The Fourth Annual Michael P. Malone Memorial Conference

Natural and Unnatural Geographies:
A Graduate Student - Faculty Workshop

January 17 - 21, 2007
Chico Hot Springs Resort
Pray, Montana

The Fourth Annual Michael P. Malone Memorial Conference will be the final of three annual conferences hosted by the Department of History & Philosophy at Montana State University as part of a National Science Foundation project, "Mile High, Mile Deep: Imagining and Modifying Topographical and Subterranean Environments." This project has sought to integrate the history of science and technology with environmental history and historical geography. The inaugural conference held in September 2004, "Creating Spaces," brought together more than a dozen leading scholars for a discussion of the ways in which different societies have historically conceived of, defined, and constructed space. The second conference held in September 2005, "Spaces of Struggle," investigated the ways in which diverse forms of spatial science led to different — and often hotly contested — uses and misuses of the land.

"Natural and Unnatural Geographies" promises to continue this dialogue while also exploring fresh themes, such as the roles of gender, colonial encounters, and human-nonhuman interaction in shaping notions of space and, thereby, the manner in which humans interact with environments. The title "Natural and Unnatural Geographies" is provocative because it evokes a biological "ecotone," a transitional or even hybrid space between two specific kinds of communities. For our purposes, this hybrid space can be, among others, disciplinary, gendered, engineered, epidemiological, animal, or an otherwise human one. Furthermore, this transitional space, for example, can be inhabited by biotechnologies, organisms that blur the line between "unnatural" artifacts and the wild animals that, we once thought, witlessly navigated life as naturally occurring automatons. This transitional space is also represented by the European empire-builders who relied extensively on various forms of "indigenous" knowledge — or hybrid ways of knowing — to generate cartographic, ethnographic, zoological and other forms of information about the places they explored and conquered. In a word, we hope to explore those realms wedged between the natural and unnatural.

To tease out the interdisciplinary and trans-field threads of "Natural and Unnatural Geographies," scholars must address hybrid methodological questions that lurk at the intersection of the history of science and technology, environmental history, and other intellectual communities. In order to tackle these questions, "Natural and Unnatural Geographies" is geared directly toward graduate-student training — at both early and late stages — by offering a rare chance to discuss work closely with faculty and other graduate students, present research in a hospitable atmosphere, and actively participate in faculty-led workshops.