This month we're getting to know the newest member of our department, Assistant Professor Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre, who uses social mapping and videography to highlight the multiple geographies and ways of knowing that can inform epistemic and social justice efforts.
Could you say a little bit generally about your research interests, writing, and scholarship. What has inspired the work you’re doing now?
My research interests are political and historical...
Peter Ekman, PhD alum and current faculty member at USC's School of Architecture, has published his first book. Timing the Future Metropolis is a hemispheric intellectual history of planning, urbanism, design, and social science. It reconstructs the midcentury intellectual network that gave rise to the interdisciplinary field of urban studies — at a time when geography departments were closing across the U...
Congratulations to Ambrosia Shapiro, Undergraduate Major Advisor and Events/Communications Coordinator, who has been selected to receive UC Berkeley's Outstanding Advisor Award. The criteria for this award is an individual who has demonstrated a positive impact on student learning, engagement, belonging, and success; and embody a student-centered, equity-oriented, strengths-based approach to advising, counseling...
Over the course of the 20th century, the South African state attempted to construct a “White Man’s Country” on the African continent using the biopolitical tools and spatial and economic planning strategies that characterized modern statecraft. Sharad Chari's new book, Apartheid Remains (Duke UP, 2024), examines how racialized subaltern populations of Blacks, Indians, and coloureds resisted and circumvented these efforts to construct a racialized social order. At the same time, the book also examines how...
Lauren R. Pearson, Geography PhD candidate, researches the phenomenon of illegally set wildfires in Sicily. In a new article for Criminology & Criminal Justice titled, “Land on Fire: The Spatial Production of the Mafia," Pearson proposes to address a major lacuna in geographic literature: how mafia groups are socially and spatially reproducing themselves through the intentional setting of fire. Analyzing the 2021...
This month we're getting to know geographer and curator, Diana Negrín da Silva, whose research explores intersections of race, space, and identity, with a focus on Indigenous rights and activism in Latin America and the United States.
Thanks for taking the time to chat! Can you share why you chose to pursue an academic career in Geography?
I chose Geography because of its interdisciplinary nature and its ability to include the spheres of...
The Townsend Center presents a lunchtime series celebrating the intellectual and artistic endeavors of the UC Berkeley faculty. Please join us on October 16, 2024 for a Berkeley Book Chat with Sharad Chari in discussion with Gillian Hart about his new publication, Apartheid Remains. In his book, Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the city of Durban. Learn more...
On October 2, Sharad Chari will be presenting his new book, Apartheid Remains, at the Knowing Africa Seminar Series at the Institute for International Studies, Carleton University. In his book, Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the Indian Ocean city of Durban. Chari will be joined by discussants Mark Hunter (University of Toronto) and...
NSF Fellows are anticipated to become knowledge experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching and innovations in science and engineering. These individuals are crucial to maintaining...
Geography Phd students Andrea Lara-Garcia, Jasmine Martin, and Jimena Perez have been chosen to be a part of Social Science Matrix Research Teams, groups of scholars who gather regularly to explore or develop a novel question or emerging field in the social sciences. Andrea Lara-Garcia is part of the Legal Geography...
"Literature on black environmental geographies uplifts black land and water relations, marronage, placemaking practices, and the envisioning of black futurity in the face of environmental and climate precarity. This demonstrates the ways these communities are not only geographic actors, but also ecological actors and caretakers."
Black environmental geographies scholarship has made significant strides in expanding the ways we understand ecologies and ecological relationships interweaving the lives of black communities across the black diaspora. In this article,...
A new article by Assistant Professor Clancy Wilmott and Geography PhD student Alexis Wood investigates the ways in which base maps are a fundamental, but under-recognised, starting point for planners, architects, cartographers and geographic information scientists in urban spatial planning and decision-making contexts. Focusing on the case study of a collaborative mapping project with the Wood Street Commons, an unhoused community in West Oakland, it...
Join our team! The Department of Geography invites applications for an Associate or Full Professor with expertise in pertinent subject areas, including but not limited to Pacific Islander studies, Asian diasporas, migration, capitalism, histories of imperialism, labor, social movements, immigration, and environmental change. The successful candidate will enrich the intellectual diversity of the department and fortify its capacity to engage with and contribute to crucial discussions on social, political, and economic disparities, and the multifaceted aspects of race and ethnicity...
Geography alum, ameia camielle smith (B.A. '24), has just been published in Sounding Out!, a peer-reviewed sound studies publication which seeks to direct the field’s energy toward the social, cultural, and political aspects of sound and listening since 2009. ameia’s piece, “to follow an invisible creek: in search of a decolonial sound walk praxis,” was written as part of their final...
The Leventhal Map & Education Center’s Small Grants for Early Career Digital Publications supports scholars through the process of producing a publication for general audiences in a digital format. The program is designed to catalyze creative projects which utilize a digital medium to present scholarly work through engaging, accessible, and experimental communicative modalities.
By the end of the academic year, the Leventhal Map Library will be publishing...
"The yoking of property to modernity and civilization makes technological progress a fundamental part of how relationships to land are constituted and reconstituted, and in whose interests, throughout global capitalism."
A wide range of digital innovations has changed property relations globally over the past fifteen years, encompassing such diverse manifestations as the sale of tokenized fractional interests in rental properties, the brokering of land sales via Facebook livestream (Faxon & Wittekind 2023), and metaverse environments that...
Annabelle Law, Geography senior, was awarded $400 in department funds to participate in the weeklong 2024 AAG conference. Below, she shares her experience and insights from the event.
Attending the American Association of Geographers (AAG) conference in Hawai’i this year was an experience that intertwined learning, reflection, and immersion in a complex socio-geographical context. The choice of Hawai’i as the conference venue, though controversial due to the island’s challenges with tourism and militarism, provided a unique backdrop for exploring themes of indigenous knowledge,...
