Introduction

Introduction
One of the most exciting and fun parts of being a geographer is taking your geographic skills out into the world around you. You may begin to see your local landscape differently, hear new narratives from people you know, and rethink how you understand the places youve known your whole life. In this assignment, youll expand on one of the five organizing themes — region, mobility, globalization, nature-culture, or cultural landscape — in one of the topical areas we have covered or will cover this semester by finding an example from wherever you are that you think adds to your understanding of cultural geography, and thats an interesting local example. And by local, I mean wherever you are and at whatever scale of analysis, from regional to personal.

For example, perhaps you begin your day with a breakfast of wheat toast and coffee and you live in Hilo. Your coffee may be locally grown, but in all likelihood, it isnt, and your wheat toast may have come from bread baked locally, but the wheat certainly wasnt grown locally. Your breakfast is an example of globalized agriculture in the modern world. But it could also be an example that points to the mobility of seed crops and the widespread diffusion of wheat or the mobility of food preparation and how people incorporate foods from outside their regions or ethnic origins. It could also be an example that highlights the importance of ethnicity and race in what we eat.

The topics in your own lives that tie into the course material are many and varied, Im sure that everyone will have great ideas.You could investigate toponyms in the cultural landscapes, or Covid-19 and your journey to work patterns, or wildlife in new locations, or climate change. But the key to coming up with a topic is to think about what youve read and listened to this semester and relate it to your life.

After you decide on a topic, youll do some additional research about it and locate at least three academic articles relevant to your topic that you think adds to your understanding of the place or topic of your choice.

For example, in the toast and coffee example, you would do a search through one of the databases such as JSTOR or EBSCO to look for articles about the globalization of coffee or perhaps the localization of coffee production in Hawaii. Or perhaps youre more interested in the toast and why people eat certain foods for breakfast but not others. Or is there an ethnic group that you want to focus on and their relationship to coffee? What about the language of coffee?

-It should be double-spaced, proofread carefully, and correctly cite your sources in-text and at the end of the essay in a Works Cited page.
-Please use APA referencing.

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