Department of Geography

February 1 - Professors Out and About

At the La Jolla Playhouse last season, Kate Swanson led discussion about the urban geography in Unusual Acts of Devotion, a play set in a New York City apartment. More recently, Trent Biggs stood under the stage lights of the IMax theatre in the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center to speak about the Amazon and field questions at the San Diego movie premiere of The Greatest Places.

January 6 - Giorgio Curti Defends Dissertation

Congratulation to Giorgio Curti who successfully defended his doctoral dissertation titled “The Body Geographic: Affect, Imagination and the Relationality of Be(com)ing, or Movements through Spinozan Earth-Writings” on December 18, 2009. Giorgio explains his dissertation topic:

An exploration of what geography does (and can do) can help uncover its role as a disciplinary mode of encounter in tension with the dominant ontological foundations of Western philosophic and scientific thought. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze points to the existence of two lines of Western philosophical tradition: the dominant one exemplified by the philosophies of Plato, Descartes and Kant, the other a challenge and break from the interiority and artificial dualisms of this “rationalist” tradition and expressed through the works of such philosophers as Lucretius, Hume, Nietzsche and Spinoza (as well as Deleuze himself). It is my position that the latter line, most forcefully the work of 17th century Dutch (Marrano) thinker Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza, finds a certain vital resonance with(in) geography through a shared epistemological break from and ontological challenge to conventional Western thinking. Nigel Thrift recently argued that “Spinoza was a kind of geographer.” I take this statement one step further to argue that geography does a kind of Spinozan science. I support this claim by first exploring how geography’s content is entangled in enduring intellectual and practical separations which hinder or disallow it adequate expression. I then discuss and illustrate through different topical movements - such as landscape, territorial conflict, gentrification and displacement, media and social networks, and the relationships between children, families and governmental institutions - how Spinoza’s work and its: (1) conceptualization of humans and earth, nature and culture, society and space, as intimately and necessarily inter-connected and inter-related phenomena; (2) immanent understanding of ideas (thought) and material (extension) as two perspectives of the same substance informed and experienced through capacities of embodied imagination, affection (affectio) and affect (affectus); and (3) capacity to serve as a dynamic nexus through which various geographical viewpoints and interests can find lines of agreement or correspondence, presents geographers with a conceptual logic internal to and expressive of the content of the discipline. In its move towards a ‘Spinozan Geography,’ this work - both as a whole and in its composite parts - is not an attempt at a rigorous analytical exposition of Spinoza’s thinking in the academic philosophical sense. In other words, the drive of this work is not for rigor as redundant repetition or analytical critique. Rather, it is a call for and a push towards rigor as an internally consistent and creative “productivism.” Thus, as a “productivist” mo(ve)ment, this work is not propelled by the necessity, need or desire to ‘critically’ trace or embed Spinoza’s thought in or to a particular episteme or time-space. Neither is it driven by the need for an historical or ‘comprehensive’ survey of the geographical tradition. Instead, it is an effort at an open ontological and epistemological assemblage creatively building on Spinoza in fluid molecular dialogue with other thinkers, such as Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Antonio Negri and Brian Massumi, but especially the lineal “geo-philosophers” Deleuze and Guattari and the body geographic - in the double sense of a geographic body of literature and practice and the body as a(n) (un)folding geographic membrane and force - as an affirmative way through which geographers can better gain insights into, grapple with, understand, express, share and explore what geography does. To put it in practical terms, this work is more concerned with what bodies do or can do - in this case assembling bodies of thought, practice and action - than by what they are.

Currently, Giorgio Hadi Curti is working on papers, editing a book on media and geography and a special issue of Aether on media geography and the Middle East, teaching two classes at SDSU and looking for a tenure track J.O.B.

Dr. Curti's doctoral committee members were: Dr. Stuart Aitken, Dr. Fernando Bosco, Dr. David Carr (UCSB Geography), and Dr. Colin Gardner (UCSB Art/Film).

January 6 - Chris Moreno Defends Dissertation

Congratulation to Christopher Moreno who successfully defended his doctoral dissertation titled “Geographies of Addiction and Recovery: Drugs, Spaces, and Body Politics” on December 18, 2009. Chris explains his dissertation topic:

The main purpose of my dissertation project was to build on, work through, and expand relational understandings of bodies and spaces to bring different sensibilities to discussions of drug addiction and recovery, particularly as they related to geographical matters. This included, engaging with the subject of drug addiction and recovery through contemporary geographical concerns and debates surrounding the health, ethics, and politics of bodies, as well as relational understandings of space and affect as they intersect in the critical and health geography literature. Through different modes of encounter (film, families, institutions, and communities), I also qualitatively and ethnographically explored the different ways in which drug users (including their social and familial relations) and spaces of drug addiction and recovery evolved and worked to create for themselves new, more active, healthy, body-spaces not necessarily confined to, or limited by, institutional or ideological controls. Ultimately, there were two intended goals and outcomes of this project: 1) to explore conceptually and empirically what drug using and recovering bodies and spaces were capable of by mapping a more hopeful social and spatial politics of drug addiction and recovery, and 2) to offer social science researchers and policy makers different geographical sensibilities from which to approach the complex and emerging relationships between drug use and recovery in differentiating social and institutional contexts.

Three of five chapters in this project were published, forth is currently in review, and the fifth will be submitted here shortly. In the spring, beyond looking for a job and teaching a few classes, I will also be putting together two edited journals on addiction and recovery in Emotion, Space, and Society and Social and Cultural Geography.

Dr. Moreno's doctoral committee members were: Dr. Stuart Aitken, Dr. Fernando Bosco, Dr. Helen Couclelis (UCSB Geography), Dr. Colin Gardner (UCSB Art/Film), and Dr. David Carr (UCSB Geography).

January 5 - Holiday Party Highlights

The annual Geography Department Holiday Party was held on December 16, 2009. There was much food, drink, and trivia had by all during the three hour extravaganza.

January 5 - Swanson Book Coming Soon

Begging as a Path to Progress: Indigenous Women and Children and the Struggle for Ecuador's Urban Spaces is the forthcoming book by Professor Kate Swanson. The book is part of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Series from the University of Georgia Press. It will be available in March 2010.

In 1992, Calhuasí, an isolated Andean town, got its first road. Newly connected to Ecuador’s large cities, Calhuasí experienced rapid social-spatial change, which Kate Swanson richly describes. Based on nineteen months of fieldwork, Swanson’s study pays particular attention to the ideas and practices surrounding youth. While begging seems to be inconsistent with—or even an affront to—ideas about childhood in the developed world, Swanson demonstrates that the majority of income earned from begging goes toward funding Ecuadorian children’s educations in hopes of securing more prosperous futures.

“Begging as a Path to Progress is an excellent book that comes to some arresting conclusions. Pleasingly and accessibly written, it is a major contribution to the fields of youth geographies, development studies, and interdisciplinary research on childhood.”
—Craig Jeffrey, coauthor of Degrees Without Freedom?: Education, Masculinities, and Unemployment in North India