For many years, the Department of Geography has had the great fortune to offer Howard Martin Awards to graduate students, thanks to generous endowments and gifts to the department. These awards provide valuable research funding for geography graduate students. The award is named after Howard Martin, the Department of Geography’s founding chair from 1935 to 1950. Dr. Martin championed graduate education and mentorship, and his legacy lives on in the powerful work students do with these awards.
Ongoing projects by M.A. student Olivia Orosco and Ph.D. candidate Isaac Rivera epitomize the wide range of graduate student research supported through Howard Martin Awards. Find details about each project below!
Olivia Orosco, Landscapes of Un-Caring: Latina Caregivers' Experiences in the COVID-19 Pandemic
Olivia Orosco’s research focuses on oral histories with home care aides in South King County, highlighting an invisible and vital sector of the workforce: those who do complicated and challenging work of caring for our elders, disabled people, and others who need support with daily care needs. Orosco is building nuanced understandings of how COVID-19 has affected the lives and labor of everyday workers, and offers a unique Latinx geography approach.
Conducting individual testimonios, Orosco emphasized listening and validating, giving caregivers a “chance to share about what it was like to be at the brunt of an incredibly challenging year.” Orosco also worked with BIPOC artists to commission collaborative portraits that were given back to the caregivers and expand what it means to be visible and deserving of portraiture.
Across 15 testimonios, Orosco heard a stark theme emerge that “encapsulates and lays bare some of the most painful realities of the pandemic.” Nearly all of the caregivers she spoke with contracted COVID-19 through their work; some were hospitalized, and some have symptoms of long COVID. Many caregivers had clients die of COVID-19, contracted through family members who had brought it in their homes. Despite these very challenging times, caregivers overwhelmingly expressed that they loved their work but hoped for more respect.
Orosco anticipates that her research “can bring to light the fact that caregivers, like hospital janitors and food service workers, are also part of a health care system and deserve visibility and recognition.”
Through funding from the Howard Martin Award, Orosco felt “supported in this project that pushes at what traditional academic scholarship and methods can be.”
Learn more about Orosco’s research and see beautiful portraits of the caregivers here!
Isaac Rivera, Mapping the Terms of Freedom & The Ongoing Refusal of Settler Imaginaries
Isaac Rivera’s project investigates the making and unmaking of settler imaginaries in Denver, Colorado. Rivera researches how Indigenous refusal as a desire-based framework reshapes visual knowledge regimes. Rivera writes “the archive of history is written through logics in racial capitalism and settler colonialism, attending to the broad terrain in which archives exist and through a framework of Indigenous refusal can re-script settler imaginaries of place and condition the dismantling of colonial science regimes, to insist instead on liberatory geographies.”
Rivera shares that the Howard Martin Award “played a crucial component to my dissertation work for which I am very grateful.” The award enabled him to support the background work for the (Re)Mapping Native Denver Exhibit, which he says “served as a community site in which to demonstrate the strength of the Denver Indigenous community in the face of ongoing settler colonialism.”
Rivera will next begin the dissertation writing process, including a chapter co-written with Viki Eagle, who inspired the community curation of (Re)Mapping Native Denver.
Congratulations Olivia and Isaac!