By Richard LeComte
LEXINGTON, Ky. -- Priscilla McCutcheon, assistant professor of geography in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Kentucky, has been named a 2023 Fellow in the American Association of Geographers.
The University of Kentucky Department of Geography invites you to our 52nd annual Geography in the Bluegrass Day; a celebration of the geography program, our history, our students and faculty, our alumni and friends and the achievements of all.
Andrea Marston, Ph.D. I am a human-environment geographer with research and teaching expertise at the intersection of political ecology, political economy, development studies, feminist geography and science and technology studies. Broadly, my research examines the political economies and cultural politics of natural resource governance and energy systems. My specific areas of interest include artisanal and small-scale mining; energy transitions and critical minerals; subterranean spaces and geological knowledges; toxic and post-industrial materialities; gold mining and global finance; energy storage and battery manufacturing; and community water governance. My book, Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia, was published with Duke University Press.
Caroline Faria - associate professor of geography - Ph.D., University of Washington, WA
My research examines 20th- and 21st-century nationalism, development and neoliberal globalization. I attend to the drivers and impacts of these processes and the connections between them. This research brings together longstanding and complex bodies of scholarship on each area. As a feminist geographer, I complicate our understanding by demonstrating how these processes are embodied. I use a feminist "global-intimate" scalar lens to understand how neoliberalism, nationalism and development are tied to gendered, racialized, classed and sexualized geometries of power; grounded in colonial and postcolonial pasts; experienced unevenly; and lived in the everyday. In connection, I focus on undertheorized and typically marginalized people and places, most notably women and the region of East Africa.
My current research project involves a collaboration with Dr Brenda Boonabaana (formerly in the Department of Forestry, Environmental and Geographical Sciences at Makerere University, Uganda, now at UT Austin). We are examining the role of global retail capital in driving urban development and displacement with a focus on a global south city at the cutting edge of urban change — Kampala, Uganda. I examine how and why global retail capital is transforming cities of the early 21st century, the spatial form that transformation is taking and its widely differential impacts on city residents and workers. Deploying a multi-scalar analysis, I link globalized capital investments from the United States, Gulf, Europe and China to the local political economies of Kampala and examine the impacts on, and strategies of, resistance deployed by low-income female entrepreneurs. Finally, I will examine and assess effective strategies, developed by alliances of city residents and workers, city managers and international entities, to build more sustainable, safe and secure urban futures.
My intersectional feminist scholarship is mirrored by my disciplinary activism around mentoring women and faculty and students of color. A central imperative of my work is to support women and minority geographers and those excited by geographic approaches but who may not see a place for themselves in the discipline. This work includes building and sustaining faculty-student and peer-peer mentoring networks for undergraduates, graduates and fellow faculty; mentoring around research, writing, publication and securing academic positions; and both writing on and practicing diverse geographic futures.
I co-founded and run the Feminist Geography Collective in our department. This effort brings together faculty, graduates and undergraduates from across UT (and beyond) who are interested in the relationship between power and place and who are committed to building diverse geographic futures. We are now part of a growing group of critical geographers organized in the Spatial Justice Lab and including the undergraduate Environmental Justice Collective. Please see the link for more details.
MM Ramírez, Ph.D. is a feminist urban geographer whose work analyzes how minoritized peoples across North America resist urban dispossession and other injustices through spatial, cultural and artistic practices. She explores these themes across space and scale in her research and teaching, thinking transnationally and intersectionally to understand how cities are contested and spatially remade in the everyday by Latinx, Black and Indigenous communities.
Ramírez’s writings have been published in such journals as Antipode, Society & Space and Urban Geography, and in such edited collections such Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (2021), Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance (2021) and Key Thinkers on Space & Place (2024). Ramírez is also a founding member of the Latinx Geographies Specialty Group and has been collaborating with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project since 2017. Before joining CCSRE as the associate director of Latinx studies, she was an assistant professor of geography at Simon Fraser University and a creative cities postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, and she earned her doctorate in geography at the University of Washington.
Join a panel of alumni and professionals for a night dedicated to kickstarting your career. We'll be meeting in-person rom 5 to 7: p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 4, at the Stuckert Career Center on campus.
