Graduate Program and Research Clusters

The Department is known for high quality research and graduate education in human geography, and recently we have added faculty in physical geography in accordance with our strategic plan, and funded in part through our RCTF designation, to build up a focused research cluster in Earth Surface Systems.  In addition, we are now building a program in critical cartography/GIS, participatory mapping, and the geospatial web. Program strengths include close faculty/student interaction, flexibility in designing an appropriate plan of study, and research training in seminar environments.  Emphasis at both the M.A. and Ph.D. levels is placed on theoretical and methodological training and is closely integrated with both breadth and depth in substantive literatures.  Student research also is empirically rich, with data regularly acquired through off-campus fieldwork.  Members of the faculty are committed to assisting students in disseminating their research through publications in professional journals and presentations at conferences, and in obtaining external funding. Graduate students also gain valuable experience as instructors in undergraduate courses.  Rounding out graduate students' experiences is their active participation in departmental governance and service as members of departmental committees. 

Faculty and student research in the Department focuses on interrelated thematic clusters. Research seminars are organized around topics relevant to these clusters.  The thematic content of seminars varies in accordance with the current interests of graduate students and faculty.  The research clusters we presently feature are:

Cultural Geographies: Interpretation and analysis of cultural landscapes and the built environment; space and representation; the political economy of landscape production; racialized landscapes; historical geographies of settlement; questions of space and power relating to race, class, gender and their intersection; historic preservation; US roadscapes; regional imagery; popular culture; community, identity and belonging and their social construction; the diasporic identities of migrants and immigrants, Islamic/Muslim cultural practices in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States; recreation, tourism and society.

Critical Mapping: Social implications of geospatial technologies; critical GIS/cartography; histories of cartography and GIS; public participation GIS, and community-based GIS; volunteered geographic information and neogeographies; mapping 2.0 and the geoweb; spatialities of user-generated content; geographies of the Internet; digital/spatial humanities.  Research in this area is organized through the New Mappings Collaboratory established in 2011.

Development Studies: Policies and practices of development; political economy perspectives on development; anti-development and postcolonial theory; household survival strategies; the relations between migration, transportation, tourism, and economic development; environmental management and sustainable development.

Economic Geography: The political economy of urban and regional economic change; globalization, and in particular the critical geographies of global finance: information and telecommunications, especially the economic geography of the internet; the oil and resource extractive industries;  the geography of multinational corporations, foreign direct investment, and global production and commodity chains; economic clusters; alternative forms of urban and economic development (including craft-oriented production, immigrant entrepreneurship, informal employment, local currency systems and Islamic banking); the geography of labor and employment; labor migration and migrant labor.


Environmental Geography: Critical theories of nature (political ecology, ecological economics, green social movements, environmental sustainability, the politics of environmental management and conservation policy); environment and development (post-colonial environmental history, models of environmental management in development, local environmental movements in developing areas, global environmental policymaking); resource geographies of Asia and the United States (especially oil); trade, markets and environment (markets in ecosystem services, fair trade networks, neoliberal environmental policy, environmental policies of multinational corporations).


Physical Geography: Fluvial and soil geomorphology; surface and subsurface weathering processes; ecological biogeography and biogeomorphic approaches; bioclimatology and human climate change; hydrology; earth surface systems modeling; remote sensing and geospatial applications, theories of scale and scaling.

Political Geography: Questions of states, territory, and law; citizenship; migration and immigration; transnationalism; post-colonial and imperial geographies; Islamist politics; feminist geopolitics; political economy of environmental movements; political economy of globalization discourses and practices; urban governance; and the politics of urban and regional development.

Social Geography: Health care, disease, and society; the geography of AIDS; the geography of aging and the life course; poverty and social policy; race and gender; human behavior in space and time; population and migration studies; spatial structure of social networks; transportation of disadvantaged groups.

Social Theory: Theories of human spatiality; marxist, neo-marxist, and post-marxist theory; regulation theory; postmodernism and poststructuralism; continental philosophy, feminist theory; queer theory; identity theory; race theory; geographic thought and society; technology and society.

Urban Geography: The local politics of urban development; urban social fragmentation; post-suburban development; urban property markets; questions of citizenship and public space; urban space and identities relating to ‘race’, gender, class, and migrants and immigrants; urban historical geography; urban landscapes; racialized landscapes; historical preservation; labor migration and urban economic development (especially cities and informal employment); critical geographies of urban transportation.

Faculty have regional expertise in South and Southeast Asia, Japan, the Himalayas, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East (particularly Turkey), the Central Asian republics, Western Europe, and Canada and the U.S. (particularly the Upland South).

In addition, students have access to faculty with expertise in a variety of methodological areas including field methods; qualitative research methodologies (such as interviews; focus groups; critical ethnography; experiential methods; textual and visual methods and deconstruction) quantitative methods (especially multivariate statistics, modeling and mathematical demography); as well as GIS and remote sensing methods (such as participatory GIS; digital image processing; crowd-sourced data collection; automated and production cartography).