Congratulations to Eli Perloff, Geography senior, who has been selected for the highest award for creativity given on the UC Berkeley campus, the Eisner Prize! Eli's winning work, a short film titled (In)Between Spaces, was created in Lecturer Joel...
Ally Matheson, Geography undergraduate, has been hired as a summer research assistant for the Dayer Lab at Virginia Tech! Ally will be working closely with Nathan Thayer, a postdoctoral researcher, to analyze survey data collected from members of professional societies, review and report on social science literature on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging in the sciences, assist in writing reports, and create presentations to report out...
Associate Professor Summers spoke to Berkeley Social Sciences recently about her career, her work with students, and her work to advance Oakland, where she grew up. Read her entire interview...
Associate Adjunct Professor Dave Wahl's research group has made headlines with their work on atmospheric rivers. After the group published a paper in Nature, their findings were shared across news sources, including the SF Chronicle,...
We are writing to share the videos from the “Antonio Gramsci and the Current Conjuncture Conference” held in McCone Hall, UC Berkeley on December 2, 2023, which are now available on the Trinity Social Justice Institute website. Please find it here. We regret that the last two panels are not available due to technical difficulties. Apparently, the camera simply quit recording and we were unable to salvage despite our...
Congratulations to Lecturer Joel Wanek, who has been chosen as a recipient of a Berkeley Collegium Grant Award for his proposal, "Deep Listening: Sonically Mapping Bay Area Creeks!”
“Between 1817 and 1840, there was legal, and extralegal, trafficking of enslaved Africans into these waters and onto this land. . . . We want to remember them today.”
Big thanks to Erendida Corona and Ally Matheson, Geography undergraduates who represented Berkeley Geography well during the panel "Finding Your Academic Path at Berkeley" on Cal Day for incoming first-year students. As part of the ACES panel, they talked about finding a community at UC Berkeley and emphasized how being a...
William Fei, Geograpahy undergraduate, has won an honorable mention from the Cartography and Geographic Information Society for his interactive map website, "A Celebration and Archive of San Pablo Avenue." Fei's site was created for his final...
Geography junior, Summer Nicholas, has been hired as an intern for a Biotech/Agtech company, Sustainable Oils (SusOils). Sustainable Oils owns genetic patents of a crop called Camelina. Camelina is used to produce renewable diesel. Between May and August, Summer will be traveling across Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Montana, and Washington as part of a Sustainable Oils project in collaboration with the USDA. The focus will be on maintaining and ensuring the accuracy of crucial equipment, including carbon sequestration and water vapor...
The Borders of Paradise is an intimate dive into Ventimiglia, the final Italian town before the French border and is where 30,000 asylum seekers annually arrive in an attempt to enter the rest of Europe. Produced by Fraser Byers, Geography undergraduate, the film captures the physical and psychological...
Reflecting on the historians' craft, Borderlines has published a series of essays as a meditation on presentism, and as a beginning of an ongoing conversation. Associate Professor Sharad Chari engages with Ajay Skaria's introductory essay in the first response from the viewpoint of a geographer, where he offers a "'ham-fisted' Marxist approach" which "refuses to separate working hands from theoretical elaboration". Read it...
“For them to find their voice, to feel comfortable, to find a place, even if it’s somewhat ephemeral, to engage — for me, that’s one of the most meaningful elements.”
In Apartheid Remains, Associate Professor Sharad Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the Indian Ocean city of Durban. Through long-term historical and ethnographic research, Chari portrays South Africa’s twentieth century as a palimpsest that conserves the remains of multiple pasts, including attempts by the racial...
Professor Emerita Gillian Hart's latest paper, Progeny of Empire: Defining Moments of Nation Formation in South Africa and Palestine/Israel, aims to confront and counter the equation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism by recognizing the value of—but also reaching beyond—the apartheid analogy by situating both South Africa and Palestine/Israel in a global comparative and spatio-historical frame. Using Hart's South African Jewish roots, the paper focuses on how South Africa and Palestine/Israel have been forged as...
"As the mainstreaming of sacred plants continues to evolve and diversify, it is critical to hold space and speak out with honesty about the underlying colonia relations that rural fall farmer and indigenous communities continue to navigate."
Geography Lecturer Diana Negrín's new article, "Why Land and Ecology...
Geography senior and Public Policy minor, Tatiana Butte, has been chosen as a John Gardner Public Service Fellow, which provides meaningful postgraduate leadership opportunities and encourages UC Berkeley’s best students to pursue a career in public service. The program honors John Gardner's own...
The annual TEDxBerkeley event is happening tomorrow and our very own Assistant Professor Clancy Wilmott will be presenting! Wilmott's talk will discuss her Indigenous re-mapping project with the Sogorea Te Land Trust called “Before You Are Here.” Learn more here!
"There is an abundance of actions for Black life, relationships, and care beyond spectacular activism and dying that takes place in environmental justice spaces. There is Black life even in close proximity to death. We must attune our analytics to begin to behold these within environmental justice literature."
Assistant Professor Tianna Bruno's new research article, "More than just dying: Black life and futurity in the face of state-sanctioned environmental racism," published in Society and Space, argues...
Congratulations to Professor Emeritus Michael Watts, who received the Ester Boserup Prize for outstanding development research! The prize is awarded by the Copenhagen Centre for Development Research, a virtual centre connecting researchers from different disciplines, especially from the University of Copenhagen.
The Ester Boserup Prize is awarded to a scholar whose research has improved and deepened our knowledge of development...
We are excited to share the wonderful news that Dr. Stephanie Pau will officially join UC Berkeley as a jointly appointed Associate Professor in Geography and ESPM starting January 1, 2024! Join us in welcoming Stephanie to McCone Hall and we look forward to celebrating her arrival in the Spring semester.
ISSI Director Stephen Small will be on sabbatical during spring semester, researching his new book on Black Liverpool. Brandi T. Summers, Associate Professor of Geography, has agreed to serve as Interim Director until Professor Small’s return on July 1, 2024. Summers is currently a member of the ISSI Advisory Committee and has been deeply involved with ISSI for a few years, including serving as a respondent for ISSI Graduate Fellows.
