Entry #1

Hi everyone! My name's Craig Nielsen, and welcome to the first installment in the chronicle that is my senior research project! For my SRP, I will be working under the guidance of Sarah Kelly, who is currently working on preliminary research for her PhD in Geography. That will entail her going to South America later this year and investigating the ongoing controversy surrounding the prospective Pascua Lama mining project, which lies on the border of Argentina and Chile - and in particular, the mine's potential for impact on glaciers in that region. Unfortunately, I will not be going to South America with Sarah; instead, I will be immersing myself in a field of enquiry known as critical discourse analysis (CDA), methods of which Sarah plans to use on media sources concerning her subject while abroad. At a glance, critical discourse analysis is the process by which linguistic trends are assessed in order to show the hegemonic assumptions underpinning our very lines of thought, speech, and writing. Similar to the Derridean deconstruction many of the seniors learned about this year in Critical Theory, this topic, along with various glacial ecology- and political economy-related texts, will occupy much of my individual reading time throughout the project. In the time leading up to my advisor's research proper, I will be concerned with producing a database of news sources related to not only my advisor's topic but myriad glacier- and ecology-pertaining texts as well, complete with write-ups and applications of CDA methods (as I begin to research them).

At the moment, my advisor is also involved as a coordinator for the joint Tucson-Nogales Confluencecenter Fellowship, working with social and natural/physical science students from both Arizona and Sonora to produce bilingual multimedia materials relevant to the region and conduct community-based projects and research. My responsibilities in this regard will be to produce write-ups and photos for a host of Google Tours destinations on the U.S. side of the border, however I do not expect this to take up as much time as the database component. Lastly, and in a bold step outside of my comfort zone, my final product for the project will consist of a short story (20-40 pages) demonstrating my knowledge of how CDA interfaces with elements of glaciology and ecology, as in, what assumptions are conveyed by the language used in those geographic discourses? Transposing this more abstract theory into a narrative format will be difficult, but I'm up for the challenge - and of course, I'm excited to see where this project takes me!