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Selected Courses 2009 - 2011

TOPICAL COURSES AND SEMINARS

Topical courses at the 700 level are offered under standard course numbers (which reference a sub-field within Geography) but with different titles chosen by the professors.  Students can take multiple versions of the same course number (e.g., GEO 714) as long as the subtitle and focus of the course is different.

GEO 509: Geographic Information System Workshop (taught by Wilson)
Geographic information technologies continue to drive the representation and management of complex as well as everyday spatial information.  As a result, increasing numbers of for-profit and non-profit organizations have recognized the need to transform their information into a spatial format.  The demand for collaborative and participatory skills in the use of these mapping tools has, of course, been furthered by this general trend.  Therefore, the goal for this course is that each student will become an independent and effective GIS user while developing their collaborative skills in the use of GIS for spatial analysis and representation.  To meet this goal, this course follows a participatory workshop model, drawing on Elwood (2009) -- an intensive, hands-on experience in which student teams use GIS in collaboration with community partners.  These partnerships will involve students in a full range of collaborative GIS: working with team members and project partners to identify project goals, acquiring and preparing spatial data for GIS analyses, communicating with clients to assess progress, managing spatial data, and producing necessary maps and analyses.  The lecture, reading, and seminar discussion components of the course will focus on topics important to collaborative development -- to be prepared to implement, manage, and apply in a variety of research and applications areas, and in multiple geographical and institutional contexts.

GEO 530: Biogeography and Conservation (taught by Stallins)
An introduction to the geographic patterning of biological diversity, exploring its origins, dynamics, and present trends. Examines the interplay among physical conditions, ecological interactions, evolutionary processes, and the historical movements of organisms and as they have combined to affect the distribution of species, with particular attention to the application of geographic thought to current problems of species loss and conservation.  We also survey a range of topics relevant to geographic inquiry, including the history of ideas about ecological structure and function; vegetation dynamics; scale theory and how ideas from  geography inform the practice of scale; complexity theory and adaptive management; fire ecology and managing forests for fire; conceptions of wilderness; and invasive species.  This class is taught so that it is informative as well as useful for a range of students, from those with more traditional biogeographic interests, to political ecologists seeking to make stronger linkages to non-human forms and processes, as well as students of geospatial techniques who want a better understanding of the dynamics of the surface phenomena they interpret and visualize.

GEO 655: Fluvial Forms and Processes (taught by J. Phillips)
This course is an introduction to fluvial geomorphology and fluvial landforms. Geomorphology is the study of earth surface processes and landforms; fluvial refers to flowing water. Therefore we will be studying processes such as the generation of runoff, surface and channel flow, erosion, sediment transport, and deposition. We will also examine the landforms created by rivers, streams, and overland flow.  Roughly a third of the course will be devoted to mastering the basic concepts and terminology of fluvial geomorphology via traditional classroom lectures, demonstrations, and textbook readings. The other two-thirds of the course will focus on further explorations of specific topics in fluvial geomorphology via case study presentations, fieldwork, laboratory and in-class exercises, and other hands-on activities.

GEO 655: Publications Workshop (taught by Secor)
This seminar guides graduate students through the process of writing, revising, and submitting a journal article.  Publication is the main way in which scholars communicate their ideas and findings and engage others in conversations.  In geography, journal articles are the main form of publication (though many scholars do also write books).  Becoming part of scholarly conversation in geography means learning how to write and publish journal articles. Furthermore, hiring and tenure decisions are very often based on publication in peer-reviewed journals. The purpose of this course is to help students prepare a journal article for submission and in the process lay the groundwork for a writing career. This seminar is organized around the creation of a publishable paper. Each student should enter the class with the germ of a publishable paper – perhaps a seminar paper from another class that garnered attention, a dissertation chapter, or a Master’s thesis. 

GEO 655: Markets and Nature (taught by Robertson)
This course is an advanced interdisciplinary seminar that examines the current round of the commodification of ecosystem services from a range of theoretical approaches, and incorporates the policy literature as well for critical evaluation.  The course readings will focus on the way that nature is quantified and accounted-for in late capitalist society, specifically for exchange on markets. One emphasis will be on how nature has been theorized by mainstream economists, critical political economists, liberal environmental movements, and from the vantage of poststructural social theory.  A second emphasis is to examine actually-existing policy initiatives and engage with the on-the-ground practicalities of elaborating new markets in ecosystem service commodities, carbon credits, and biodiversity. 

GEO 711: Land and Landscape (taught by Schein)
This seminar is designed to allow us: to briefly explore the concept of the cultural landscape, especially as it has been employed within geographic literatures; to read a number of "thematic" empirically grounded essays which explore particular landscapes as either a direct object of study or for their implication in general social processes (or both); to explore the manner in which a specific, local landscape might be interrogated in light of knowledge gained from the other two objectives above. We will begin with the proposition that "the cultural landscape is our unwitting autobiography..." (as Peirce Lewis has written), and move toward a more processual conception of the landscape where "it" is implicated in the ongoing formulations of social and cultural (re)production.

