Faculty Profile Fall 2009
Dr. Fernando J. Bosco
I joined the Department of Geography at SDSU in the fall of 2002 after receiving my doctorate from The Ohio State University. I enjoy the collegial nature of the department that allows for easy interactions with students and my fellow faculty. My main areas of interest include urban, social and political geography, and the geographies of South America.
One of my main interests are the geographies of collective action, in particular in relation to emotions,
networks, and the politics of memory. I have published papers on how emotions and place relate to the formation
and sustainability of social movements, on how social movements create networks across space and scales, and on
the way activists use specific features of urban landscapes and their place-based emotions for the performance of
their activist identities. Most of my papers on social movements are based on case studies of human rights
movements in Argentina, but I have an interest in Latin American social movements more generally. I have also
written about networks and the geographic dimensions of the US war on terrorism in its early stages.
I’m also interested in the social geographies of children, youth and families in relation to notions of place
and community. I work at the intersections of social, political and urban geography and I am interested in
social change. I often ask: how does social change happen? How can it happen? What does geography have
to do with social change? This is a broad area of research, so I engage it in relation to different issues and
places. For example, I have written about how networks of NGOs that deal with children’s poverty become global
through different strategies of expansion and representation. More recently I have began working with some of
my colleagues and graduate students on different issues facing Hispanic and Latino immigrant families in
Southern California, and I am a contributor to ISYS (Center for
Interdisciplinary Studies on Youth and Space), housed in the Department of Geography at SDSU.
I have an interest in the history and evolution of geographic thought, and I teach a graduate seminar on the History of Geographic every year (GEOG 701). I am particularly interested in approaches to space-society relations that deal with networks and relational thinking. I am also interested in the application of qualitative methods for data collection and for data analysis. I have been using and writing about focus groups lately. I have a broad perspective when it comes to research: I enjoy being outside conducting fieldwork, but I also like sitting in my office working with qualitative analysis software packages or conducting archival research.
I like traveling to lots of places, but as a native of Argentina, I have a predilection for all things Latin
American. This shows up on most of my research! I love doing fieldwork too, and I take advantage of any excuse
to make it down to Buenos Aires, my favorite city. San Diego is also a fantastic city, so I spend lots of time
walking the different neighborhoods in the city and enjoying the amazing outdoor environments, from the beach
to the desert. As you can see in one the pictures, my dog Mateo is always with me!