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). |