We review resumes with a career counselor to help you overhaul yours. Also, make sure to dress professionally to receive a new professional headshot for your LinkedIn profile. Then stay for a panel discussion with alumni from UK GEO and ENS discussing their career path after graduation.
Enjoy light refreshments as you network and learn from others in the field.
More information about the event
NOTE: As a point of information, the parking lot behind the Stuckert Career Center building is available for attendees after 5:00PM.
By Sara Spinks, Veena McCoole and Jenny Wells-Hosley
OXFORD, England (Jan. 20, 2026) — Large language models like ChatGPT increasingly shape how people see the world, yet their responses can mirror long-standing biases in the data they ingest.
The Dr. Pradyumna P. Karan Memorial Lecture Series at the University of Kentucky honors the doctoral program that professor Pradyumna P. (P.P.) Karan launched in 1968. Supported by an initial donation by the family of Dr. Karan, this memorial lecture series is meant to serve the graduate program and the department in perpetuity.
For more information on the Series itself, please visit: Dr Pradyumna P. Karan Memorial Lecture Series in Geography.
In this talk, I examine how environmental imagination, political contestation and ecological transformation intersect in the canal-irrigated landscapes of Punjab amid a global environmental crisis. By tracing the competing claims, uneven power relations and fractured visions of ecological futures that shape Punjab’s hydro-social assemblage.
I show how material and narrative infrastructures of development and crisis converge to produce both material ecologies and imaginaries of abundance, scarcity and decline. Reading literary texts, oral histories and everyday narratives alongside archival records and hydrological interventions, I demonstrate how environmental imagination mediates lived experiences of infrastructural power.
Situating hydro-social futures within these contested imaginaries of place and people, I argue that Punjab’s ecological crisis demands attention to the cultural and political work through which water is rendered legible, governable and morally and materially charged. Using factional ecologies as a conceptual framework, I highlight the plurality of ecologies in struggle, where historical legacies and imaginative practices shape the possibilities of hydro-social futures and environmental justice.
Dr. Abdul Aijaz is a human geographer whose research brings together political ecology, environmental humanities and literary geographies to examine the entanglements of narrative, infrastructure and ecological crisis. He explores how global discourses of climate change are lived, contested, and reimagined in the canal colonies of Punjab, Pakistan, an area shaped by the world’s largest contiguous irrigation system and a legacy of colonial hydrological engineering.
From the rustle of a crow’s wings to the cool touch of moss on a stone wall, to the quiet determination of a worm crossing a sidewalk, "The Sound of Feathers" invites readers to notice the small wonders of life all around them. These fleeting details hold surprising truths about humanity’s connection to nature, the complex relationships of care and harm in which we are entangled, our responsibilities to other species and what it means to be fully present in the world. Through vivid storytelling and deeply personal reflections, Kathryn Gillespie invites us to slow down, pay attention and think differently about our everyday lives so that we might imagine shared futures of flourishing. She urges us to confront the forces that separate us from the natural world and find more compassionate ways of living in harmony with it. Gillespie reminds us that the quiet, often overlooked moments in life are where the most profound insights and connections begin.
Kathryn Gillespie, Ph.D., is a writer, researcher, and educator. Her research and teaching interests focus on: ethnography and qualitative methods; feminist and multispecies theory and methods; food and agriculture; political economy; critical animal studies; and human-environment relations. Her latest book, The Sound of Feathers: Attentive Living in a World Beyond Ourselves (Duke University Press, 2026) is about the power of attentiveness to build gentler futures with those other animals with whom we share a world.
She is also the author of The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 (University of Chicago Press, 2018). She has published in numerous scholarly journals and has co-edited three books:
Gillespie was formerly a postdoctoral scholar in applied environment and sustainability studies online master's program at the University of Kentucky, an animal studies postdoctoral fellow at Wesleyan University (2016-2018) and a lecturer at the University of Washington. She has volunteered with Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (a Puget Sound, Washington-based prison education organization), Food Empowerment Project (a food justice organization in Cotati, California) and Pigs Peace Sanctuary (a sanctuary for pigs in Stanwood, Washington). She is vice president of research & strategy for Farm Forward.
This presentation will be held in Zoom in Room 191 Gatton.
Dr. Nick Lally, with the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky, will be hosting online office hours to answer questions for prospective M.A. and Ph.D. residential graduate students.
Join us via Zoom here!
