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!
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.
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.
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...
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...
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....
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...
Desiree Fields writes on the proliferation of corporate real estate iBuying, or instant buying, and its impacts on renters, hopeful homeowners, and residential communities.
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Tech and finance firms buying up homes doesn’t bode well for everyone else Zillow shut down its iBuying program, but other...
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...
"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
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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
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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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Shelter from the Machine Homesteaders in the Age of Capitalism Hard work and hard truths inside the back-to-the-land movement
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"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-...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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
