LAS Research Blitz- Who Owns West Virginia?

About

Join the UCCS Geography and Environmental Studies department for an all-day research event! Come contribute to Dr. Dylan Harris’ research in a low-stakes, fun environment. Event Details • Date: Friday, November 20 • Time: 9:00 AM – 3:00 PM • Location: UCCS Campus, Columbine Room 329 How to Participate • Early Registration: The first 25 people to register will receive catered food and fullday access starting at 9:00 AM, Register now on MLC to secure your spot! • Drop-In Hours: If you miss the first 25 slots, drop-in hours open at 12:30 PM. You can still stop by and participate anytime until 3:00 PM. This event aims to be accessible for reasonable accommodation, including food preferences, please reach out to Brody Dickson at bdickson@uccs.edu. More about the Event: The LAS Research Blitz is an event that aims to tackle a specific research question/problem over the course of a day-long event. This will be the first one, but it is our hope that this becomes a model for similar events in service to pressing research questions among faculty and community members. This event will focus on Dr. Dylan M. Harris’s ongoing research on the ‘transit’ of the Just Transition – the move away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy and, ideally, a more just society – in Central Appalachia. More specifically, event participants will help Dr. Harris process data that will help refine a GIS tool – called PART – developed by his collaborators at the West Virginia Abandoned Properties Coalition. Participants will receive instructions on how to cross-check and manage data. This data will then be used to develop the next stage of the project, which will include ground-truthing in person in Mingo County, WV. We will provide a project overview and justification, clear instructions, food, and a fun atmosphere to learn, do meaningful and applied research, and hopefully develop some new skills. Why West Virginia? Central Appalachia, and especially the southern coal fields region of West Virginia, is a paradox. It is one of the most resource-rich places in the world, and yet it has been – and remains – persistently poorer than the rest of the US. There are many factors leading to this reality, but the main one is that the region has been subject to histories of resource exploitation at the hands of absentee and corporate landowners. Because of tax policy in the US, and in WV specifically, these landowners pay very little, if any, taxes. Without a sustainable tax base, the region struggles to provide basic resources – schools, road, hospitals – which results in structural poverty. It should also be noted that many of these landowners have also historically been energy companies, which have vested interests in maintaining these legacies of exploitative landownership patterns in light of a Just Transition. The Abandoned Properties Coalition developed PART as a resource to help families and individuals determine who owns what land. Because of absentee landownership, this information is incredibly opaque. By having a better sense of who owns the land, communities can find out who, for example, owns and abandoned mine and then hold them accountable for more sustainable and equitable development pathways. During the research blitz, participants will be processing as much data as possible during the allotted time to refine data regarding landownership patterns in Mingo County, WV, which is at the heart of the state’s historic coal fields. By providing communities more information here, the Abandoned Properties Coalition, with the help of event participants, will be able to develop PART’s proof of concept. With this in place, PART can be expanded to the rest of the state and potentially the entire region of Central Appalachia.