4th Annual SUU Women and Gender Studies Conference

Why don't more women write for Outside Magazine? Why don't more men write best-selling narratives about their transformative personal experience? This presentation will explore how gender affects expectations in travel writing.

Kelly Kathleen Ferguson is the author of My Life as Laura: How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself. Her work has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Witness, New England Review, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She is an Assistant Professor of English, specializing in Creative Nonfiction, at Southern Utah University.

This presentation focuses on analysis of sharp changes in local environmental governance in the Great Lakes over the past 25 years. The move towards public-private partnerships has privileged some segments of society, while marginalizing others. The presentation will explore the social and environmental consequences of narrowing democratization in environmental governance.

Andrew Van Alstyne is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Southern Utah University. His research connects sustainability, environmental justice, and social movements. An east coast native, he lives in Cedar City with his wife and three daughters.

This presentation will cover the Intermountain Adaptation Partnership webpage. One objective of this partnership is to synthesize the best available scientific information to assess climate change vulnerability and develop adaptation options throughout the U.S. Intermountain ecoregion in order to understand and mitigate potentially adverse effects of climate change on natural resources and ecosystem services.

Susan Leslie has been with the Dixie National Forest since 1987 and has done a variety of jobs there. Currently she is the Climate Change & Sustainable Operations coordinator for the Forest and serves as a resource for the Forest leadership team on climate change issues.

This presentation will discuss the Southern Utah Sustainable Operations Partnership webpage. The objective of this partnership is to encourage the voluntary use of sustainable practices to reduce the risk of climate change.

Holly Hadley has been the Sustainable Operations Partnership Intern since May of 2014. Holly has assisted the Sustainable Operations Partnership working through Cedar Breaks National Monument and the Dixie National Forest in furthering regional sustainable operations and practices in Southern Utah.

Natural areas used to be synonymous with tranquility, quiet, and solitude. In recent years the byproducts of industrialized civilization have spread into even the most pristine and remote natural areas. The science of soundscapes will be presented to show the importance of the auditory experience in natural areas.

Dr. Britton Mace is a Professor and the Chair of the Department of Psychology at Southern Utah University. Dr. Mace came to SUU in 1999 after earning a Ph.D. from Colorado State University in Experimental Psychology, with emphases in Environmental and Social Psychology. For the past 25 years Dr. Mace has researched sound and noise in protected natural areas. He is currently conducting acoustic monitoring in the Grand-Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Dr. Mace has published his research in such respected journals as the Journal of Environmental Psychology, Environment and Behavior, Society and Natural Resources, Ecopsychology, the Journal of Park and Recreation Administration, and the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

Initially, the geothermic region just northwest of Salt Lake City, which included the Warm Springs area and Beck Street (which would later be incorporated as a portion of Hwy 89), was a deeply spiritual and communal site for Mormon settlers. It was a place where early interactions with nearby Native American groups took place in relative peace and the site acted as a place of rebaptism for emigrants to the valley. As time went on, the area became a site of struggle for a myriad of binary forces--spirituality and commerce, leisure and labor, nature and industry. Various peoples were ghettoized in the area as the Mormon church struggled with its own demographics and the increasing presence of non-member residents in the city. The waters were diverted and the land was tainted by one industry after another. By the early twentieth century, a pattern on social and environmental injustices had been established that continue into the current day and remain difficult to break.

Michael McLane is the Literary Program Officer for Utah Humanities, where he is also the director of the Utah Humanities Book Festival. He holds bachelors degrees in English and Anthropology from the University of Utah, an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University, and an MS in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah. He has worked for, or been on the board of, literary non-profits and organizations in Utah, Colorado, and Idaho. He is an editor for Sugar House Review and Saltfront: Studies in Human Habit(at). His own work has appeared in numerous journals, including High Country News, Western Humanities Review,Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Interim. He lives in Salt Lake City.