Teaching

Courses

GEO201: Human Geography
GEO393 (special topics): Geographies of Justice
GEO393 (special topics): Gender, Development & Justice
GEO393 (special topics): Urban Ethnography in the Global South
GEO355: ”Emerging” China and Contemporary Geopolitics
GEO411: Political Geography (online course)

Digital Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (DASH) Lab Internships

In addition to my regularly scheduled courses, I oversee, advise and mentor students who are selected as DASH Lab interns each semester.

International field research experience

In 2015, with a Student-Faculty Fellows grant from ASIANetwork, Professor Salvatore Engel-di Mauro and I co-led a trip to Chongqing, China to conduct field research with five SUNY New Paltz undergraduate students.

Project Summary

By 2030 over seventy percent of China’s population will be living in urban areas. This large scale movement of China’s rural population into urban areas serves as both a challenge and opportunity to better understand the ways in which processes of urbanization, demographic change, and urban farming can intersect to support the creation of sustainable food systems. This project examines the viability of urban farms for feeding an increasingly urbanized population. The research team travelled to Chongqing and carried out the project between 1 and 28 July. Areas were identified for transect walks, transect walks were conducted, and contacts were made with urban farmers. Translators were later briefed about protocols for the interview process. By the time translators were engaged, all transect walks had been completed and the areas visited were revisited to seek interviewees. Within the latter two weeks, thirty interviews were completed, notes were assembled, and data processing protocols were established. In the meantime (but also prior to fieldwork), plans were discussed and finalized with students regarding options in continuing the work and in divulging findings following fieldwork completion, data processing, and analysis. Thanks to a successful proposal for a paper presentation, one venue where we will share our findings will be through a paper presentation at the forthcoming New York Conference on Asian Studies, to be held at Vassar College. This is in addition to the poster presentation exhibited at the 2016 ASIANetwork meeting in St. Petersburg, Florida. Further, the paper resulting from the research titled, Food Production in Chongqing, China: Opportunities and Challenges (2016) was published in the Middle States Geographer, the publication for the regional American Association of Geographers.