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Region Matters
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October 12th, 2012 Vol. 3. Issue 4
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Dear Community,
The academic quarter is in full swing and the CRC is busy with the wonderful response to several of its recent projects. We are looking ahead to the most impactful and productive year in the Center's history. We look forward to sharing our work and the work of our partners with you as it develops throughout the year.   |
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Activities
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Please join the UC Davis Art of Regional Change and the Cache Creek Conservancy from noon to 6 p.m. on Saturday, October 20, 2012, at the Cache Creek Nature Preserve, for a multimedia arts festival and celebration of the diverse and layered history of the Cache Creek Preserve. "Restore/Restory: A People's History Project" showcases the stories of Yolo County's peoples, traditions, and relationship to the land through site-based audio tours, interactive art murals, nature and culture walks, and story circles. Free and open to the public, the event will also feature live music, hands-on activities for children, basket-weaving demonstrations, and guest speakers. For more information, visit http://artofregionalchange.ucdavis.edu. 
Created by media artist jesikah maria ross, Restore/Restory involved over 200 Yolo County residents in a collaborative effort to gather and share their diverse and changing demographics, traditions, and relationships with the land that is now the Cache Creek Nature Preserve. Through a community driven process, hundreds of recorded audio stories, images, and documents were collected by university and community members and compiled into a site-based audio tour of the Nature Preserve presenting multiple perspectives on local history and an interactive website featuring a storymap of community memories, digital art murals, and an illustrated timeline of peoples, conflicts, events and policies related to the land that is now the Preserve. According to jesikah, "People care about places they have a connection with. By telling and hearing stories about this special place in Yolo County, residents can build stronger ties with each other and this county we call home. And those ties can help us make just and sustainable decisions on how to steward natural and cultural resources".
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Regional Change in the News
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Just last Sunday, California's Governor Brown signed the "Climate and Community Revitalization" bills -SB535 and AB1532. Together, they set up a system for allocating revenues from auctioning allowances under California's new market-based effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions - and they mandate that a significant share of those resources be invested in the Golden State's most environmentally burdened and socially disadvantaged communities. Starting Monday for a week, AlterNet will post vignettes on organizations across California from their new report Facing the Climate Gap: How Environmental Justice Communities are Leading the Way to a More Sustainable and Equitable California (which will be posted here on Monday). Each organization is dealing with the "climate gap" - the disproportionate burden of climate change on vulnerable communities. These organizations are working with small staffs on tight budgets to tackle some of our most pressing environmental burdens while governments and political leaders are still debating implementation.
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Special Reports on Regional Change
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Drawing coverage from major new sources, the likes of the Associated Press and NPR, CSII's newest analysis, Rock the (Naturalized) Vote, shows the share of the voting-aged citizen population that is recently naturalized - and in the form of innovative, user-friendly maps! Organizers across the nation are using these maps to target last minute registration efforts to register and mobilize new citizen voters. For news coverage and maps, see their website.
And explaining the political importance of this analysis, particularly given the recent presidential debates, CSII Director Manuel Pastor's opinion piece "New Americans, New Voters, New Politics" reminds readers that with a race that has just tightened, every vote matters more than ever. And what's more, in key swing states and key areas (like northern Virginian suburbs), these new voters could be enough to tip the election in one way or the other for the nation. For what this means for both candidates moving forward, read Pastor's blog and visit their interactive maps to see the potential effect of newly naturalized immigrants in your community.
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Upcoming Events
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On Thursday, November 8, join faculty speakers and others from the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CA&ES) to learn more about the impact the college has on California's Central Valley, one of the world's most bountiful agricultural areas. Hear about research under way at UC Davis-featured in the fall issue of CA&ES Outlook-that addresses challenges and opportunities in the region. Listen to two outstanding undergraduates, originally from the Central Valley, discuss the opportunities they've explored as students at UC Davis. Click here for more information. Register online here.
The Environments & Societies Colloquium will meet seventeen times between October 2012 and May 2013. The scheduled Wednesday workshops will take place from 4-6pm in 126 Voorhies Hall. The colloquium seeks to build cross-disciplinary collaboration in the environmental humanities and humanistic social sciences to undertake a broad rethinking of human-nature interactions that are critical to meeting the environmental challenges of our era. Each presenter's work will be pre-circulated for the group's review and will be available for download one week prior to each meeting. Click here for more information.
Paving the Way for Financial Success in California, a statewide symposium to support asset building programs and policies in California is being held on December 4. The event will explore best practices and policies shaping the future of Asset Building with practitioners, experts, policy makers, and industry leaders from across the State. Learn what you can do to help low-income Californians make full use of available resources and build financial stability! Two tracks to choose from: Policy & Practitioner. Click here for an attached brochure for workshop titles & summaries. Register here.
The UCD Gifford Migration Workgroup, formerly UC Davis Immigration and Social Mobility Workshop, is open for paper submissions from graduate students and faculty for the 2012-2013 academic year.
We are currently looking for paper presenters and discussants for the 2012-2013 academic year. Students and faculty working on issues related to migration are cordially invited to join the workgroup and consider submitting their work for discussion and feedback. The first meeting will be at the Mayhew Room (Humanities and Social Science Building, Room 2234) on November 15th, 12:00-1:30 PM. If you are interested in either submitting a paper, serving as a discussant, or attending meetings, please contact Ali Chaudhary (alichaudhary@ucdavis.edu), our graduate student coordinator.
The San Joaquin Valley Greenprint will document how natural resources support the 8-county San Joaquin Valley's economy, health, and quality of life, and will identify strategies that may be used to guide stewardship of land, water and living resources. This is an open invitation to respond to a survey before the October 5, 2012 deadline. This survey is intended to give a very broad idea of the natural resource issues and challenges that are of concern to a wide range of stakeholders from throughout the San Joaquin Valley. Click here to take the survey.
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