Tad Mutersbaugh (PhD University of California-Berkeley) has joined our faculty as an associate professor. Tad's teaching and research interests relate to ecologically sustainable and economically supportable rural development in Mexico. His current research, recently funded by the National Science Foundation, is strongly field-based at sites in Oaxaca where he works with coffee farmers and their families, local political officials, cooperative officials, and others involved in the coffee production process locally and regionally. One of his central research questions relates to the manner in which rural families strategically restructure their spatiality of work within their villages in response to the demands of the international coffee economy that they supply. Theoretically, his work draws on Torsten Hagerstrand's time-geography, Henri Lefebvre's spatial theory, and indigenous Mexican theories of governance and social space.