Professor Nathan Sayre has published a new paper in the Journal of Peasant Studies on the history and political ecology of the feedlot in US livestock production. The key takeaway is that for over a century, corn-fed beef was sustained without chemical fertilizers, relying on a closed nutrient loop rather than the metabolic rift that defines the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) of today. This history is completely missing from current...
We are excited to share the wonderful news that Jovan Scott Lewis has been promoted to full Professor. Congratulations for the much deserved recognition of your extraordinary scholarly achievements and service, Jovan!
The Fifth National Climate Assessment has just been released! This report is the US Government’s preeminent report on climate change impacts, risks, and responses. It is a congressionally mandated interagency effort that provides the scientific foundation to support informed decision-making across the United States. As an author for the...
Tohar Zamir, Geography senior, will present tomorrow, November 14, at 11:05am PST during the UC GIS Week Conference. Zamir's presentation, Hidden Wells: Resource Extraction and Minority Communities in Los Angeles, will include a variety of archival maps alongside datasets he compiled using GIS software to demonstrate the disparate experiences of oil drilling on LA's landscape, mediated by racialized identities. Watch Tohar's presenation here and learn more about the conference...
Graduate Foundations in Black Geographies is hosted by the Caribbean Studies Reading Group (Stanford University) with support from the Department of African & African American Studies, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and the Black Studies Collective, in collaboration with the UCSC Black Geographies Lab and Berkeley Black Geographies.
For the second half of the Graduate Foundations in Black Geographies virtual discussions for the fall quarter, CSRG is thrilled to welcome guest scholars from UC Berkeley (Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis) and UC Santa Cruz (Dr. Camilla...
Big congratulations are in order for Geography PhD alum, Keith Brower Brown!
This month, the journal Environmental Politics published "Working sunset to sunrise: union strategies in three California climate transitions" by Dr. Keith Brower Brown (PhD, Berkeley Geography, 2023) with geographer Dr. Sara Holiday Nelson (University of British Columbia Centre for Climate Justice). The article, which draws on Keith...
PhD Candidate in Geography Sherine Ebadi is featured on the Social Science Matrix podcast and discusses her research on Special Immigrant Visas and the Afghan diaspora. Ebadi's work explores immigration bureaucracy in times of conflict and humanitarian crises, and engages with the role of labor in precipitating refugee...
The Department of Geography invites applications for a full-time, tenure-track faculty member in critical geospatial practice and analysis at the rank of Assistant Professor beginning Fall semester 2024. We seek a scholar with a commitment to and in the Americas with attention to Indigenous and/or Latinx politics, contexts, and issues, who has an analytically rich and critically engaged geospatial practice including critical data studies, geocomputation, remote sensing, or GIS. Thematic areas of interest could include (...
Associate Adjunct Professor Dave Wahl and Marie Champagne are co-authors in a new paper published by Science that re-writes the history of humans in the western hemisphere. The standard story of the peopling of the Americas has Asians migrating across a land bridge into Alaska some 14,000 years ago, after Ice Age glaciers melted back, and gradually spreading southward across a land never before occupied by humankind. But human footprints discovered in mud in what is now...
Congratulations to Associate Professor Desiree Fields on her new paper, co-authored with two students in the Department of City and Regional Planning, titled "Platform Firms, Commercial Real Estate Cycles and San Francisco’s Growth as a Tech Cluster, 2008–2020". This article uses the lens of the commercial real estate market to examine the urbanization of digital technology companies in San Francisco in the years between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. During this period, the rise of digital...
Congratulations to Camilla Hawthorne (PhD alum) and Associate Professor Jovan Scott Lewis, who served as the editors for the new book, The Black Geographic, as well as Lecturer Diana Negrín, who contributed to the publication.
The contributors to The Black Geographic explore the theoretical innovations of Black...
Congratulations to Associate Professor Sharad Chari on his new appointment as the co-director of the Program in Critical Theory! This program enables graduate students already enrolled in UC Berkeley Ph.D. programs from across the social sciences, arts and humanities...
"The invitation to write it forced me into new areas--namely, the pre-Civil War period and east of the Missouri River. This was written before my sabbatical, but it raised a topic that became a major focus while I was on leave: the origins of the Corn Belt and the feedlot. That work resulted in a more critical political-economic piece that is in final review at Journal of Peasant Studies."
Gray Brechin's provocative and best-selling book, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, is now available as an audiobook! First published by the University of California Press in 1999, Imperial San Francisco is now more relevant than ever as...
How might an oceanic Gramsci speak to Black aquafuturism and other forms of oceanic critique? Associate Professor Sharad Chari's new book, Gramsci at Sea, reads Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the sea,...
Professor Emeritus Orman Granger recently passed away at his home in Berkeley, CA at the age of 88. He's survived by his wife, Donna Granger, and children, David Granger and Logan Granger.
Professor Granger joined UC Berkeley faculty in 1974 and retired from the Geography department in 2004. Born in Trinidad & Tobago, he was one of the first tenured black faculty members in the department. Professor...
This spring, the United Nations Academic Impact and MCN launched the Millennium Fellowship. This program convenes, challenges, and celebrates bold student leadership advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on campus and in communities. 44,000+...
Join our team! The Department of Geography invites applications for a full-time, tenure-track faculty member in critical geospatial practice and analysis at the rank of Assistant Professor beginning Fall semester 2024. We seek a scholar with a commitment to and in the Americas with attention to Indigenous and/or Latinx politics, contexts, and issues, who has an analytically rich and critically engaged geospatial practice including critical data studies, geocomputation, remote sensing, or GIS. Thematic areas of interest...
"Qualitatively, what I found on the ground was that women — and also queer and trans deportees and return migrants who may or may not identify as women — are undertaking fundamental community-building and political activism that affects the entire deportation and return migration community."
