Colloquium Series Archive

Over the last decade, transnational farmland deals in the global South have become increasingly prevalent and controversial. Framed by scholars as a new global land rush, these deals have highlighted the link between the shifting geopolitics of development cooperation and intertwined problems of food security, climate change, and global trade...

Four Geography graduate students will present a preview of the talks they will give at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) meeting in New Orleans April 10-14, 2018: Sarah Tynen : State Territorialization through Bureaucratic Control: Authoritarian Governance at the Neighborhood Level in China By building on the concept of...

A mismatch between largely absolute Newtonian models of space in GIScience and the relational spaces of critical geographies has contributed to mutual disinterest between the fields. Critical GIS has offered an intellectual critique of GIScience without substantially altering how key geographical concepts are expressed in data structures. As an example...

This talk explores how China's urbanization program is recasting the politics of place in the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau, Xining. Urban development discourse and practice is transforming increasing numbers of China’s ethnic population into de-ethnicized urban citizens under the the sign of the Civilized City. The state deploys...

We have been applying big geospatial data processing techniques to vehicle GPS data collected over several months in 2015 for Maryland roads in order to reconstruct spatiotemporal vehicle trajectories and understand how the volume of traffic varies on different types of roads. Volume of traffic or vehicle miles traveled estimates...

During a tornado outbreak in May of 2013, a family of seven took shelter in an underground culvert in Oklahoma City, fearful, no doubt, for their children’s lives; minutes later, they were swept away in flood waters that raced through ditches and culverts near the city, killing all of them...

As we approach the 10th anniversary of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, it is worth reflecting on the post-earthquake reconstruction from the perspective of what was built, why was it built, and ultimately for whom was it built? Based on my book Shaken Authority: China’s Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan...

“China is building roads right up to the border and we have to follow suit.” There is an urgency in the road building activity on India’s borders. These roads, we are told, will secure the nation and bring development to its peripheral areas. In this paper, I go deeper into...

In what sense is the 21st century world "urban"? In this lecture, Neil Brenner critiques contemporary ideologies of the "urban age," which confront this question with reference to the purported fact that more than 50% of the world's population resides within cities. Against such demographic, city-centric understandings, Brenner excavates Henri...

Assessments of the sustainability of smallholder agriculture in Africa have focused on soil fertility decline. The forms in which these scientific assessments take are shaped by disciplinary traditions, development prerogatives, and assumptions about the social “drivers” of environmental change. The dominant approach in Africa today creates nutrient budgets for land...