Publications

Publications

Why Land and Ecology Matter for Global Psychedelics by Diana Negrín

January 25, 2024

Workshop on mesquite derivatives in Wirikuta, San Luis Potosí

"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."

Professor Diana Negrín's new article, "Why Land and Ecology Matter for...

Gillian Hart Publishes Paper on Antipode Online

January 31, 2024

Professor Gillian Hart

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...

Sharad Chari Publishes New Book, Apartheid Remains

February 5, 2024

Apartheid Remains book cover

In Apartheid Remains, 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....

"More than just dying" - Tianna Bruno's Newest Article Published in Society and Space

December 28, 2023

Professor Tianna Bruno

"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."

Professor...

Professor Nathan Sayre Publishes "Corn and the range: rethinking ranching, agriculture and the feedlot"

December 11, 2023

Professor Nathan Sayre

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...

Jillian Crandall, Geography PhD Student, Publishes Article in Big Data & Society

November 13, 2023

Jillian Crandall

"How equitable is tokenized equity – does it prioritize the right to the city for all or to all but a very few?"

Jillian Crandall, PhD student, has published a new article in Big Data & Society called,...

Keith Brower Brown, PhD 2023, published in Environmental Politics, hired at Labor Notes

October 31, 2023

Keith Brower Brown

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...

Professor Dave Wahl re-writes the history of humans in the western hemisphere in his new article published in Science

October 5, 2023

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 New Mexico were between 23,000...

Professor Fields Published in Annals of the American Association of Geographers

September 27, 2023

Congratulations to 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 platforms and...

New Book: The Black Geographic

September 19, 2023

The Black Geographic

Congratulations to Camilla Hawthorne (PhD alum) and Professor Jovan Scott Lewis, who served as the editors for the new book, The Black Geographic, as well as Professor Diana Negrín, who contributed to the publication.

The contributors to The Black Geographic explore the theoretical innovations of Black Geographies scholarship and how it approaches Blackness as historically and spatially...

Professor Sharad Chari Publishes New Book: Gramsci at Sea

August 28, 2023

Cover of the book Gramsci at Sea by Professor Sharad Chari

How might an oceanic Gramsci speak to Black aquafuturism and other forms of oceanic critique? Professor Sharad Chari's new book, Gramsci at Sea, reads Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the sea, focused in his prison...

Mary Jirmanus Saba, PhD Candidate, Published In Critical Times

March 30, 2023

Tear gas and smoke bombs in Beirut's southern suburbs when police were called in to disperse Saturday's protests

"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...

Desiree Fields Co-Authors Essay for the Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project

February 20, 2023

Desiree Fields

"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."

Desiree Fields, Geography Professor, has co-written an essay for the Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project...

Dr. Kurt Cuffey Publishes Article in Nature Revealing 11,000 Years of Temperature Changes from West Antarctic Ice Core

January 11, 2023

a chart showing the 50-yr δD averages for summer in red, mean in purple, and winter in blue

"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."

After years of research, Professor Kurt Cuffey has...

Christopher Lesser, PhD Alum and Current Visiting Scholar, Publishes Article for American Anthropologist

January 12, 2023

Christopher Lesser

"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...

"Black Scale" by PhD Candidates april l. graham-jackson & Robert Moeller Published in The Professional Geographer

December 5, 2022

april l. graham-jackson. Robert Moeller

"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...

Adam Hasan, Geography PhD student, Publishes Article on Lebanese Crypto Miners, Electricity, and the State

December 7, 2022

Adam Hasan

"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."

Adam Hasan...

PhD Candidate, Morgan Vickers, Publishes First Journal Article in Annals of the American Association of Geographers

November 29, 2022

Morgan Vickers

"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...

Professor Jovan Scott Lewis featured in article for The New York Times

December 1, 2022

“We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction.”

Professor Jovan Scott Lewis discusses his work with the CA Reparations Task Force with The New York Times in Kurtis Lee's article, "...

Professors Brandi Summers and Desiree Fields Publish Article in Antipode

October 2, 2022

Moms 4 Housing

"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...

Professor John Chiang Publishes Research in Nature on Orbit-Induced Changes in the Seasonality of the Pacific Cold-Tongue Region

November 9, 2022

Professor John Chiang

"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...