"Growing up gay at a time when it was broadly condemned helped form me as an independent thinker. Strong scientists are independent thinkers."
Professor Kurt Cuffey was interviewed for UCOP's Pride month article, "UC’s queer climate scientists on making science as diverse as the natural world." In this article, Cuffey shares what it is...
Congratulations to Geography PhD Alum, Jesse Rodenbiker, on the publication of his new book Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China (2023, Cornell University Press), available as a free open access e-book and as a paperback. The...
Yesterday afternoon, Associate Professor Jovan Scott Lewis was interviewed live on Piers Morgan Uncensored. The segment, which you can watch here, puts Lewis in conversation with host Piers Morgan and Leo Terrell, Civil Rights Lawyer, on the topic of...
"It has been really interesting now going without a prosthesis and experiencing the world in a totally different way and seeing the sort of things that are frustrating designs. But not just frustrating designs and inaccessible designs and hostile designs in the world just for disabled people or just for people with my body geometry, but for anybody."
“During the pandemic, I felt a sense of uselessness, feeling there was little I could do while isolating to help my friends and others struggling in the community. I gained a sense of purpose by becoming involved in campus research surrounding the gender equity ramifications of stay-at-home orders and by tailoring the California Legal Studies Journal to COVID-related submissions. I also learned that simply...
California's Reparations Task Force, which Associate Professor Jovan Scott Lewis (pictured center on stage) is a member, has approved recommendations that could mean hundreds of billions of dollars in payments to Black residents to address past injustices. The task force spent more than a year conducting research and holding listening sessions in order to produce a detailed...
Alexander Brown has been chosen to work with Associate Professor Laurel Larsen for the summer as a Project Coordinator/Web Designer position. Brown will be helping plan a team workshop and field trip, develop a project website, and produce outreach materials dealing with the challenge of salinity management in the Delta.
From Brown: "This is quite literally a dream come true for me as I am deeply passionate about the future...
Congrats to Associate Professor Jovan Scott Lewis, who has been honored by the Royal Geographical Society with the Gill Memorial Award for exceptional early career research with a remarkable record of achievement. Lewis has established an international reputation as leading scholar in the study of...
Congrats to Shreya, Geography undergraduate, who was chosen to be a summer intern with The Nature Conservancy. In this internship, Shreya will be working on meta data analysis on peatlands conservation through implementing nature-based climate solutions.
The L&S Faculty Award recognizes and celebrates outstanding L&S faculty members for their exceptional scholarship, service to the College and community, and transformational teaching. These extraordinary...
Congrats to Mia Albano, Geography Senior, on being chosen for the Stronach Baccalaureate Prize! Mia's research project, "They Only Remember Us at the End of the Month:” Experiences of Former Overseas Filipino Workers on Scales ...
Congrats to Josh Mandel, Geography Manager, who has won a Distinguished Service Award from the Office of the Dean! This comes as no surprise, as Josh consistently demonstrates his commitment to our department. From complicated logistical and financial situations over the years to operational duties that keep the department running, we are all grateful for his...
Each year, twenty highly qualified, academically talented undergraduates are chosen for the Haas Scholars program. Participants receive close mentoring from members of the UC-Berkeley faculty, seminars and workshops to assist them in the research and writing process, the opportunity to present their work at a professional...
Congrats to Jack Moorehead on his upcoming Cartography internship with Avalon Travel! An imprint of Perseus Books and Hachette Book Group, they are publishers of independent travel guidebooks such as Rick Steves and Moon Travel. During his internship, Jack will be assisting the...
Passing Through is a snapshot of a family's holiday gathering in Trinidad and Tobago that invites the viewer into warm celebration and the rituals of food, cards and music. An ephemeral travelogue of moments that records a journey home using...
Geography senior, Noelani Fixler, has been awarded the WTS Molitoris Leadership Scholarship. The purpose of the scholarship is to motivate and reward women who demonstrate leadership in the transportation industry, ensuring that the essential...
"To build a strike image archive from a position of solidarity is an ongoing aspiration but never a guarantee, like that of building a movement itself. But it is essential if our work with images is to do more than solidify the same ownership structures that made movements necessary and urgent in the first...
"When we’re talking about reparations in California, we’re talking about reparations not for slavery itself, but for this system of governance around Black people, around African Americans, that slavery initiated. That slavery represents the kind of initial and formative philosophy, from Jim Crow straight through to mass incarceration and even gentrification today. This idea of being able to discriminate and dispossess...
Dr. Gillian Hart, Geography Professor Emerita, has won the AAG Presidential Achievement Award, which recognizes individuals who have made long-standing and distinguished contributions to the discipline of geography.
"The hour has come for the UC to listen to its students, and to use its massive capacity to invest and plan to help solve the housing crisis, rather than prolong it."
"Located on a former plantation in the Paraíba Valley of Rio de Janeiro, a region central to state and market formation, and to Atlantic slavery in the nineteenth century, this “forest” contains ecological histories different from those encoded in environmental law. Rather than a legislative failure, this incongruence constitutes an important structural feature of the juridical authority that marginalizes...
"Here, we analyse a continuous record of water-isotope ratios from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide ice core to reveal summer and winter temperature changes through the last 11,000 years."
"Amid Lebanon’s crumbling infrastructure and socio-economic decay, a cottage industry of crypto miners has found razor-thin profits using hydroelectric power in the mountains. That puts them into direct competition with local residents over one of the country’s most prized resources: electricity."
"By examining the relationality across music, sound, and Blackness, we (re)activate and engage scale as a racialized, evolving, intimately embodied, and subjective interpretation of the world as well as structural, objective descriptions...
"Swampification did not merely stagnate Black terraqueous landscapes but further perpetuated racial stereotypes of Blackness as out-of-place and pestilent, and situated the presence of non-White others as antithetical to U.S. progress."
Congrats to Morgan P. Vickers, Geography PhD candidate, on their first journal article, published in Annals...
