The University of Kentucky’s Department of Geography is known for high quality research and education in human geography, physical geography, and mapping. During the Fall Semester we encourage interested students to reach out to individual faculty and the Director of Graduate Studies to discuss the possibility of joining our M.A. and Ph.D. programs.

Faculty and student research in the Department of Geography focuses on interrelated thematic clusters. The clusters facilitate collaborative scholarship though they typically do not function as formal research teams. The clusters tend to work as loose and overlapping intellectual communities that can incorporate working groups, reading groups, and collaborative projects, and they give a sense of the breadth of the research conducted in the department.

Critical Human Geography

Faculty approach critical human geography from a wide variety of conceptual lenses, including Black Geographies, feminist and queer theory, post- and anti-colonial thought, political economy and other critical theories. Our work contributes to conversations about cities and urbanization (e.g. housing, labor markets, urban landscapes and gentrification, urban politics and property development); geopolitics and statecraft (especially in relation to carceral formations, borders, immigration, migration, and refugee movements); geographies of finance/the financialization of everyday life, and social movements across a variety of places, scales, and territories. Colleagues in the department study how race, class, gender, and sexuality are imbricated in these processes as well as in the constructions of space and place and the workings of societies.

Environment & Climate

Faculty interests in the environment and climate research range from political ecology and environmental justice to a focus on spatial patterns and biophysical processes of human-environment and climate systems. We draw on and contribute to interdisciplinary conversations that span both human and physical geographic research. These include on the one hand feminist political ecology, Black studies, multispecies justice, environmental philosophy, agrarian livelihoods, urban sustainability and climate justice, and on the other, urban meteorology, bioclimatology and phenology, biogeography, landscape ecology, and biodiversity. Together we offer a broad-based set of methodological approaches to key questions of environmental justice, health-environment geography, and global rural and urban sustainability, well as environmental biopolitics and philosophies of nature. Our research employs an array of qualitative methods as well as geographic tools such as GIS, remote sensing, and spatial analysis.

Digital Geographies, Critical GIS & Mapping

Faculty understand digital systems as imbricated in our social and environmental worlds. This work requires both an understanding of the technical capacities of digital systems as well as their broader operative effects in society. This work contributes to dialogues on how the digital shapes social relations, financial networks, forms of governance, urban geographies, the production of social difference, and other issues germane to critical human geography. We deploy critical engagements with GIS, cartography, and mapping as means to explore pressing social, political, and environmental issues. Our approach deploys both critically-engaged technical work and technically-capable critical work to explore a range of topics that traverse the department’s research clusters.