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.

Factional Ecologies: Environmental Imagination and Hydrosocial Futures in Punjab

by Dr. Abdul Aijaz

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.

The Sound of Feathers: Attentive Living in a World Beyond Ourselves

by Kathryn Gillespie, Ph.D.

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:

• Vulnerable Witness: The Politics of Grief in the Field (University of California Press, 2018, co-edited with Patricia J. Lopez).
•  Critical Animal Geographies: Politics, Intersections and Hierarchies in a Multispecies World (Routledge, 2015, co-edited with Rosemary-Claire Collard). 
• Economies of Death: Economic Logics of Killable Life and Grievable Death (Routledge, 2015, co-edited with Patricia J. Lopez).

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!

“The logistics revolution” was not a revolution at all. It was a counterrevolution. Beginning in the 1950s and '60s, multinational corporations facing a period of falling profitability began to experiment with innovations in logistics management and infrastructure that could speed products to their destinations, cut transportation costs and aid the relocation of production to the low-waged Global South. 

As supply chains have sped up and snaked across the Earth in the last half century, turning suburbs, coastal zones and oceans into a network of warehouses stretched across global space, scholars have largely told the history of logistics as a history of increasing efficiency:

• In business literatures, as an objective technological advancement that reduced poverty by facilitating the globalization of industry.
• In Marxian literatures, as a history of firms’ efforts to sidestep economic crisis by expanding the mobility of global supply chains. 

Yet whether critical or celebratory of the logistics revolution, both approaches assume that corporations and states in the Global North are the primary drivers, excluding the agency of Third World actors and their role in these transformations. In The Logistics Counterrevolution, I ask: What does the rise of logistics look like from the vantage of anti-colonial struggle in the Global South? 

Drawing on archival research in Indonesia, Singapore,  the United States and the United Kingdom, I provide an alternative story: Global supply chains acquired their contemporary power not only because of powerful corporate actors or functionalist shifts in capital’s accumulation strategy but also in response to the rising threat of anti-colonial nationalisms and internationalisms in the decolonizing world. 

Approaching the history of logistics from the standpoint of the Global South illuminates a more political reading of supply chains not simply as results of corporate ingenuity or economic structures for smoothing the fast circulation of goods but also as forms of slow violence that produce social, political, and market access to the labor, resources  and geostrategic locations of Asia.

Charmaine Chua is acting associate professor of geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on political economy, postcolonial development and technological change with a specific interest in how the rise of the logistics industry has reconfigured the contemporary relations between supply chain capitalism, race, and empire. They are currently writing two books: 

• The Logistics Counterrevolution (under contract with University of Minnesota Press).
• How to Beat Amazon: The Struggle of America's New Working Class (co-written with Spencer Cox). 

Her work has been published in Environment and Planning D, the Socialist Register, Theory and Event, Antipode, The Review of International Studies, The Boston Review, The Nation and Jacobin, among other venues. She also co-founded the Marxist Institute of Research, is an editor of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and serves as the chair of labor organizing at the Council of University of California Faculty Associations. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including being named a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar in recognition of movement leaders who participate in academia with a demonstrated commitment to supporting social movements.

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 P.h.D. residential graduate students!

Join us via Zoom here!

Our alumni and friends are also invited back to Lexington for a reunion on Saturday, November 22, 2025.

Itinerary for Lexington in November

• Join us in Lexington on Friday, November 21, 2025 for our 10th Annual Bailey Distinguished Alumni Lecture, followed by a reception in the Gaines Center for the Humanities.
• Reconnect with Lexington and the Bluegrass on Saturday, November 22, 2025 before a special program and dinner that evening.
• Stay for the Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Division of the American Association of Geographers on Sunday, November 23 and Monday, November 24, 2025.

The University of Kentucky Department of Geography invites you to our 10th annual Harrison and Eva Lewis Bailey Distinguished Alumni Lecture. Harrison and Eva graduated from UK; Eva from psychology in 1948 and Harrison from geography in 1949. Read more about the fund here, established by Harrison in memory of Eva.

Viral Worlds: Researching and Experimenting with the Flesh of the World

A concern for the reach of pathogenic viral matter into human bodies emerged as a deeply colonial project with fears over the transformation of endemic diseases into epidemic ones conjoined with cautions of population decline in the colonies and disrupted trade routes. 