GEO 712: Work, the body, and alienation (ethnographic imagination and political economy) (taught by Mutersbaugh)
Political economy and social theory have taken the working body – producing, affective, performing, consuming – as a worthy site for social analysis. This course will tour contemporary literatures regarding: Work – recent studies, particularly under the rubrics of 'labor process' and 'society and technology' have reworked classical concerns, including novel work relations that are emotional, affective, and cooperative; The Body – gendered, racialized, sexualized, virtual, classed, our lived experiences shape and are shaped in and through a body that produces, reproduces, consumes, and constitutes our worldly experience; Alienation – doubly expresses both our sense of loss and abstraction from the world, and also the power-laden, cultural and economic processes through which value produced by the body is removed as 'surplus'.

GEO 712: Theories of Development and Anti-Development (taught by Roberts)
The aims of this course are to introduce students to the contours of development theories and to the basic features of the related history of development practices, as well as the variety of critiques of development theories --  internal and external.  The course begins a survey of the predominant twentieth and twenty first century theories of (economic) development. Full consideration is given to the political economy of key organizations (such as the IMF and World Bank, critiques of development (such as the Debt Crisis) and movements in opposition to it. Recent scholarly work analyzing development as a set of practices is also read as well as strategies which promote some “alternative” path or which call for “anti-development” theories and praxis.

GEO 713: Virtual Geography (taught by Zook)
This seminar focuses on the diffusion of information technologies and their associated practices throughout the economy and society.  While this provides the opportunity for revamping politics, culture, creativity and the economy the outcome is far from fixed.  While the example of WikiLeaks illustrates the ability of individuals to sidestep traditional controls, the recent proposal of Google and Verizon regarding net neutrality issues highlights the continued power of entrenched actors.  Geography runs throughout these debates and the rise of Neogeography/Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) are particularly compelling topics for inquiry.

GEO 714: Geographies of Power (taught by Secor)
What is power? How is it constituted and maintained? How does it work in and through space? What roles do violence, hegemony, resistance and desire play in the constitution of relations of power?  This seminar centers on questions of power and space. We will work through texts by major theorists (Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, Butler and others) with an eye to understanding their implications for geographical work.  The objectives of the seminar are 1) to develop a theoretical basis for political-geographic studies; 2) to hone reading and analytical skills; and 3) to advance individual research programs through tailored writing assignments.

GEO 714: Political Ecology (taught by Robertson)
This course is designed as a pro-seminar introducing graduate students to the breadth and depth of the subdiscipline of political ecology within geography.  The age-old task of analyzing the relationships between human society and the natural environment was reframed for Geographers by Blaikie and Brookfield’s 1987 definition of political ecology as an approach that “merges the concerns of ecology with a broadly-conceived political economy.”  With antecedents in cultural ecology, environmental anthropology, developmentalist economics, and more recently poststructural theorizations of nature, political ecology has come to cover a broad spectrum of intellectual endeavor.  As a pro-seminar, it covers the diversity of topics in a relatively brief manner, rather than going deeply into any one area within political ecology.  Students are invited to explore one area more deeply in a research paper to be presented at the end of the semester.

GEO 714: Critical Theories of Nature and Environment (taught by Robertson)
This course is an advanced review of heterodox approaches to issues of nature and the environment.  To mainstream economists and mainstream ecologists, nature is a material object of knowledge and source of factors of production.  Nature’s overwhelming claims to authenticity, ontological priority and prediscursivity tend to silence – or at least not to nourish – the critical voices that speak more freely on issues of labor, race, and justice.  It is this authenticity and power that makes the discourse and rhetoric of nature and environment such powerful resources for governance, economic, and cultural strategy.  But in this long shadow of nature’s ontology a fascinating array of heterodox and critical approaches to nature in the social sciences has nonetheless developed.  Perhaps because of the dampening effect of nature’s rhetorical and political power on post-positivist thought, these traditions have been marginal, orphaned, and in generally poor communication with each other.   This course surveys these traditions, including Eco-Marxism, Political Ecology, Dialectical Biology, Environmental History, Ecological Imperialism, Social Natures, Ecological Economics, Risk Society, and Environmental Governmentality.

GEO 715: Geography and Social Theory (taught by Secor)
The overall goal of this course is to substantiate the idea that social theory comprises a set of ontological and epistemological issues about human coexistence which are interdisciplinary. The course will (1) examine what different social fields take as their central theoretical issues and concerns, and (2) conduct multidisciplinary explorations of key problem areas in contemporary social thought such as the nature of objectivity, the construction of gender, the role of space and time in social life, and modernity and postmodernity.

