1. First, a place that is personally significant is Addison, Maine, where my family has gathered for many years and is always in my mind. Secondly, Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, is a place where the humanities influence geography. This is where I spent a year researching conflicting memories of the landscape in the post-conflict period and how they influenced two reconstruction projects: a national park that had been destroyed during the war and the sites of ancestral villages and sacred spaces from which local peoples had been removed when the park was created and to where they returned during the war. Finally, Les Eyzies in the Black Perigord region of France, where the caves of the Vezere Valley are filled with some of humanity's first representational art from the paleolithic period.

2. I am a social studies teacher preparing a new interdisciplinary course with a strong geography component at a high school in Maine. I originally trained as a cultural anthropologist with an interest in human-environmental relationships in Africa. 

3. The words that come to mind when I think of geography are space, place and landscape. I chose them because I am fascinated by how these concepts frame the relationship between human cultures and their environments.