Jane Henderson, Geography alum (PhD, Summer 2022), Co-Authors Essay Published in Society and Space

October 31, 2022

Jane Henderson

"We call on geographers, planners, geo-spatial analysts, and all spatial thinkers to divest themselves from the creation of carceral space."

Congrats to Jane Henderson, Geography Alumni (PhD, Summer '22) and current Research Associate at Dartmouth, on her wonderful essay,...

Chris Lesser, Visiting Scholar and Geography Alum (PhD, Summer 2022), Published in American Anthropologist

October 24, 2022

Christopher Lesser

"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,"...

Professor Kurt Cuffey Publishes Findings About the Formation of Yosemite Valley

October 20, 2022

Yosemite Research 2010

“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

After...

New Book by Professor Jovan Scott Lewis - Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa

October 18, 2022

Violent Utopia

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...

Book Release - Ethnographies of Power: Working Radical Concepts with Gillian Hart

August 2, 2022

Ethnographies of Power

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...

Geography alum Yi Jiao (PhD 2021) publishes Application of copper(II)-based chemicals induces CH3Br and CH3Cl emissions from soil and seawater

February 1, 2022

Geography alum Yi Jiao (PhD 2021) publishes Application of copper(II)-based chemicals induces CH3Br and CH3Cl emissions from soil and seawater in Nature Communications

---

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...

Geography alum Adam Romero (PhD 2015) publishes Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture

January 31, 2022

Geography Alum Adam Romero (PhD 2015) publishes Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture

---

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....

Faculty member Desiree Fields publishes Tech and finance firms buying up homes doesn’t bode well for everyone else

January 4, 2022

Faculty member Desiree Fields publishes Tech and finance firms buying up homes doesn’t bode well for everyone else in The Washington Post

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...

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...

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 “...

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...

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...

Graduate student Adam Jadhav publishes Was it rural populism? Returning to the country, “catching up,” and trying to understand the trump vote

October 29, 2020

Graduate student Adam Jadhav publishes Was it rural populism? Returning to the country, “catching up,” and trying to understand the trump vote in Elsevier

---

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...

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...

Graduate student Caroline Tracey publishes How to Deport a Virus

August 2, 2020

Graduate student Caroline Tracey publishes How to Deport a Virus in n+1 magazine.

---

How to Deport a Virus

A nationalist strategy cannot be a public health strategy

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/how-to-deport-a-virus/

Lecturer Peter Ekman publishes “Radburn Rackets”: Robert D. Kohn and Marjorie Sewell Cautley’s Sketches Against the Speculative Suburb

July 8, 2020

Lecturer Peter Ekman publishes “Radburn Rackets”: Robert D. Kohn and Marjorie Sewell Cautley’s Sketches Against the Speculative Suburb in the journal PLATFORM

---

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...

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...

Professor Brandi Summers publishes "We need action to accompany art" in the Boston Globe

June 16, 2020

Professor Brandi Summers publishes "We need action to accompany art" in the Boston Globe

---

We need action to accompany art

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.

By Brandi Summers

Updated June 11, 2020, 3:08 a.m.

Graduate student Meredith Palmer publishes new article in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, entitled "Rendering settler sovereign landscapes: Race and property in the Empire State"

May 18, 2020

Graduate student Meredith Palmer's article, Rendering Settler Sovereign Landscapes: Race and Property in the Empire State, is now published online in the journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

---

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...

Professor Brandi Summers publishes "What Black America Knows About Quarantine" in New York Times

May 15, 2020

Professor Brandi Summers publishes "What Black America Knows About Quarantine" in New York Times

---

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...

Geography alum Mark Hunter (PhD 2005) publishes new book Race for Education: Gender, White Tone and Schooling in South Africa

April 10, 2020

Geography alum Mark Hunter (PhD 2005) publishes new book Race for Education: Gender, White Tone and Schooling in South Africa

---

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...

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-...

Graduate student Caroline Tracey publishes Gentrification and Denver's Hispanic Past

April 2, 2020

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 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...

Graduate student Sol Kim publishes How to Start Adapting to California’s “Precipitation Whiplash”

November 12, 2019

Graduate student Sol Kim publishes How to Start Adapting to California’s “Precipitation Whiplash”

---

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...

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...

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...

Former Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellow in Geography Penelope Anthias publishes new book on indigenous territorial claims and the limits to decolonization in Bolivia

May 11, 2018
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...