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.
Join us on Monday, Feb. 16, 2026, from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. to learn more about our GEO major and minors as well as our interdisciplinary program in Environmental and Sustainability Studies.
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.
Our 52nd Geography in the Bluegrass Day invited speaker is:
Prof Cindi Katz of the CUNY Graduate Center. The talk is scheduled for 3 p.m. in Gatton BE Building Room 191. A title is forthcoming.
The talk will be followed with an awards and recognition ceremony for our GEO and ENS students at the Lyric Theatre and Cultural Arts Center at 5 p.m.
Past GiB Day speakers
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.
The shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda are a rich and delicate ecological area. It is host to creeks and springs, swamps and wetlands that sustain life in and far beyond the region. In this talk, I draw on ongoing research with collaborators at UT Austin and Makerere University, Uganda. We center one key site where land, water and the political-economies of Ugandan neoliberalism mingle: the Ntabo/ Garuga peninsula and the development of Pearl Marina.
This luxury residential development encroaches on and degrades the silted spaces of the marsh, dispossessing local communities; damaging plant, insect and animal life; and foreclosing opportunities to glean medicinal herbs, collect water and catch and trade in fish. A central irony of racio-colonial capitalism and neoliberalism, these publicly accessible resources are all-the-more vital now, given the privatization of health, water,and other public goods in the last 40 years.
Through archival research on these areas and interviews with urban planners, district politicians, developers and community-members, we trace how other forms of mingling makes this theft possible: faith in foreign investment, elite wealth-capture, “order from above” and residues of colonially grounded ideals of progress and improvement.
Part of a larger collaborative project on the feminist political-ecologies of global retail capital, we examine the machinations of contemporary development in and around urban space, the stakes for local communities -- particularly low-income women -- and the socio-environmental impacts on wetland ecologies in Uganda.
Caroline Faria an associate professor of geography at the University of Texas at Austin, examines 20th- and 21st-century nationalism, development and neoliberal globalization. Her work analyzes the drivers and impacts of these processes and the connections between them, bringing together longstanding and complex bodies of scholarship on each area. As a feminist geographer, Faria complicates conventional understandings of these dynamics by demonstrating how they are embodied. She employs a feminist “global-intimate” scalar lens to analyze how neoliberalism, nationalism and development are tied to gendered, racialized, classed and sexualized geometries of power; grounded in colonial and postcolonial histories; experienced unevenly; and lived in everyday life. Her research pays particular attention to undertheorized and typically marginalized people and places, especially women and communities in East Africa.
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, as information-technology companies expanded remote work opportunities for their employees, a dramatic increase in foreign remote workers ("digital nomads") moving to Mexico City for extended periods of time has occurred. In collaboration with 06600 Plataforma Vecinal y Observatorio de la Colonia Juárez, Proyecto Juaricua has mapped the swell of Airbnb listings in Mexico City between 2019-2024, particularly in central neighborhood of the Colonia Juárez.
This project documents a rise of mega hosts that have fueled evictions in central Mexico City, now operating hundreds of units in the city. This example reflects broader patterns of the financialization of housing on a global scale. While "digital" nomads’ often see themselves as transitory, their presence has had a lasting impact, normalizing racialized processes of dispossession that alter the landscapes of the neighborhood.
In this talk, I explore how housing organizers articulate this phenomenon as blanqueamiento por despojo (whitening by dispossession) to make sense of the modes of displacement and extraction occurring in the city as well as how they enact other, everyday ways to stake claims to the neighborhood. I ask what these notions of blanqueamiento reveal about longer histories of colonial dispossession and territoriality in Mexico and consider how the analytic of cuerpo territorio might deepen theorizations of gentrification.
Margaret Marietta Ramírez, Ph.D. is the associate director of Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies at Stanford University. She 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 journals such as Antipode, Society & Space,and Urban Geography as well as in such edited collections as 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). She leads the SSHRC-funded Proyecto Juaricua.
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.