Faculty of the Geography Department at Berkeley stand with Graduate Student Instructors who join 48,000 academic workers in a historic strike across the University of California, including Postdoctoral Scholars, Academic Researchers, Academic Student Employees and Student Researchers. We call on the University to negotiate in good faith for new contracts. We recognize the union’s call for 54k base pay and COLA as prerequisites for dignified life for academic workers in California. We recognize the vital role that graduate students play in teaching, research, and service. We recognize that...
Mia Albano is an undergraduate in Geography conducting research on migrant workers and surrounding policy in the Pacific. She recounts the details of her research, what she finds special about Berkeley Geography, and her experience presenting at Renaissance Weekend.
Why Geography? What does this department do that’s different? What’s memorable?
Can I rant about how much I love the department?...
Professor Joel Wanek is a new addition to the Geography department. With a background in multimedia production and filmmaking, Professor Wanek has spearheaded an initiative to introduce new perspectives in Geography through field courses focused on audio-visual production.
What are you working on now that you want to feature?...
Lance Owen is a former graduate student from Berkeley Geography. He recounts his fond memories of the department, how it prepared him for his career at the CDC, and where his training is taking him next.
Tell me about what you do?
For the last 3 years, I have been working as a geography and geospatial analyst in public health. I got pulled into what was initially a post-doc at the CDC...
"Our job in The Living New Deal is to educate Americans what the New Deal did, not just as a historical nicety, but because it's relevant today." - Richard Walker
"We teach our students that the Earth’s axial tilt is responsible for the seasons. But for the eastern equatorial Pacific - which is best known as the hotspot for El Nino - it turns out that its seasonal cycle has a sizable contribution coming from the annual variation in earth-sun distance as well. Awkwardly, the latter is what we tell our students how not to think about the seasonal cycle." - Professor John...
“Nature and people should be able to flourish together in the campuses and communities that Google calls home.”
Erin Beller, Geography alumni (PhD, Spring 2020) has been featured on a Google blog post about ecosystem restoration in Silicon Valley. The post highlights Beller's paper, "...
"Neither can history resolve the question of Santa Mônica’s past, nor law disentangle its possible futures. These properly political problems can only be resolved in the present."
Chris Lesser, current visiting scholar and Geography alumni (PhD, Summer 2022) has written a fantastic research article entitled, "Another "education by stone": An archaeological case study in Brazil's environmental law,"...
“Yosemite Valley is one of the most famous topographic features on the planet. And of course, if you go to Yosemite Park and read the signage, they will give you numbers for when it became a deep canyon. But up until this project, every single claim about how old this valley is, when it formed a deep canyon, was just based on assumptions and speculation.” - Professor Kurt Cuffey
Gray Brechin will be a narrator in the new film, American: An Odyssey to 1947. The film, directed by Danny Wu, features a collection of stories leading to the year 1947, most notably exploring the life and politics of Orson Welles. The film uses rare archival footage and innovative 3D modeling to immerse the audience in the era. American: An Odyssey to 1947 debuts October 20 at the Newport Beach Film Festival. Check out the trailer here!
In Violent Utopia, Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, from the post-Reconstruction migration of Black people to Oklahoma Indian Territory to contemporary efforts to rebuild Black prosperity. He focuses on how the massacre in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood—colloquially known as Black Wall Street—curtailed the freedom built there. Rather than framing the massacre as...
We are excited to share that Tatiana Butte, Geography undergraduate and Public Policy minor, has been chosen to represent Cal as a student delegate at this year's COP 27 (UN’s international climate conference) in Egypt. This opportunity, provided by the Student Environmental Resource Center (SERC) at UC Berkeley, will...
Robert Symens-Bucher, graduating senior in Geography, has been named the Chancellor's Public Fellow this semester. The fellowship recognizes his work in the American Cultures Engaged Scholarship (ACES) partnership with Canticle Farm for students in...
"In a life beyond staying, ownership is organised not around property, but around the deep, complex bonds between people, place, and land that financialisation cannot account for."
In their article for Antipode, "Speculative Urban Worldmaking: Meeting Financial Violence with a Politics of Collective Care," Professors...
"[Risk] permeates the economy, but also intimate relations within family. And so while I was interested in using risk as a sort of analytical lens into agrarian change, what I found was as with the use of the term “tension,” the term “risk” was used all the time in rural India. So everything was understood in terms of, what is the risk of this?"
Brittany Meché, recent Geography graduate (PhD, 2020) and current Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College, was interviewed by Social Science Matrix about her forthcoming piece for New Geographies. In the interview, Meché discusses how anticipated climate refugees...
“We are caught in a bionic-hand arms race. It’s time to ask who prostheses are really for, and what we hope they will actually accomplish.”
KQED Forum invited Brittany Young, Geography PhD Candidate, to speak about how the prosthetics industry's focus on high-tech limbs impacts the disabled folks it’s meant to help....
We are pleased to share that Matthew Shutzer, Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Scholar in Geography, has won the Jack Goody Prize, an in-house award at ...
Cristina Villalobos, recent Geography B.A. graduate (Spring 2022), has been offered an in-person position in Alabama working with NASA's DEVELOP program. During the course of her 10 week internship, she will apply NASA earth observations to the project, named "Mesoamerica Ecological Forecasting: Assessing land cover change and habitat connectivity to inform management planning for the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor." The project is very heavily focused on spatial data. Please join me in congratulating Cristina!
“On the one hand, we are not doing anything close to what is required for net-zero transition in terms of clean energy. But at the same time, for the kind of aging oil and gas production, we’re investing as if a renewable energy transition was happening.”
Gabe Eckhouse (Geography PhD, Summer 2022), discusses the political economy of...
We are excited to announce the release of Ethnographies of Power: Working Radical Concepts with Gillian Hart. This co-edited collection in honor of Geography Professor Gillian Hart will serve as a useful resource for thinking in a dynamic way about concepts and how to use them in the service of social change, in the tradition of...
