Associate Professor
Department of Geography
Ohio State University
1036 Derby Hall
154 North Oval Mall
Columbus, OH 43210
USA
ph: 614-247-7264
fax: 614-292-6213
Ph.D.
M.S.
B.A.
Geographical Perspectives on Environment and Society (Geog 430)
Political Geography (Geog 460)
Conservation of Natural Resources (Geog 630)
Globalization and Environment (Geog 635)
Research Design (Geog 795)
The Production of Nature: Perspectives on Economy and Environment
(Graduate seminar: Geog 840, 2002)
Governance, Regulation, and the State-Economy Relationship (Graduate seminar:
Geog 840, 2003)
Qualitative Research Methods (Graduate seminar: Geog 840, 2004)
Privatization, Property, and Markets (Graduate seminar: Geog 840, 2004)
Neoliberalism (Graduate seminar: Geog 840, 2007)
Neoliberalism, Globalization, Scale, and the State
Health as a nature-society question
My research centers on the political economy of the environment. This approach examines uneven power dynamics to understand both how the natural environment is perceived, used, and regulated, and how these perceptions, uses, and regulations create particular social and environmental outcomes. Within this environmental focus, almost all of my research is on marine fisheries, which I investigate as both a natural resource (an environmental good produced as an economic input) and a food (used for sustenance and in cultural practice but also part of transnational agro-food networks). As resource and food, fisheries are constituted as both ecological and economic entities, are the object of political conflicts, and are subject to multiple types of regulation.
One
of my goals is to understand and explain the pronounced shift over the past
several decades toward neoliberalism, with its emphasis on the free market as a
means to spur economic growth and environmental protection. Focusing on
environmental relations of neoliberalism, key themes of my research are
neoliberal contradictions, scalar relations (including the ongoing role of the
national state), and privatization and property regimes in environmental
management and political economic change.
Another
of my goals is to understand the complex nature-society relations involved in
the political economy of the environment, and explain how those matter.
In an attempt to overcome dualistic approaches that treat nature and society as
separate realms, key themes of my research are the role of the biophysical in
economic processes, how perceptions of the world influence political economic
practice, and how the biophysical and perception are interrelated and help
constitute each other.
Recently
I have been interested in applying some of the insights I have gained from my
work on political economy of nature to understanding health geographies. My goal is to think about health, well-being,
and bodies as themselves involving nature-society relations, and further to
think about how health and bodies shape and are shaped by the socio-natural
environment. To this end, I have begun a
research project on pregnancy and childbirth practices, particularly in the
Sustainability.
Forthcoming. In The Companion to Environmental Geography. Castree, N., D. Demeritt, B. Rhoads, and D.
Liverman.
Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature-Society
Relations (Editor). 2008.
The
social nature of natural childbirth. 2008. Social
Science and Medicine 66: 1084-1094.
Health
as a nature-society question. 2008. Environment
and Planning A 40: 1015-1019.
Global
environmental politics. 2008. In The
Handbook of Political Geography. Cox, K., M. Low, and J. Robinson,
eds.
Privatization:
Property and the Remaking of Nature-Society Relations: Introduction to the special
issue. 2007. Antipode 39(3): 393-405.
Property, markets, and dispossession: the Western Alaska Community Development Quota as neoliberalism, social justice, both, and neither. 2007. Antipode 39(3): 479-499.
Articulation
between neoliberal and state-oriented environmental regulation: fisheries
privatization and endangered species protection. 2007. Environment and Planning A 39: 1926-1942. [pdf]
Neoliberalism
in the oceans: “rationalization,” property rights, and the commons
question. 2007. In Neoliberal Environments: False Promises and Unnatural
Consequences. Heynen, N., J.
McCarthy, W.S. Prudham, and P. Robbins, eds.
Routledge. (Reduced from article published in Geoforum, 2004).
Assessing
market-based environmental policy using a case study of North Pacific
fisheries. 2006. Global Environmental Change 16: 29-39. [pdf]
Scale
framing of scientific uncertainty in controversy over the endangered Steller
sea lion. 2006. Environmental Politics 15(1): 78-94.
With Johanna Haas. [pdf]
Beyond
rescaling: reintegrating the ‘national’ as a dimension of scalar
relations. 2005. Progress in Human Geography 29(4): 458-473.
[pdf]
Rules
of privatization: contradictions in neoliberal regulation of North Pacific
fisheries. 2004. Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 94(3): 565-584. [pdf]
Neoliberalism
in the oceans: “rationalization,” property rights, and the commons
question. 2004. Geoforum 35(3): 313-326. [pdf]
Organic
views of nature: the debate over organic certification for aquatic
animals. 2004. Sociologia Ruralis 44(2): 216-232. [pdf]
Spatializing
globalization: a ‘geography of quality’ in the seafood
industry. 2003. Economic Geography 79(1):1-16. [abstract]
From
catfish to organic fish: making distinctions about nature as cultural economic
practice. 2003. Geoforum 34(3): 329-342. [pdf]
Fish,
factory trawlers, and imitation crab: the nature of quality in the seafood
industry. 2003. Journal of
Rural Studies 19(1): 9-21. [pdf]
‘Imitation
crab’ and the material culture of commodity production. 2003. Cultural
Geographies 10(2):176-195. [pdf]
Thinking
through scale: the role of state governance in globalizing North Pacific
fisheries. 2001. Environment and Planning A 33(10):
1807-1827, with Erratum (figure correction) 34(1): back page. [pdf]
Property regime or development policy? Explaining growth in
the US Pacific groundfish fishery. 2001. The Professional Geographer
53(3): 384-397. [pdf]
Last updated May 2008