Geography Commencement 2008
The commencement ceremony for the Class of 2008 was held on Saturday, May 17, in the Zellerbach Playhouse.
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Kurt Cuffey:
What we want to do is hear a few perspectives on their department, their experience, the discipline. So let me first ask Laurel Lemontt to come up. Ladies and gentlemen Laurel Lemontt. Laurel Lemontt: So I want to talk about what Geography means to me, rather than trying to educate you. The first thing that I wanted to say is I am not ready to graduate from Geography. Geography means so much to me, there is still so much more that I want to learn. I always thought the academy was a crude collection of experts not affiliated with me and my beliefs. But I realized that we are the academy. The academy, enables us in certain ways and disenables us in others. As I get more confused, there are just that many more opportunities. When I look on my undergraduate experience I realize Geography was the closest I have ever got to a well rounded education of learning, insight and inspiration. It means so much to me not just as a discipline or something you would study in a book, but more of a lifestyle and a way to see the world, a lens through which to see yourself. I thought of it as my duty to get as many people as I could to join Geography just because it was such a beautiful thing. People would say, “So you study Geography. That’s like maps right? Maps…What’s the capital of Tonga.” And I would say, “Nufualofa, ok! But that’s not the point. It’s a lot deeper than that.” Seriously, there is some truth to it. As Watts would say, “Maps can represent every dimension of the community.” I think that Geography is a really great foundation through which to explore other disciplines. Its very interdisciplinary. And I would just like to flag a few things. We’ve always talked about power in Geography in a very nuanced way. Since we have been talking about power, the reason why I am speaking at Commencement is because I want to consolidate my power and take over the world. Standing at this podium, I am imagining what it is like to be a politician that has that kind of power. You are all looking at me, listening to what I have to say. This is what would like to happen to all of us, to have power within us. As Gramsci would say, “no matter how many institutions, military, or other forms of law enforcement there are, consent is key.” That idea really resonated with me. One thing I didn’t tell you is that this plan to take over the world is something I wanted to do with love. I think Geography relates to my Buddhist background. All the things I have learned, all the books I read have lead me to this one question “Can we start loving unconditionally without any expectations?” Robert Burne anyone who thinks that a way to a man’s heart is through his stomach flunked geography.” There is an eternal landscape. We search for its outlines in all of lives. Ya know, I was gonna go on but I wanted to tell you about this dream I had last night…all in Geography terms. So I was flying through this time space continuum. I had Regolith Man and Younger Dryas with me, two action figurines. We were in The Land of Praxis. We were looking for the key to the universe which was lost in this articulation of relations. I looked down at our treasure map which was a Voronai diagram. “Rats,” I said “We have an absolute or relative spatial metric distance of 1/24,000…kilometers or miles I don’t remember. But we only have 7.5 minutes to get there!” But then there was this dark obscure figure named Metadata and his sidekick Thomas Friedman. I was scared for a second, but were killed by a TIN. So then we reached the palace of Vernacular architectures. Snape appeared played by Kurt Cuffey of all people! And he told us the key to the universe which is control F. Younger Dryas says, “that’s phatasmagorical. Regolith Man said, “That’s totally gradicule”. And it was all worked into a GIS table. Thank you. |
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