It is with sadness that we write that Sarah White passed away last week from heart complications due to Covid. She is survived by her husband, Tristan, and her two young children, Helen and Martin.
Sarah was a UC President’s postdoctoral fellow in our department and had just completed her term this past June. She was a foremost scholar on the climate of the Pliocene, a dedicated educator, and a warm and generous colleague and friend to those that knew...
Frontiers Journal's Sustainable Food Systems edition has published a paper co-written by Geography B.A. alumni and former Berkeley United Geographers (BUGs) President, Kathryn McNeal. The article, titled "...
We are excited to share that Professor Desiree Fields has been promoted to Associate Professor, with tenure! Professor Fields and her scholarship mean so much to our department and our discipline, which the campus rightly recognized with this decision. Congratulations, Professor Fields!
The ‘AC Teaching Award’ is intended to recognize individual faculty members’ exemplary teaching in the American Cultures curriculum. Instructors are recognized for their inspiring and sustained commitment to creating a learning space able to hold the multiple challenges and opportunities that teaching AC content requires. Great creativity, ingenuity, and courage are required to meet this rich environment, providing inspiration and guidance for colleagues across the campus.
A California task force on Wednesday released a landmark report detailing recommendations for possible reparations for African Americans. Raj Mathai speaks with Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis of UC Berkeley about it. Watch the video here.
We are pleased to announce Professor Brandi Summers’ tenure promotion to Associate Professor! In her time with us, Professor Summers has helped change our department and discipline in remarkable ways. This is an important milestone for her and an historic moment for our department. Congratulations, Professor...
The RISELeader Awards are about highlighting the exceptional endeavors and efforts of women* leaders as they continue to support and empower our community of Berkeley women through their participation and representation. Selected winners have demonstrated strong leadership, care and love for the community, as well as, inspired and empowered other women. Congratulations, Ambrosia!
I am excited to share that Professor Clancy Wilmott has been awarded the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Excellence Award! Phi Beta Kappa is the most prestigious honor society in the US. Check out this video, where Clancy shares what teaching excellence means to her.
Jovan Scott Lewis, California Reparations Task Force member and chair of UC Berkeley’s geography department, introduced a motion on March 29 to define eligibility for reparations based on lineage. The task force approved the motion.
At a contentious meeting Tuesday, California’s Reparations Task Force decided who would qualify for...
Application of copper(II)-based chemicals induces CH3Br and CH3Cl emissions from soil and seawater Yi Jiao, Wanying Zhang, Jae Yun Robin Kim, Malte Julian Deventer, Julien Vollering & Robert C. Rhew Open Access | Published: 10 January 2022
Methyl bromide (CH3Br) and methyl chloride (CH3Cl) are major...
Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture by Adam M. Romero (Author) November 2021 First Edition
The toxicity of pesticides to the environment and humans is often framed as an unfortunate effect of their benefits to agricultural production. In Economic Poisoning, Adam M. Romero upends...
April and I are excited to report that the Black Geographies library guide we composed last semester is finally published and live on the Berkeley Library website! Please use the link embedded above to review the guide.
Dr. Paul Groth passed away at the age of 72 on January 16, 2022 in Berkeley, California. Paul was a beloved friend, son, brother, cousin, brother-in-law, and uncle.
Paul joined UC Berkeley faculty in 1983 and spent much of his career studying architecture that organized the lives of low-income and working class people. His overarching...
Conjuncture is a monthly web series and podcast curated and co-produced by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton for the Trinity Social Justice Initiative. It features interviews with activists, artists, scholars, and public intellectuals. Taking its title from Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall’s conceptualization, it highlights...
Desiree Fields writes on the proliferation of corporate real estate iBuying, or instant buying, and its impacts on renters, hopeful homeowners, and residential communities.
Tech and finance firms buying up homes doesn’t bode well for everyone else Zillow shut down its iBuying program, but other corporate...
Check out Jake’s interview and discussion on Worldings: Regions, Peoples, and States with the Berkeley Pedagogy Podcast, where he discusses Geography 10AC and the radical possibilities of teaching. This interview comes off the back of Jake...
"La miseria de los megaproyectos y las semillas de la esperanza" is a photo essay on the field work Diana Negrín da Silva has been doing this year in the Chihuahuan Desert and Wixarika territory more generally. The photographs by Joaquín Urrutia tell a story of the imposition of large scale (narco) development and the...
In the essay, Summers asks, “[H]ow might we consider the relationship between parking lots — as central, even redundant features of the built urban environment — and the politics of Black clearance and containment?” Moreover, she asks, “[W]hat does it mean for Black people, in Oakland and elsewhere, to continue to live the same experience again and again, decade after decade?” Summers also discusses images from the “...
Professor Jovan Scott Lewis Talks To BR About Historic Tulsa & Reparations
Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis, Chair and Associate Prof. of Geography at UC Berkeley, is a member of Gov. Newsom's Task Force on Reparations. Since 2014, Dr. Lewis has been researching Tulsa, Oklahoma and the history of Greenwood. In Part One of his interview with BR's Jan Mabry, he connects his research on historic Tulsa to current events. In Part Two, he makes the case for reparations and talks about the challenges would blacks face in a post-reparation society.
Geography Professor Laurel Larsen explains how Data Science can help California's Drought in Q&A
California’s Drought is Getting Worse. In a Q&A, Laurel Larsen Explains How Data Science Can Help.
Rachel Leven
California is amidst a period of intensifying drought. As of July 8, Governor Gavin Newsrom (D-Calif.) had issued drought emergency declarations for 50 of the state...
Professor Jake Kosek was selected as one of 2021's American Cultures Excellence in Teaching Award recipients, and is now featured on the AC Center website.
The American Cultures Center will also recognize Professor Kosek as a recipient of the 2021 AC Excellence in Teaching Award during the AC 30th Anniversary celebration on November 16, 4-6 pm at Doe Library in the Morrison Reading Room.