GEO 717: Mobile Urbanism (taught by Wood)
Academic work on cities and urban policy has recently undergone a substantial shift. From a long-standing focus on the city as a bounded unit and the various ‘urban’ interests that generate urban politics and urban policy, contemporary geographical work has adopted a more ‘relational’ view in which cities and urban policy are seen as assembled together from ideas, practices and policies that have their origins in a variety of different places and contexts. This course is designed to examine the recent literature on cities and urban policy making, paying particular attention to its geographies. The course encourages the development of a critical perspective on urban policy as a set of practices of policy making as well as the policies themselves. It also examines the analytical weight of mobile urbanism or, in short, the strengths and limits of urban policy mobility as an analytical device.

GEO 717: Global Urban Futures (taught by Samers)
This course explores the intersection between cities and social life. Rather than an advanced, systematic introduction to the intellectual history of urban geography, the course adopts an inter-disciplinary thematic and socio-theoretical approach to the transformation of cities in the twenty-first century. Drawing on literatures principally from anthropology, geography, and sociology, we will address issues which are, and will likely to continue to be significant issues associated with urban areas in the twenty-first century. The course will explore such themes as new diasporic urban communities, new forms of urban citizenship and governance, collective urban violence such as riots, alternative/‘grassroots’ social movements for affordable housing and ‘living wage’ employment, informal working and squatting communities, urban ‘green’ initiatives (related to energy use, transportation, and housing), the role of digital technologies (‘smartphones’, etc.) in producing new urban consumers, navigators, and ‘neo-flaneurs’, as well as the implications for  the reinvention of cities through the pervasive discourse of ‘creativity’ and ‘diversity’. However, it is the bubbling DIY extension of urban ‘social movements’ and ‘contentious politics’ that will serve as the guiding leitmotif of this course – a diverse collection of urban actions that address the above themes to uncertain ends. The course focuses on North American and European cities, but with some attention to issues in African, Asian, and Latin American cities.

GEO 721: Biogeomorphology (taught by J. Phillips)
This seminar is designed to provide advanced students with substantive research experience in biogeomorphology, focused on a specific problem. The course is not intended to be a comprehensive general geomorphology or biogeography course. Students should have had at least one geomorphology course (e.g., GEO 351) and one biogeography or ecology course (e.g., GEO/BIO 530, 531). The course will require extensive out-of-class fieldwork in rough terrain in remote locations. Students who have physical limitations that may influence their ability to safely participate should consult with the professor about possible alternatives or accommodations. The specific problem focuses on tree uprooting, the resultant landforms and soil mixing, and the effects of trees on regolith evolution. The field area is in the Daniel Boone National Forest, Kentucky.

GEO722: Immigration (taught by Ehrkamp)
This seminar is intended to provide students with a broad introduction to the conceptualization of contemporary immigration, immigration policies and immigration law, immigrant incorporation, and immigrants’ experiences in the North America and Europe.  We will read works from across the social sciences, focusing mostly on recent scholarship and research areas.  The seminar begins with a brief consideration of ‘classic’ concepts of immigrant incorporation before moving on to thinking through social differentiation and the ways that such social differentiation is achieved and/or mediated by laws and policies.  Throughout the course, the question of difference plays an important role as we consider how sexuality, race, and gender (to mention but a few) are implicated in discourses about immigration, citizenship, and in immigration policy and enforcement.  (The seminar is cross-listed with Social Theory and counts towards the Certificate in Social Theory.)

GEO722: Crowdsourcing, the Geoweb and Augmented Realities (taught by Zook)
This seminar focuses upon the geographies of digital space and the complex ways it intersects with the material world. The course draws upon work from Geography, Sociology, Planning, Visual Studies and Information Science to think through the array of ways this ongoing process can be conceptualized and theorized.  Of particular interest is the ability to map and analyze “big data” sources that are increasing available (Twitter, social networks, mobile phone tracks, etc.) to researchers, governments and companies.  Ranging from digitized collections of texts and other cultural artifacts to the transactional records of day-to-day life captured by social media to the ubiquity of environmental sensors, scholars are just beginning to understand the possibilities and challenges (particularly relating to privacy and surveillance) of these rich sources of data on the time and location of the social and natural processes of everyday life.  This course includes sections on capturing and using these data and students are encouraged to develop individual research projects.

Courses in Methodology

GEO 565: Remote Sensing Fundamentals (taught by Liang)
This course provides an introduction to remote sensing technologies and their applications in environmental observation and study. This course provides essential knowledge and skills that are needed to utilize remote sensing for various applications related to land use/land cover analysis, environmental monitoring, natural resources management, and urban planning. This course includes coverage of the fundamental remote sensing principles, overview of space/air borne sensors/data, essential techniques for digital image processing, and applications particular related to diverse land surfaces such as vegetation, water, urban, and soil/bedrocks. Theoretical training and lab exercises are integrated components in this course.

