.6 acres among the studied Old Order Amish settlements. Most Amish owned lands are dispersed among lands that remain under “English” ownership. Older and larger settlements display greater concentrations of Amish owned lands, whether measured by maximum acreage per survey section within the settlement, average owned acreage per section, and presence or absence of non-contiguous sections of Amish owned lands. Amish church affiliation, origins of Amish within the settlements, and types of occupational engagement also appear related to these differences. Keywords: agriculture, Amish, landownership, Old Orders, Wisconsin

ABSTRACT GIS students and faculty at the University of Tennessee are engaged in a long-standing and ongoing community-academic partnership with the Beck Cultural Exchange Center, a local African-American-led nonprofit heritage advocacy organization. The partnership supports the Beck’s development of a “Black restorative cartography” that carries out the memory-work of publicly working through the wounds of racist urban development by mapping and honoring African American places and institutions destroyed or displaced by urban renewal in Knoxville from the 1950s to the 1970s. A key Beck goal is the creation of what we term a “geo-memory overlay”—a geospatial and commemorative draping of pre-urban renewal locations on top of contemporary city maps to provoke a reckoning with the city’s occluded history of Black urban place-making. The purpose of this paper is to delve—conceptually and operationally through the Knoxville partnership—into what Black restorative cartography is, how it works as a means of creating memories in communities, and what is required to realize the full transformative potential of cartography as a tool of historical justice. Geospatial scientists can play an essential role in assisting restorative Black memory-making, but this demands centering Black ways of knowing and mapping while recasting seemingly technical mapping operations as politically- and emotionally-laden recovery practices. Keywords: Black geographies, historical justice, memory-work, restorative cartography, urban renewal