Congratulations to the Berkeley Geography undergraduate class of 2021 and our newly minted PhDs. This year’s virtual commencement ceremony and our message to graduates can be found here: Berkeley Geography Commencement 2021
Please note that closed captions are available for the entirety of the video and can be viewed by clicking on the "CC" logo in the bottom right corner. Many thanks to Dr. Wilmott for bringing this virtual ceremony to life!
Three Geography Department instructors -- Dr. Diana Negrín, Emily Weiss, and Prof. Desiree Fields – were honored with this year’s Extraordinary Teaching in Extraordinary Times award. The award recognizes UC Berkeley faculty, staff, and student instructors who embraced the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and engaged in or supported excellent teaching in 2020. These instructors and staff used innovative methods and worked beyond their traditional roles to ensure that students...
What 'Minari' is doing for Asian American farmers like me
(CNN) Early in the film "Minari," Korean American farmer Jacob Yi digs his bare hands into the Arkansas dirt. The first time I saw this, as he revealed the soil's dark, loamy tilth, I swooned: not only to see this rich earth, but also to see hands like mine...
Erin Torkelson has received the Best Dissertation award from the Economic Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers for her dissertation “Taken for Granted: Geographies of Social Welfare in South Africa.”
We are appalled by the spread of anti-Asian violence and racism this past year. This week saw the killing of 6 Asian women in the Atlanta area, as part of a murderous rampage that claimed 8 lives. Since the pandemic started, Asian Americans have increasingly been attacked and harassed with racial slurs, getting coughed and spat upon, and subjected to physical and deadly violence. From March 2020 to February 2021, nearly 3800 incidents of racism and hate against Asian Americans have been logged, and over 700 anti-Asian hate incidents in...
Dr. Camilla Hawthorne, Assistant Professor at UC Santa Cruz and a Berkeley Geography PhD, was appointed as Chair April L. Graham-Jackson, current PhD candidate in Berkeley Geography, was appointed as Graduate Student Representative
The BLACK GEOGRAPHIES SPECIALTY GROUP strives to create a global platform for: (a) promoting study of the social, political, cultural, economic,...
Italian newspaper ranks sociology professor and Geography alum Camilla Hawthorne (PhD 2018) among top women of the year
Italy’s most widely read newspaper, Corriere della Sera, released its year-end list of the world’s top women of 2020, and UC Santa Cruz assistant professor of sociology Camilla Hawthorne made the list at number 20 for her highly influential research into the Black diaspora across Italy and the Mediterranean.
Jovan Lewis, assistant professor of Geography and co-lead of the Economic Disparities research cluster in the Othering and Belonging Institute, is awarded the 2021 Diversity and Inclusion Award, from the American Association of Geographers (AAG).
Per the press release: "Within the AAG, Lewis is a key leader leveraging and amplifying Black Geographies, helping to lead the Black Geographies Specialty Group and successfully advocating for the inclusion of Black Geographies as a theme of the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting. Notably, Dr. Lewis is still only in the first decade of his career as a...
KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN wants to move into Addis Ababa. Among the last of African countries to be colonized by fast food, Ethiopia just received their first multinational fast food chain in 2018, when two Pizza Huts opened in Addis. More international chains want to open in the capital, though their efforts are...
Was it rural populism? Returning to the country, “catching up,” and trying to understand the trump vote
In May 1982, news broke that heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar would lay off another 8000 workers, mostly in Illinois (UPI, 1982). The company blamed a global recession and high interest...
In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually...
Geography Lecturer Seth Lunine (and Geography alum, PhD 2013) is one of this year's recipients of the 2020 American Cultures Excellence in Teaching Award.
The Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) came together in 1923 when a heterodox group of New York–based architects, planners, economists, and other reformers, galled by the footloose patterns of speculative development they saw unfolding...
Between 1956 and 1959, amid far-flung residential and industrial suburbanization and with the joint backing of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Twentieth Century Fund, an interdisciplinary coterie of scholars from Harvard partnered with New York’s...
The 35-foot tall letters were formed in stark marigold paint against the dark gray speckled pavement. Though bold in color, the action itself is not bold.
We write to you with feelings of incredible outrage and sadness in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. His violent killing by “law enforcement” officers, along with the killings of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, KY, Tony McDade in Tallahassee, FL and Ahmaud Arbery by white civilians in Brunswick, GA, reflect only the most recent and visible examples of anti-Black violence endemic to this country, and to many of the nation’s institutions.
We also condemn the violence of the repressive state apparatus firing...
A University of California Board of Regents special committee has nominated Alexis Atsilvsgi Zaragoza, a UC Berkeley undergraduate student, to be the 2021-22 student regent, UC announced today (June 5).
Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry
Strawberries are big business in California. They are the sixth-highest-grossing crop in the state, which produces 88 percent of the nation’s favorite berry. Yet the industry is often criticized for its backbreaking labor conditions and...
Rendering settler sovereign landscapes: Race and property in the Empire State
This article examines the politics of race, indigeneity, and landscape in US American enactments of property. Its substance is the homelands of the Haudenosaunee, now territorialized as...
What Black America Knows About Quarantine White people are protesting against being trapped at home. Black people know what it feels like to really be trapped.
By Brandi T. Summers
Dr. Summers is an assistant professor of geography and global metropolitan studies at the University of California...
Shelter from the Machine Homesteaders in the Age of Capitalism Hard work and hard truths inside the back-to-the-land movement
"You’re either buried with your crystals or your shotgun." That laconic comment captures the hippies-versus-hicks conflict that divides, and in some ways defines, modern-day homesteaders. It also reveals that back-to-the-landers, though...
Following the end of apartheid in 1994, the ANC government placed education at the centre of its plans to build a nonracial and more equitable society. Yet, by the 2010s a wave of student protests voiced demands for decolonised and affordable education. By...