GEO 600: Introduction to Methods in Geography (taught by Mutersbaugh, Robertson)
This course is designed to familiarize the beginning graduate student with the practical and theoretical challenges of approaching research with an appropriate, rigorous and defensible methodology.  Questions of method are often seen as secondary to theoretical ambition or the practicalities and logistics of research, and perhaps Geography is particularly guilty of this tendency.  A range of quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches have been elaborated over the past 40 years.  And yet, as quantitative methodologies have been laid aside in some post-positivist human geography, the rigor expected in qualitative traditions has given way to earnest but vague notions of a theory-driven praxis.  In this course qualitative and quantitative approaches are considered equally valuable, and may even be combined in multi-method work; questions of rigor remain no matter which approach is chosen.  Human geographers must be able to convincingly operationalize theory in the mundane activities of daily research, and be able to structure an extended study in such a way as to produce convincing results.  Both effective scholarly communication and effective grant-writing depend on a critical mastery of methodological questions.

GEO 705: Doing Qualitative Research (taught by Ehrkamp, Schein)
This course is meant to be an in-depth study and application of one or more research methods/techniques (e.g., qualitative methods, ethnography, textual analysis, visual analysis, GIS). Intended to offer M.A. and Ph.D. students advanced methodological specialization in geography. In this iteration, we will discuss students’ previous “training” and current methodological “needs” the first day in order to respond to those particularities. In any event, the course will focus on several “units” after an introductory section; each unit will begin with readings on and discussion of a particular research method (its foundations, its issues and problems, its prosecution in the abstract) before requiring a “hands-on” exercise designed to gain practical experience in data collection and analysis. Units will be (potentially) organized around archival research, interviews, focus groups, participant observation, and data analysis.

GEO 705: Applications of Geospatial Techniques (taught by Kim)
The primary goal of this course is to help students get familiar with not only recent concepts and theories, but also various quantitative techniques in geospatial science. Although there are numerous geographic data, useful methods, and (free) software packages available, many are unaware of their existence and how the methods should be used correctly. Moreover, it is often relatively fast and easy to get outputs without knowing basic assumptions and procedures associated with the analysis. Throughout this semester, students will study these statistical basics continuously using a step-by-step approach, and enjoy a variety of hands-on experiences of analyzing real-world data using different software packages.

Courses part of the core curriculum within Geography

GEO 702: Concepts in Geography (taught by Roberts, Wood, Secor)
The formal aims of this seminar are two-fold: (1) To introduce students to selected recent and contemporary themes and debates in geographic thought; and (2) To encourage critical and informed engagement with key texts in the discipline.  Less formally, what I want you get out of this course is an appreciation for the importance of key concepts in geography and the centrality to the discipline of debates over the meaning and significance of those concepts. A number of points will be clear from the outset. First, what counts as a concept and especially a ‘key’ concept is a matter of debate that often touches on the very identify of the discipline itself. Second, the meanings attached to concepts continue to be things that are struggled over. Third, by understanding such arguments and debates – through a careful and theoretically-informed critical reading – we can begin to assess what was and/or is at stake in the discipline’s struggles over concepts and their meanings.

GEO 707: Development of Geographic Thought (taught by Samers)
The history of the development of Anglophone (human) geographic thought is considerably less rehearsed than the well-tread historiography of the post-WWII discipline, except among a small coterie of historical geographers and those with cognate environmental and spatial interests. Yet the stories that this history tells have had far reaching consequences for the writing of history itself, and the practice of cartography, colonialism, imperialism, and human geography since the late 1960s. This seminar-based course is designed to explore the development of geographic thought mainly, but not exclusively before WWII (surely an arbitrary, but convenient ending point), and mainly but not exclusively from the point of view of ‘white’, Anglophone men (surely a limited perspective). Nevertheless, the emphasis is on reading both a small set of critical (and less critical) synoptic texts as well as the original pre-1945 texts themselves that have charted this sometimes unfortunate history. The course concludes with the writings on the Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun, as well as exploring a history of physical geography, and geomorphology in particular. Ultimately, the purpose is not necessarily to develop a one-size-fits-all critique of ‘enlightenment geographies’ or a fixed historiography of early geographic thought (feel free to write your own) but to foster a critical appreciation of a certain history of spatial thought, in such a way that we are not doomed to repeat it, or a great deal of it anyway. At the very least, we do not want to reinvent the colonial wheel.  

GEO 721: Concepts in Physical Geography (taught by Turkington)
There are three objectives to this course: 1) to introduce students to selected recent and present-day currents in geographic thought; 2) to assist students practice critical and informed engagement of key texts; and 3) to familiarize students with wider issues surrounding debates over concepts in physical geography. To this end, the course is divided into two parts. In Part I, “Concepts in Physical Geography,” we work through some key themes in geography, regularly partnering with the GEO 702 class, in order to examine some key texts within the themes of ‘environment and landscape’, ‘time’ and ‘space’.  In Part II, “Current trends in geomorphology and biogeography,” we will turn our attention to some key studies in geomorphology, biogeomorphology and biogeography to examine current debates in the literature. 
Less formally, what this course will hopefully offer is an appreciation for the importance of key concepts in physical geography and the centrality to the discipline of debates over the meaning and significance of those concepts. A number of points will be clear from the outset. First, what counts as a concept and especially a ‘key’ concept is a matter of debate that often touches on the very identify of the discipline itself. Second, the meanings attached to concepts continue to be things that are struggled over. Third, by understanding such arguments and debates – through a careful and theoretically-informed critical reading – we can begin to assess what was and/or is at stake in the discipline’s struggles over concepts and their meanings.

