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Welcome to my web site. I'm a professor in the
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My major publications are:
If you want to know more about my work, then check out my
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I grew up in New York and received my B.A. with a double-major in Politics and Third World Studies from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1987, writing a thesis on the politics of technology adoption among small-scale rural industries in the People's Republic of China. I then spent several years working in a diverse array of jobs, including booking speaking tours and talk-show appearances (coincidentally, one of my first gigs involved bringing writer Barbara Ehrenreich to Florida State), managing voter registration drives and electoral campaigns (in New York, Connecticut, and California), running a neighborhood organization that was fighting a proposed multi-use mega-development (in New York City), and ghost-writing speeches (sorry, I'm sworn to secrecy on this one). And then there were the really strange jobs: supervising tests of an experimental cockroach killer, helping to organize a mega-conference of women entrepreneurs (Oprah was the keynote speaker!), doctoring market-analysis reports for a firm that brokered financing for large commercial real estate projects, and doing database-programming and computer training in Zimbabwe. In between all of these things there were numerous stints as a temporary secretary (I'm a wicked fast typist) and a summer delivering pizza.
Eventually, I found my way to graduate school at Clark University in Massachusetts, where I planned on studying either international development issues or the politics of urban planning in the U.S. Somehow I got sidetracked and wrote a dissertation on the uses, regulations, and representations of the world-ocean, and how these have changed over the past 500 years in keeping with changes in the spatial organization of global capitalism. Although both my M.A. and Ph.D degrees (in 1994 and 1996, respectively) were in Geography, my work has always been explicitly interdisciplinary. Since obtaining my Ph.D., I've published and presented in venues associated with the disciplines of Anthropology, Art, Communications, Environmental Studies, History, International Relations, Law, Literature, Planning, Political Science, and Sociology, as well as Geography.
Much of my research continues to focus on the governance and representation of global spaces, especially the ocean, the Internet, and the Arctic. At the same time, continuing my earlier interest in urban and regional politics and planning, I also have conducted a number of studies of local environment-development conflicts and planning disputes, often with a focus on how specific emotional attachments to place impact individuals' positions in these disputes. Increasingly, I don't know how to respond when people ask me to specify my subfield of Geography. Although my training was as a political geographer (I was president of the Association of American Geographers' Political Geography Specialty Group from 2003 through 2005) and secondarily as an economic geographer, I spent much of the period from around 2000 through 2007 moving ever further into cultural geography, although the past few years have seen me returning to my political geography roots. At the same time, much of my work also overlaps with nature-society, urban, communications, and cartographic issues, so I have affinities with these subfields of the discipline as well. If you'd like to join me in trying to make sense of this hodgepodge of interests, please see my research page.
During my downtime, I write and produce material for a local alternative drama troupe, listen to (and occasionally play and/or write) music, commune with my two lovely cats and one equally lovely (but less furry) human partner, and coax new life from my ever-expanding vegetable and herb garden.
This web site includes seven pages with information about me, my research, and my teaching. These pages can be accessed from the navigation sidebar, located on the left side of the screen at the top of each page:
Home * FSU Geography * FSU Social Science & Public Affairs LLC * FSU This page was last updated on 6 November 2009 |
