Graduate student Monique Hassman received one of four scholarships from the 2016 Damon Anderson Memorial Scholarship Fund. Talented students are the foundation of our growing profession and we’re impressed with what you’ve accomplished thus far. A $1,000 scholarship for the 2016-2017 academic school year will be sent to your Bursar’s office in your name. Along with the scholarship you will receive:

• One year student membership to the Wisconsin Land Information Association.
• Free registration to the 2017 WLIA Annual Conference Feb. 22–24 in Wisconsin Dells, WI. All recipients will be recognized at this conference.
• Free hotel accommodations for that annual conference in Wisconsin Dells at The Chula Vista Resort

The award is in recognition of Ms. Hassman’s dissertation research titled Placing Transformation: Complexities of Change in the Aftermath of Disaster, which takes a novel interdisciplinary approach fusing Anthropology, and Geography, and utilizing various theoretical and methodological approaches including mapmaking and GIS. Her work, pushes the boundaries of traditional land information gathering, taking critical 21st century approach to understanding cultural and individual agency in placemaking as a mechanism for empowerment and community building in the aftermath of disaster. Specifically, her vital research examines placemaking of New Orleans, Louisiana’s Lower Ninth Ward residents post-Hurricane Katrina as a means of investigating sociocultural and spatial transformation in a neighborhood setting using ethnographic and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) methodologies. This research explores struggles and agency influencing the process of coming home and practices cultivating activism and well-being in the return to ‘normalcy’.

The importance of Ms. Hassman’s research and scholarship cannot be emphasized enough as many of the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward continue to face untenable circumstances, and many still have not fully recovered their land prior to Katrina.