Philanthropo-capitalist organizations, university researchers and government officers pursued "public health" through the continuous unfolding of experimental techniques in sites considered the "home" of viral pathogens. Viral research was valued as offering a safer future even as it sat alongside the structural violence of colonialism manifest in lives truncated by chronic disease, expropriation and the radical reshaping of rural and urban environments. 

Amid a neoliberal roll- back of primary health care, and a targeted reinvestment in disease-specific programs and sustainable goals, viral research continues to tread this well-worn ground. The Zika pandemic outbreaks of 2015-2016 ushered in a by now well-worn anatomo-politics of safe sex and abstinence. Yet, the transgenic engineering of vectors prompted by this pandemic also saw the emergence of something new: an interruption to the way in which viral matter was not only researched but afforded a tempo that superseded the "natural evolution" of life. 

Drawing on specific examples, this presentation maps out the reiteration of colonial tropes on disease ecologies and experimental design in this new set of technological practices. But it also goes on to draw out how transgenic engineering -- this new viral tempo -- is both a feature of the Anthropocene’s "forcing" of matter and a proposed solution to the same. The superseding of a natural evolution is a measure of Global North scientists’ drive to rise above the flesh of the world and a reminder of the remaking of the Global South as a living laboratory intended to facilitate this through the provision of viral samples and test subjects. In these viral worlds, what scope is there for decolonization?

Image: Transgenic female mosquitoes expressing a fluorescent protein (glowing blue) and nontransgenic mosquitoes (no color). Source: Could Genetically Engineered Insects Squash Mosquito-Borne Disease? - Science Friday

Dr. Deborah Dixon is professor of geography in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She received her Ph.D. in geography from the University of Kentucky in 1995. Dixon is an internationally recognized scholar in feminist geopolitics and has been key to the emergence of "geo-humanities" as an interdisciplinary field of research and practice. She is the co-founder of the interdisciplinary (American Association of Geography) journal GeoHumanities, which publishes analytic and practice-based research. She has researched aesthetic, technological, political, and cultural responses to environmental problematics (including toxic landscapes, loss of biodiversity, and climate change impacts) in Europe, the United States, sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and Japan. Most recently, her research has addressed the making of an innovative interdisciplinarity, including the potential for creative geo-visualization in narrating and reimagining the stressed relationships between people and place. 
 

Please contact the Geography Department's office for more information about joining us for the Bailey Alumni Lecture.

For more information on our speaker, the event, and more, please visit the official Bailey Alumni Lecture webpage.

Baker A. Rogers is an associate professor of sociology at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro. Baker is the author of King of Hearts: Drag Kings in the American South (Rutgers University), Conditionally Accepted: Christians’ Perspectives on Sexuality and Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights (Rutgers University Press) and Trans Men in the South: Becoming Men.

The talk explores the convergence of the de-generation of film celluloid and videotape as highly-unstable visual materials that inevitably break down and the concept of gay male generation, where the important political gains of previous generations are taken for granted, rejected, or entirely forgotten. My case studies range from an anti-Vietnam War porn film from 1973, award-winning “safe sex” VHS porn videos from the 1990s, and social distancing digital porn during the Covid-19 pandemic. I argue that it is through recording and re-dubbing old images anew that will enable and ensure the preservation of sexual memory and the expansion of sexual possibilities for future queer generations to come. The talk will be supplemented by a screening of short experimental videos.

Nguyen Tan Hoang is an experimental videomaker and writer based in San Jose, California, USA. Nguyen’s videos include Forever Bottom! (1999), PIRATED! (2000), K.I.P. (2002), look_im_azn (2011), I Remember Dancing (2019), and Sad Porn (2024). Their research interests include Asian American visual culture, Southeast Asian cinema, queer cinema, experimental film, race and pornography, and videographic criticism. Nguyen’s experimental videos have screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and the Pompidou Center in Paris. They have programmed film, video, and performance for MIX NYC: New York Queer Experimental Film Festival and the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Nguyen is a member of the working group International Videoessay Research Network (IVERN). Nguyen teaches film, media, and cultural studies in the Department of Literature at UC San Diego.