Research Clusters

Space, Place and Social Worlds

Seeks to understand how socio-cultural and political-economic processes like urbanization, industrialization, poverty, health care, migration, and mediated communication interact to produce diverse socio-spatial realities across urban, regional, national and global scales.

Environmental Changes and Surface Processes

Studies environmental changes as conditioned by biotic, climatic, geomorphic, and anthropogenic factors.

Digital Landscapes

Explores the theoretical and applied issues associated with the acquisition, measurement, representation, analysis, simulation, and visualization of digital geographic information.

Research Initiatives

Food and Farming

Eugenio Arima, William E. Doolittle, Gregory W. Knapp, and Rebecca M. Torres

Food and Farming research initiative integrates components of the Department's three major research clusters to examine tactics and strategies of the production, distribution, preparation, and utilization of food and other useful plants and animals at a variety of scales from local to regional and global. Faculty and student research projects have included the dynamics of agricultural and other land use in the Amazon basin, irrigation features and practices in the Southwest, Mexico, and the Andes, nontraditional export agriculture (including soybeans, quinoa and flowers), cattle ranching, the impact of roads, tourism and migration on agriculture, gendered spaces of food preparation, kitchen gardens, the persistence of smallholder farming, impact of traditional plant use on the environment, and the impact of climate change on agriculture.