Seminars offered by the Committee on Social Theory with the active involvement of Geography faculty

ST 600: Law, Sex, Family (co-taught by Ehrkamp)
This seminar is broadly conceived as a study of law as a set of norms constitutive of culture and society, in which our entry into questions of “law” occurs through the topics of sexuality and family. We examine how practices come into being as ‘law’ and are treated as ‘law,’ as well how ‘sex’ and ‘family’ come into being through such ‘legal’ and cultural forms of governance and discourse. Topics include: constructions of family, marriage and kinship in law; colonial and customary law; psychoanalysis and the family; migration, race and nationhood; queering law.

ST 600: Security (co-taught by Roberts)
Concerns over security permeate our globalizing world. From the food we eat, the water we drink, the body we live in, and money we save, to the “homeland” where we reside, the war and violence in which we are implicated, and cyberspace we explore, it is indeed difficult to think of facets of social life that are not touched by the questions of security. How has all this happened? Whose security, exactly, are we talking about? Where is our society headed – the dream of gated communities, or the nightmare of surveillance society? Where are the points of intervention, if there are any, for politics, democracy, freedom, and equality in the midst of security concerns? How do we theorize security? We will explore these and related questions as they have been manifested in diverse historical and geographical contexts.

ST 690: Feminism and Post-Colonialism (co-taught by Ehrkamp; cross-listed with GWS 616)
This course is designed to expose students to a range of theories and debates centering on or pertinent to women, gender, and sexuality in the field of postcolonial studies. Here, the field is understood in its widest and most interdisciplinary sense, inclusive of studies of Empire, subaltern studies, and diasporas. Topics for study will include classical texts in the field, current postcolonial readings on gender and sexuality in empire, geopolitics, representation, immigration, trans/nationalism, and diasporas. We will, in particular, unpack Western understandings of ‘culture’ and ‘liberal democracy,’ and philosophical concepts such as ‘hospitality’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’.

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Research Facilities

The Department of Geography has departmental offices for faculty and graduate students in the Patterson Office Tower. Across the plaza, Miller Hall is home to additional offices, laboratories, and the Department's Gyula Pauer Cartography and Geographic Information Laboratory with up-to-date computing, GIS, and mapping capabilities. The Laboratory's facilities support professional graphics workstations and the latest GIS, statistical, and visualization software.  The W. T. Young Commonwealth Library houses over 2.6 million volumes.  The library's holdings include a special Appalachian Collection, a collection of Kentucky geographer Ellen Churchill Semple's papers, and a separate map library.  It is also a regional depository for U.S. Census, Federal, and United Nations documents.

The Department maintains strong linkages with interdisciplinary research centers and programs on campus, including the Appalachian Center, the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, the Kentucky Transportation Center, the Committee on Social Theory, the Kentucky Geological Survey, the Digital Public Humanities research group, The Tracy Farmer Institute for Sustainability & the Environment and the Japan Studies program. These and other programs offer students an opportunity to engage with scholars from a broad range of disciplines such as Anthropology, Forestry, Landscape Architecture and Gender and Women's Studies.  In addition, students may gain valuable international field experience through participation in the summer field courses organized each year in Yatsushiro, Japan, and Oaxaca, Mexico.

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Applications and Admissions

Admission to the Geography Graduate Program at the University of Kentucky is internationally competitive. We strongly encourage applications for matriculation in the Fall semester (rather than Spring or Summer semesters). Applicants should submit their materials by January 15 to ensure a complete review. Applications will be accepted and decisions will continue after the January 15 date, but later applications may miss financial aid decision deadlines. The admissions process (detailed below) precedes and is separate from the financial aid decision-making process.

The application process requires materials to be submitted to two separate places:

1. You should submit to the University of Kentucky Graduate School the following:

1. Official Application Form


2. Application Fee


3. One official transcript from each University attended
   
   
4. Official GRE scores (click here for more information)
   
   
5. Official TOEFL scores if your first language is not English (click here for more information)
   

For additional information, please visit the Graduate School's web site. The mailing address is:

University of Kentucky
Graduate School
101 Gillis Building
Lexington, Kentucky, 40506-0033 USA
telephone (859) 257-4613
fax (859) 323-1928

2. The following documents (in pdf format) should be emailed to the department at: GeoGradAdmissions@uky.edu.  Although some documents are identical to those sent to the graduate school you must also submit them to the Geography department via this email.

A.       A statement of your goals and objectives in which you discuss your areas of scholarly interest, any research directions you may wish to pursue, and how your interests and goals fit with those of the University of Kentucky's Graduate Program in Geography. This document should be about two pages double-spaced.

