The University of Kentucky Department of Geography invites you to our 52nd annual Geography in the Bluegrass Day, which is a celebration of the geography program, our history, our students and faculty, our alumni and friends and the achievements of all.

Please contact the Geography Department's office for more information.

Schedule of Events for Friday, April 24, 2026:

• A Friday afternoon talk by Dr. Cindi Katz at 3 p.m. in Gatton BE Building Room 191.
• An awards and recognition ceremony for our GEO and ENS students at the Lyric Theatre and Cultural Arts Center at 5 p.m. immediately following the lecture.

This event is free of charge and does not require RSVP.

Our 52nd Geography in the Bluegrass Day invited speaker is Cindi Katz

Social Reproduction and the Topographies of Hope

by Cindi Katz, Ph.D.

Practicing hope keeps the possibility of change alive — a methodology against fear in dismal times. While the dismal touches all too many places in multiple registers these days, counter-topography is a way of marking the common effects of, and responses to, large-scale processes in disparate locations. 

Drawing out the common grounds and entanglements of such shifts as global economic restructuring, deskilling, state violence, or dispossession as they play out in distinct and dissimilar places offers a new geographical imagination for political organizing and action. Its "contour lines" intended to incite new political imaginaries and spur alternative geographies of action and activism, which are potential spaces of hope in an expanded field.

In this talk, I will look at some of the experiences, practices and challenges of grassroots organizations negotiating complicated place-based struggles while simultaneously engaging their trans-local aspirations as critical to understand in building social movements at once global and intimate, sustainable and targeted, grounded and boundary crossing. Their actions create contour lines for practice and trace topographies of hope at different times and places making the imagined possible despite the dangers and displacements associated with the mobilities of capital accumulation, racialized state violence and neoliberal land grabs.

Cindi Katz, Ph.D., is a professor of geography, women’s and gender studies and American studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research concerns social reproduction, the production of nature, the workings of the security state in everyday environments, the privatization of the public environment, the cultural politics of childhood and the intertwining of memory and history in the geographical imagination. She received Distinguished Scholarship Honors from the AAG in 2021 and its Lifetime Achievement Honor in 2024, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2003-4) and the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professorship in Gender Studies at Cambridge University (2011-12).

Past Speakers

• Richard Schein, University of Kentucky [2025]
• Katherine McKittrick, Professor, Queen's University [2024]
• Derek Alderman, Professor, University of Tennessee [2023]
• Julie Guthman, Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz [2022]
• Karl Raitz, Emeritus Professor, University of Kentucky [2019]
• Sarah Elwood, Professor, University of Washington [2018]
• John Paul Jones, Professor, University of Arizona [2017]
• Jennifer Hyndman, Professor, York University [2016]
• Michael Brown, Professor, University of Washington [2015]
• John Kupfer, Professor, University of South Carolina [2014]
• Sarah Whatmore, Professor, University of Oxford [2013]
• Trevor Barnes, Professor, University of British Columbia [2012]
• Karl Zimmerer, Professor, Penn State University [2011]
• Lynn Staeheli, Professor, University of Edinburgh [2010]
• Carol Harden, Professor, University of Tennessee [2009]
• Jamie Peck, Professor, University of Wisconsin (Madison) [2008]
• Amy Glasmeier, Professor, Pennsylvania State University [2007]
• Craig Colten, Professor, Louisiana State University [2006]
• Nuala Johnson, Reader, Queen's University of Belfast, UK [2005]
• John Antenucci, Founder and CEO, Plangraphics [2004]
• Sallie Marston, Professor, University of Arizona [2003]
• Sally Horn, Professor, University of Tennessee [2002]
• Victoria Lawson, Professor, University of Washington [2001]
• Eric Sheppard, Professor, University of Minnesota [2000]
• Richard Walker, Professor, University of California, Berkeley [1999]
• Susan Hanson, Professor, Clark University [1998]
• Ron Eller, Director, Appalachian Center, University of Kentucky [1997]
• David Harvey, Professor, Johns Hopkins University [1996]
• Gurney Norman, Professor, University of Kentucky [1995]
• B. L. Turner, II, Professor, Clark University [1994]
• John A. Agnew, Professor, Syracuse University [1993]
• George J. Demko, Professor, Dartmouth College [1992]
• Anne Buttimer, Professor, Universite d'Ottawa [1991]
• Saul B. Cohen, Professor, Hunter College [1990]
• Harm J. deBlij, Professor, University of Miami [1989]
• Sam Bowers Hilliard, Professor, Louisiana State University [1988]
• Risa Palm, Professor, University of Colorado [1987]
• Melvin G. Marcus, Professor, Arizona State University [1986]
• Chistopher L. Salter, Professor, University of California, Los Angeles [1985]
• Julian V. Minghi, Professor, University of South Carolina [1984]
• Barry C. Bishop, Asst. to the President, National Geographic Society [1983]
• Grady Clay, Editor, Landscape Architecture [1982]
• Peirce Lewis, Professor, Pennsylvania State University [1981]
• Michael P. Conzen, Professor, University of Chicago [1980]
• Cotton Mather, Professor, University of Minnesota [1979]
• Marvin Mikesell, Professor, University of Chicago [1978]
• Preston James, Maxwell Professor, Syracuse University [1977]
• Langdon White, Professor, Stanford University [1976]
• John Fraser Hart, Professor, University of Minnesota [1975]
• Preston James, Maxwell Professor, Syracuse University [1974]
• J. R. Schwendeman, Professor Emeritus, University of Kentucky [1973]