Imaginaries of place in territorialization processes:Transforming the Oyacachi<i> páramos</i> through nature conservation and water transfers in the Ecuadorian highlands

How Ecuadorian páramos are perceived has drastically changed over the last five decades. From cold, hostile, and unproductive hinterlands, páramos have changed to become areas for biodiversity conservation and ‘water towers’ that ought to be protected to provide clean and abundant water for cities and irrigation. To understand how these changing perceptions of páramos relate to interventions and their on-the-ground negotiation by local communities, we develop the notion of imaginaries of place and explore its relations to notions of governmentality and territorialization. We show how, based on changing imaginaries of what páramos are, state and non-state interventions have tried to control the Oyacachi páramos in the Northern Ecuadorian Highlands for the specific purpose of nature and water conservation. At the same time, we show that these interventions are highly contested on-the-ground. This leads to confrontations, negotiations, and a re-definition of the imaginaries of place there exist. Our analysis expounds the relevance of understanding imaginaries of place and its close relations to interventions and their negotiation

A Unit-Problem Investigation of Blunt Leading-Edge Separation Motivated by AVT-161 SACCON Research

A research effort has been initiated to examine in more detail some of the challenging flow fields discovered from analysis of the SACCON configuration aerodynamics. This particular effort is oriented toward a diamond wing investigation specifically designed to isolate blunt leading-edge separation phenomena relevant to the SACCON investigations of the present workshop. The approach taken to design this new effort is reviewed along with the current status of the program