We’re excited to announce that Alex Werth, a Ph.D. alum of our department, has a forthcoming book with UC Press titled On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland, scheduled for release on October 21, 2025.
Blending musical, archival, and ethnographic research with over a decade of experience as a DJ and dancer, On Loop explores how Black dance music and sonic practices have shaped—and been shaped by—ongoing struggles over race, space, and power in Oakland. A city central to the history of Black Power, Oakland...
“Many maps respond to questions of time by freezing it, presenting a cross-section or snapshot of a landscape, that then needs more maps to show change. This map addresses this issue by showing how spaces and landscapes hold time too, portraying both the past and present together, rather than freezing time in place.”
"Hype works by inflating the promises of technological transformation to encourage new forms of emotional and material investment. At the same time, hype hides the existing and unequal relationships of land, labor, and property that shape digital transformations in particular geographies."
Hype is ubiquitous in today’s tech sector, where new digital devices are seen as a panacea to squeeze ever greater returns from real estate markets. How are digital tools actually remaking property relations around the world? In...
"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...
"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...
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...
"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...
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...
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...
"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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
"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...
"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."
"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."
"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...
"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...
"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."
"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...
"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...
"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...
"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
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 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...
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...
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...
"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 “...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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.
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...
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