B.         A resume or curriculum vitae (if available)


C.       Copies (unofficial copies are acceptable) of the following:


i. Transcripts from each university you have attended
ii. GRE scores
iii. TOEFL scores (if applicable)

D.        If you do NOT wish to be considered for assistantships and fellowships, please provide a one sentence document stating this.

E.        Please arrange for three letters of reference from persons who can evaluate your potential for success in our graduate program.  These should NOT be submitted by you, but by the person providing the reference.

A.       All materials you submit should be in pdf format and should be emailed to GeoGradAdmissions@uky.edu.

B.       There are many ways to convert digital documents to pdf.  If you do not have software available, you can find free online utilities by conducting a Google search on “free pdf converter”.

C.       To assist us in processing applications please use the following naming conventions:



i. Lastname_firstname_statement_of_goals
ii. Lastname_firstname_curriculum_vitae
iii. Lastname_firstname_transcript_University_name
iv. Lastname_firstname_GRE
v. Lastname_firstname_TOEFL (if applicable)
vi. Lastname_firstname_not_interested_in_funding (if applicable)

D.       If you do not have access to a scanner to convert your transcripts, GRE scores and TOEFL scores to pdf format, you can send paper copies to: Geography Graduate Admissions, Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, 1457 Patterson Office Tower, Lexington, KY 40506-0027, USA.  However, we greatly prefer to receive pdf versions as outlined above.

E.       Reference letters should be in a Word or PDF document and sent directly from the reviewer to GeoGradAdmissions@uky.edu. References should NOT be submitted by you.  Please also ensure that your letter-writers write their reference on official (university or other organizational) stationery.

Applications are reviewed by a Department of Geography faculty committee (the Graduate Committee), which makes a recommendation to the Department's Director of Graduate Studies (DGS), who is responsible for admissions decisions. Questions about the application process and the status of applications may be directed to the DGS. The Graduate Committee does not have a minimum required score on the GREs or a minimum required Grade Point Average, but takes these into account in any admission decision. The Graduate Committee does not emphasize one aspect of the application over any other, but takes the entire package under consideration, and is motivated in its decision making by the applicant's potential for success in graduate study in general, and graduate study in our department in particular.

The department welcomes students with undergraduate concentrations in related fields. In some cases students without an academic background in Geography may be required to complete additional coursework so as to gain appropriate foundational knowledge.

We especially encourage applications from women and students from minority populations. The University of Kentucky has several special fellowships for minority graduate students. The DGS or the Graduate School's Office of Recruitment may be contacted for further details.  Link for grad school diversity http://www.research.uky.edu/gs/About/diversity_students.html

We encourage applicants and prospective applicants to visit the Department and the University of Kentucky to learn more about our graduate program. A visit gives the prospective student a valuable opportunity to see the campus and our facilities and to meet with faculty and graduate students to discuss interests and goals. In addition, a visit is a chance to explore the wonderfully livable city of Lexington and its beautiful Bluegrass surroundings. To schedule a visit, contact the DGS. For information about Kentucky see our About Us section.

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Financial Aid

Financial aid decisions are made subsequent to the admissions process, in much the same manner (file review by the Graduate Committee and recommendation to the Director of Graduate Studies). We begin evaluating applications for financial aid after January 15 and applicants wishing to be competitive and wanting to be considered for the full range of aid possibilities listed below should have their applications in by that date. A very high proportion of students in our graduate program are supported by Teaching Assistantships, Research Assistantships, or Fellowships of various kinds. The major types of financial aid available are described below.

Teaching Assistantships (TAs). These are awarded on a competitive basis by the Department's Graduate Committee faculty. TAs typically work 20 hours each week during the academic year. TAs in the M.A. and Ph.D. programs may assist professors in introductory courses, gaining practical experience in instruction, student advising, grading, and exam preparation. TAs may work as a member of an instructional team with responsibilities for leading discussion or recitation sections of an introductory course. Advanced P.D. students may be given the opportunity to teach their own introductory course for which they assume full responsibility. The Chair of the Department, in consultation with the DGS and TAs, makes decisions on TA assignments. Summer teaching is available on a very limited basis. First year TAs are required to attend a University TA orientation prior to the first day of classes. The University also requires that international TAs (ITAs) from non- English speaking countries participate in an ITA orientation. In addition, the Department offers a one credit-hour teaching practicum course each Fall semester for all TAs. This course is required of all new TAs, but all incoming first year students are encouraged to take the course and it is open to all graduate students in Geography interested in teaching. In addition, TAs can use the support services and resources of the University of Kentucky Teaching and Academic Support Center.


Research Assistantships (RAs) may be obtained through a variety of sources, including faculty research grants, research positions affiliated with other units on campus, and special projects within the department. RAs generally assist faculty members with several aspects of a research program thereby gaining valuable research experience.


Transportation Fellowships are available for students combining a one year program in Advanced Transport Systems Management with their M.A. or Ph.D. Degree. Interested students should write directly to the Director of Graduate Studies (michael.samers@uky.edu), for further details.

