King’s Earth Week to Feature Guest Cartography Presentation on Relationship Between Oppression and Human Interaction with the Natural World

Dr. Christy Hyman of Mississippi State University will visit King’s College on Tuesday, Apr. 23, 2024, to present “Digitally Mapping Interspecies Cooperation in the Underground Railroad,” which discusses the use of digital cartography to explore the impact of societal and environmental obstacles to freedom on human interaction with the natural world.

The event, which is free and open to the public, takes place at 7:00 p.m. in the Burke Auditorium located on the first floor of the McGowan School of Business. Visitors can park in lots off the circle accessed from N. Franklin St.

The event is part of the College’s annual Earth Week celebration, which includes several environmental sustainability workshops and service events.

Hyman is an Assistant Professor of Human Geography at Mississippi State University and the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for Freedom on the Move at Cornell University. Her research focuses on African American efforts toward cultural and political assertion in the southeastern United States during the antebellum era as well as the social and environmental costs of resource exploitation.

Hyman’s other publications include books The Cultural Heritage Resilience of the Great Dismal Swamp and The Jerusalem Oak: Mapping the Counter-Cartographies of Freedom and Struggle in the antebellum United States South.

An avid birder and native of Laurinburg, North Carolina, Hyman is now based in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.

The event is sponsored by the McGowan Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility, which organizes numerous lectures and panel discussions, conferences, faculty development workshops, and faculty-student research opportunities, among other services.