Visiting Killam Fellow maps 50 years of farm history on PEI
A visiting Killam Fellow from Arizona is helping UPEI’s GeoREACH LAB with a mapping project for agricultural land use on Prince Edward Island. The Back 50 Project is led by Alexandra Neumann, Killam Fellow and undergraduate student from Arizona State University’s Barrett, the Honors College. She is supervised by Dr. Josh MacFadyen, UPEI’s Canada Research Chair in Geospatial Humanities.
Neumann has been visiting this semester, taking courses in the applied communication, leadership, and culture program (ACLC) and learning about farms and farmers on Prince Edward Island. She has also been designing a mapping website to gather data about historical land use change for the Back 50 Project. The survey is a product of her ACLC course work, and it is designed for people with knowledge of agricultural land use change in PEI. Participants will be able to look at historical maps, identify land that is important to them, and describe how land use changed on those parcels.
Neuman’s project explores how the current landscape of rural PEI came to be, asking questions such as “what is sustainable?”, “what isn’t sustainable?”, and “how has policy affected land and society over the past 50 years?”
Neuman’s participation in the Back 50 Project will continue after she returns to Arizona.
Neumann has highly valued her experience as a Killam Fellow, noting exchanging cultural and historical understanding of the U.S. and Canada with her peers and professors at UPEI has been an impactful learning experience and a great way to connect with people. She encourages her peers at Arizona State and UPEI to apply.
The Killam Fellowships Program provides an opportunity for exceptional undergraduate students from universities in Canada and the United States to spend either one semester or a full academic year as an exchange student in the other country. The program is run by the Foundation for Educational Exchange between Canada and the United States of America (Fulbright Canada), a bi-national, treaty-based, non-governmental, not-for-profit organization with a mandate to identify the best and brightest minds in both countries and engage them in residential academic exchange.
