[Re-]Making maps for humanists & interpretative social scientists
Luke Bergmann
Department of Geography
University of Washington
Praxis: Doing Scholarship Digitally Speaker Series | Allen Library South ground floor, Research Commons | May 14, 12:30 – 1:30pm
I will offer reflections on two issues. First, I explore simple ways we can now make appealing maps. Then, I invite consideration of when it is appropriate for humanists and interpretative social scientists to embrace cartographies that are built upon positivist approaches to knowledge—approaching a singular world from above, plotting attributes assigned to individuated objects. Do generations of theoretical critique and interpretative practice suggest humanists [re-]make maps resonant with humanistic approaches to knowledge? Can we create cartographic practices that allow us to approach spaces, objects, knowers, and knowns in terms of relation, and process, and multiplicity?
 Sensational economy? Ethics, politics and economic geographies
Roger Lee
Queen Mary, University of London UK
Wednesday, May 15, 2013, 7-8:30 pm Kane Hall Room 210
Reception to follow in the Walker-Ames Room
Scholarly practices of framing may not only be restrictive and misleading but, if devoid of sentience and geography, also ignore insights into a range of influences on human understanding and practice and of political possibilities for change. Such is certainly the case with most theorizations/conceptualizations of economic practices. But can sentient dependency be reconciled with the imperative of economic sustainability across space and time? This question involves the determination in the first instance by the economic, a conception which enables a politics that is radical and open yet not divorced from economic imperatives. Such a space for a politics of value reflects the ‘ordinary economy’ – the formative intersection of values and the practice of Theories of Value in the construction of economic geographies. But the practical question remains: how to mobilize a real politics of economic change which is itself sustainable across space and through time?
Roger Lee is Emeritus Professor of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London. He is an intellectual leader in economic geography and has published extensively on topics relating to global-local ties, and informal local economic networks. In particular, his work on integrating cultural and social geography into mainstream economic geography is path-breaking and helped produce a whole new area of research in geography. He is also an extraordinarily interdisciplinary thinker and the author of numerous books that tie economic geography to emerging research themes in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. He has served as an editor of several journals and consultant for academic publishers and governments. He is currently the chief editor of the Sage Handbook of Human Geography, scheduled for publication in 2013.
This lecture is free and open to the public
For further information contact: kwchan@uw.edu
Sponsored by the Earl & Edwina Stice Memorial Lectureship in Social Sciences
 Dr. Tricia Ruiz, who graduated from the Geography Department with a PhD in 2011, is back at UW in a postdoc position! Tricia joins us this summer for a rotation with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO). Tricia is a Presidential Management Fellow at HUD, and uses spatial demographic analysis to support fair housing compliance reviews and investigations. She completed her M.A. in Geography (2007) and Ph.D. in Geography (2011) at UW, and was a NICHD-funded trainee in CSDE from 2007-2009. A main component of the Presidential Management Fellowship Program requires that each Fellow complete a developmental assignment by rotating to a different division within the agency or to an organization outside of HUD, to foster and expand the Fellow’s training and career objectives in federal government. During this rotation, Tricia will collaborate with CSDE Research Faculty, Dr. Suzanne Davies Withers, on a research project focusing on the geographical aspect of fair housing, sustainable cities and housing equity. Their work will build on existing fair housing and community development research, including topics of segregation, sustainable development, urban planning, land use and zoning, housing cost variability, measures of place-based socioeconomic opportunities such as local or regional job-housing ratios, access to transportation, high-quality schools and neighborhoods – all issues related to identifying areas of unmet housing need and to creating stable, integrated and sustainable communities.
This Friday (May 10th) Professor Ipsita Chatterjee will be giving a talk in our colloquium. Ipsita received her PhD in Geography at Clark University and she is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas. She is also affiliated with South Asia Institute.
The title of her talk is “Science, Religion and the Ideology of Urban Governance: Tales from a Globalizing Ahmedabad City, India” (abstract below).
The talk will take place in Smith 304 at 3.30 pm and as usual a reception will follow in Smith 409.
Science, Religion and the Ideology of Urban Governance: Tales from a Globalizing Ahmedabad City, India
The ‘new urban politics’ literature highlights local entrepreneurialism as the basis of neo-liberal urbanism; my talk will add to this literature by demonstrating how entrepreneurial neo-liberalism and ethno-religiosity are inflected in governance. I propose two concepts: ‘governance as performed’ (practice of ethno-religious entrepreneurialism) and ‘governance as inscribed’ (documenting policy through scientific planning). The dialectical interplay between ‘performance’ and ‘inscription’ defines the terrain of ‘new urban governance’ in its global/local entirety. Using examples from Ahmedabad city, India, my talk will explicate how ‘governance as performed’ and ‘governance as inscribed’, produce dual narratives of the ‘lived’ and the ‘inscribed’ city. The narrative of abstract and objective Ahmedabad inscribed in planning documents directly contradicts the ‘grubby practices’ of entrepreneurial, ethno-religious neo-liberalism performed in the city. By simultaneously analysing both narratives, my talk proposes to demystify the contexts of exclusion, thus exposing injustice embedded in ‘new urban politics’.
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