Fellowships. Exceptionally strong applicants may be nominated by the department for one of a number of fellowships offered through the Graduate School, which are allocated on the basis of campus-wide competition. There are several types of fellowship, including several dedicated to minority students. For details see the Graduate School Fellowships page.

Teaching Assistantships and most other forms of financial aid include tuition scholarships. In addition, most of these forms of financial aid include health insurance.

Fellows and TAs are normally supported for the following time periods: incoming M.A. students, two years; incoming Ph.D. students, four years; successful M.A. students who continue in our program receive a further three years support for the Ph.D., that is, five years in total. These award periods are contingent upon the student's satisfactory progress in the degree program, and upon the maintenance of the department's current levels of support.

Research Support:  The department is able to provide limited amounts of funding for research projects and conference participation to graduate students through its Barnhart and Withington endowments.  Graduate students enrolled in our programs are able to apply for these funds on an annual and competitive basis.  Applications are reviewed by the Graduate Committee.

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Graduate Student Life

Graduate students are valued members of the vibrant intellectual community centered in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky. Graduate students enjoy learning in a friendly and collegial atmosphere where there are ample opportunities for interaction with faculty, adjunct faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and fellow students. We deliberately foster an open and inclusive scholarly community, in which a diverse group of students can flourish.

The cornerstones of the Graduate Program are the seminars offered each semester. The required courses are offered on a regular basis and serve to provide a strong background in theoretical, conceptual and methodological issues in geography. In addition, students take seminars in areas related to their own research interests. Very often projects completed in seminars are the basis for papers students submit for publication or papers presented at scholarly meetings. Master's thesis and Ph.D. dissertation topics frequently emerge out of seminar settings and are developed in close consultation with an advisor and a thesis committee. Click here for a list of recent UK Geography thesis titles.

As part of the process of departmental governance, Graduate Students have the opportunity to develop professional skills through participation in a range of departmental activities. Graduate students work with faculty on departmental committees, and are involved in planning the Colloquia Series, the annual Fall Picnic, and the Ellen Churchill Semple Day celebrations each spring.

Geography graduate students enjoy participating in the interdisciplinary programs at the University of Kentucky. Many graduate students take seminars offered through the Gender and Women’s Studies Department, the Committee on Social Theory, the Department of Forestry, and complete Graduate Certificates in these areas. Research centers, such as the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, the Appalachian Center, and the Kentucky Transportation Center also offer opportunities for Geography graduate students. Moreover, Geography graduate students have been instrumental in organizing interdisciplinary groups such as the Political Ecology Working Group (PEWG) which has organized conferences and reading groups.

Graduate students from our program have an excellent record of participation at scholarly meetings. Each year several students participate in conferences, including the Mini-Conference on Critical Geography, the meetings of the South East Division of the Association of American Geographers (SEDAAG), and the national meetings of the Association of American Geographers (AAG). Graduate students also collaborate in organizing sessions at these and other meetings. Each year there are funds available on a competitive basis from the Graduate School to support participation in scholarly meetings and conferences.

In addition, graduate students are active in the major professional associations and the discipline scholarly community more broadly, serving on the boards of AAG Specialty Groups, managing electronic listservs, and participating in other organizational activities.

Most graduate students at the Ph.D. level, and many in the MA program, submit research papers, book reviews, and/or review articles, for publication in premier journals. Recent publications by University of Kentucky Geography Graduate students have appeared in Gender, Place and Culture, Political Geography, Geography of the Post-Soviet Union, Professional Geographer, Cultural Geographies, Social and Cultural Geography, Geoforum, Antipode, The Journal of Historical Geography, Urban Geography, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Several students have authored chapters in edited collections. Some students have been active in developing web-based texts and materials for publishers. Graduate students are assisted in publication by faculty members and learn about this and other aspects of professional development in the one-credit course titled Preparing Future Faculty offered each year and open to all graduate students. 

Graduate Students have had success in applying for extra-mural funding and faculty members are committed to working with students in this process. In addition, GEO 743 offers the chance to develop research proposals. Recently, geography graduate students have been very successful in obtaining nationally competitive grants and awards including fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the National Security Education Program, and the Rockefeller Humanities Program. In addition, students have been awarded extramural research funds from the J. William Fulbright Dissertation Program, the National Science Foundation, the InterAmerican Foundation, the National Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, and the National Council for Geographic Education.  Students may also apply for research funding from intramural sources such as the James Brown Graduate Student Research Award sponsored by Appalachian Studies, the Kentucky Oral History Commission, and the Edith Schwab Memorial Scholarship which is sponsored by the Bluegrass Community Foundation.  The Graduate School has an incentive program that adds some matching funds to national awards.

Students in our graduate program have a range of professional goals and career plans. From the start of their degree program, students work with their Advisor and Advisory Committee to develop strategies for success in the job market. Recent graduates have obtained a variety of jobs in academe, the private sector, and government. The Graduate Program maintains contact with alumni through an e-mail listserv, Facebook, receptions at AAG meetings, and regular mailings.

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