Graduate student Caroline Tracey publishes Gentrification and Denver's Hispanic Past in special publication Denver and the Rocky Mountain West, an e-book prepared for AAG (American Association of Geographers) 2020 Denver.
Graduate Student Meredith Alberta Palmer has been awarded a UC Presidential Postdoc to work with Dr. Mishuana Goeman in the Gender Studies Department and American Indian Studies program at UCLA. Following this, she will begin a Cornell Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship, working with Dr. Suman Seth in the Science and Technology Studies Department and Dr. Jolene Rickard in American Studies and the American Indian and Indigenous Studies program. Her postdoctoral research will examine the historic material conditions through which genomic biomedicine engages with Native American tribes and...
In The Frontier Effect, Teo Ballvé challenges the notion that in Urabá, Colombia, the cause of the region's violent history and unruly contemporary condition is the absence of the state. Although he takes this locally oft-repeated claim seriously, he demonstrates that Urabá is more than a case of Hobbesian political disorder.
Through his insightful exploration of war, paramilitary organizations, grassroots support and resistance, and drug-related violence, Ballvé argues that Urabá, rather than existing in statelessness, has actually been an intense and persistent site of state...
Jesse Rodenbiker (PhD 2019) is awarded the "Cornell Postdoctoral Fellowship in Sustainability" at the Atkinson Center for Sustainability and the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell University.
Political ecology, initially conceived to better understand the power relations implicit in management and distribution of natural resources in the developing world, came “home” to the American West in the 1990s and 2000s. This groundswell of research did much to problematize socio-environmental conflicts in the region, long...
Much of California enjoys a mild Mediterranean climate where the weather typically swings like a pendulum from warm, dry summers to cool, wet winters. Year-to-year, this pendulum can swing with great variation. If it doesn’t swing toward rain and snow between October and March, it leads to drought; if it does, we might see record-breaking precipitation....
Over the past decade, two development programs–cash transfer and financial inclusion–were bundled in global development discourse. Despite differences in their purported objectives, cash transfers are increasingly delivered via financial inclusion infrastructures and technologies. One important yet under...
Brittany Meché has been awarded the 2019-2021 Gaius Bolin Fellowship in Environmental Studies at Williams College. Beginning Fall 2019, she will be in residence at Williams completing her dissertation Securing the Sahel: Nature, Catastrophe, and the Empire of Expertise. During the 2019-2020 academic year, Brittany will also...
Pop City examines the use of Korean television dramas and K-pop music to promote urban and rural places in South Korea. Building on the phenomenon of Korean pop culture, Youjeong Oh argues that pop culture-featured place selling mediates two separate domains: political...
With tools developed by his UC Berkeley lab in Geography using the Google's Earth Engine platform, Professor Jeff Chambers developed a set of initial images that illustrate the staggering losses to the city of Paradise and the impact of the Camp Fire on the surrounding environment. His lab will be further developing this work, and providing additional tools and analysis to the community in the coming weeks. More information in the link below.
The piece began as a course project for Seth Lunine's Geography 50AC, California; Geography graduate student and GSI Caroline Tracy helped Issac with revisions.
"Trevor Paglen blurs the lines between art, science, and investigative journalism to construct unfamiliar and at times unsettling ways to see and interpret the world around us. Inspired by the landscape tradition, he captures the same horizon seen by American photographers Timothy O’Sullivan in the nineteenth century and Ansel Adams in the twentieth. Only in Paglen’s photographs is the infrastructure of surveillance also apparent—a classified military installation, a spy satellite, a tapped communications...
Alumna Camilla Hawthorne and graduate student Kaily Heitz publish commentary for Dialogues in Human Geographyabout the Berkeley Black Geographies Symposium and the limits to "calls to dialogue."
Jesse Rodenbiker, a Ph.D. student in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, studies the process of ecological planning in China's growing urban areas.
Penelope Anthias's new book Limits to Decolonization: Indigeneity, Territory, and Hydrocarbon Politics in the Bolivian Chaco has been published by Cornell University Press as the flagship volume in the new Cornell Land Series: New Perspectives on Territory, Development, and Environment edited by Wendy Wolford, Nancy Peluso, and Michael Goldman. Penelope completed the manuscript during a Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellowship in Berkeley Geography in 2014-2016, under the supervision of Michael Watts. Based on the experience of thirty-six Guaraní communities in the Bolivian Chaco, Limits to Decolonization...
Professor Emerita Gillian Hart was awarded the 2018 Vega Medal from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography for her contributions to Human Geography. The award is made in Human Geography every three years. Previous recipients include Carl Sauer and Allan Pred.
Professor Hart delivered a keynote address, led a symposium, and received the medal from the Crown Princess of Sweden on April 24, 2018. Click ...
Julie Klinger’s Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes (Cornell University Press, 2017) wins AAG Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography.
“Social Grants and the Green Card” is a short film about how a preeminent, state-sponsored cash transfer program has become a means of dispossession in post-apartheid South Africa. The film was produced by the Black Sash, a Cape Town based NGO, for Cutting Edge, a weekly investigative journalism program on the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC1). It aired on Tuesday, 27 March at 9:30.
Erin Torkelson was the researcher and a consulting script writer and worked with a documentary crew that included Esley Philander, Johan Abrahams, Clinton Daniels and Erna...
Roger Byrne passed away peacefully, surrounded by family, at his home in Berkeley on March 11, 2018. Roger is survived by his children, Todd Byrne, Brendan Byrne, Kevin Byrne, and Angela Sotelo.
Roger began his career as professor in the Geography Department at U.C. Berkeley in 1973 after finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. He established the Quaternary Paleoecology...
Rodenbiker, J. (2017). Superscribing Sustainability: The Production of China’s Urban Waterscapes. UPLanD-Journal of Urban Planning, Landscape & Environmental Design, 2(3), 71-86. Link to Article
A paper published in Geophysical Research Letters published by Professor John Chiang and graduate student Wenwen Kong was featured in Earth and Space Science News. Read the full story here or the original GRL paper
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