Announcements

Professor Brandi Summers publishes "Untimely Futures" in Places Journal

November 10, 2021

Professor Brandi Summers publishes "Untimely Futures" in Places Journal

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 “...

Graduate student Jeff Vance Martin publishes Revisiting and revitalizing political ecology in the American West

November 27, 2019

Graduate student Jeff Vance Martin publishes Revisiting and revitalizing political ecology in the American West

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...

Graduate student Erin Torkelson publishes Collateral damages: Cash transfer and debt transfer in South Africa

November 10, 2019

Graduate student Erin Torkelson publishes Collateral damages: Cash transfer and debt transfer in South Africa

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...

Lecturer Peter Ekman publishes From prophecy to projection: the New York Metropolitan Region Study and the rescaling of the urban future, 1956–1968

June 24, 2020

Geography alum Peter Ekman (PhD 2016) publishes "From prophecy to projection: the New York Metropolitan Region Study and the rescaling of the urban future, 1956–1968" in the journal Planning Perspectives.

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...

Geography Lecturer Diana Negrín da Silva publishes La miseria de los megaproyectos y las semillas de la esperanza

November 18, 2021

Geography Lecturer Diana Negrín da Silva publishes La miseria de los megaproyectos y las semillas de la esperanza in Nexos

"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...

Geography alum Jason Strange (PhD 2013) publishes new book Shelter from the Machine

April 12, 2020

Geography alum Jason Strange (PhD 2013) publishes new book Shelter from the Machine

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 Brittany Young publishes Incubated Futures: What is a resilient chicken?

November 12, 2020

Graduate student Brittany Young publishes Incubated Futures: What is a resilient chicken? in n+1 magazine.

Incubated Futures: What is a resilient chicken?

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...

Graduate student Xiaowei Wang publishes new book Blockchain Chicken Farm, And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

October 28, 2020

Graduate student Xiaowei Wang publishes new book Blockchain Chicken Farm, And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

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...

Former undergrad Mai Nguyen publishes What 'Minari' is doing for Asian American farmers like me

April 20, 2021

Former undergrad Mai Nguyen publishes What 'Minari' is doing for Asian American farmers like me

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...

Alumna Youjeong Oh publishes Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place

December 10, 2018

Youjeong Oh publishes Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place

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...