People at UB Geography:
Faculty

Site Last Updated: Fall 2005

Education     Research    Teaching    Students     University Service    Service to the Discipline/Academia    Community Service    Links    My CV

Education

AB, Sociology, with honors; Vassar College, 1989
MA, Geography; University of Colorado, 1992
Ph.D., Geography; University of Colorado, 1995
 

Research Overview

I am an urban social geographer. I am mainly interested in the ways that social, economic, political, and environmental processes influence cities and communities, as well as the ways that people's everyday lives create meaningful spaces and places within, or even against, the larger-scale processes operating on them. My focus has always been on social/spatial processes of marginalization and disempowerment, for example, through gender, race/ethnicity, class, youth, etc. I am especially motivated by issues such as employment, households and neighborhoods, welfare, public space, poverty, discrimination, and identity. I am a qualitative researcher: I use ethnography and other methods to learn about the geographic meanings and processes that matter to marginalized groups. Over the past 5 years I have also developed an associated interest in critical perspectives on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and have explored methods of combining qualitative research with GIS (Knigge & Cope, In press)

 

 

 

Field expeditions in the ChUG project: exploring the neighborhood with notebooks and GPS

 

 

Current Projects:

Children's Urban Geographies Project (ChUG): http://www.geog.buffalo.edu/research/geokids
I am the director of this research/teaching project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation (CAREER). Our goal is to understand how children in low-income, socially/spatially marginalized areas of Buffalo conceptualize urban spaces and what would constitute a 'child-friendly city'. The project is run partly through my 'service-learning' course, GEO496/596, "Children's Urban Geographies", which I offer every Fall semester. In this course, students participate in a weekly seminar focused on readings in the emerging field of children's geographies as well as qualitative and participatory research methods, and they also volunteer one afternoon per week at our research site -- an after-school program on the West Side of Buffalo. The students learn participant observation and practice qualitative research skills while helping with homework and serving as 'big friends' to the children, who are primarily African-American and Hispanic, between 6 and 12 years old. Each student in the course designs and executes a qualitative research project that is as child-centered as possible around the broad issue of urban space. These projects are highlighted on the ChUG website and have ranged from constructing a scale model of children's ideal play spaces to mapping neighborhood smells to sewing a neighborhood quilt.

I am currently working on several papers from this project, focused around issues of children's citizenship and rights in public space, the mechanisms of social control that regulate children's actions (specifically in after-school programs and on the street), children's racial and gender identity formation in specific neighborhood sites, how children perceive their neighborhoods and what they would most like to see, and the challenges (and strengths) of using participatory research strategies with children.

Lots of Opportunity Project (LOOP): My own most recent project with ChUG involved 10 children over a 5-week period in the summer in which they mapped their neighborhoods and constructed ideal visions for what they would like in vacant lots. Please click on the "LOOP" link on the ChUG website for pictures and more information. We are currently distributing a report on LOOP to local public officials and the mayor-elect of Buffalo in the hopes that the children's perspectives and wishes will be acknowledged and incorporated in local plans. Click HERE to download a Powerpoint presentation on LOOP.

Child-Friendly Cities: In August 2005 I attended the ChildStreet workshop/conference in Delft, Holland, where I learned a lot about what is going on internationally with regard to constructing child-friendly spaces in cities and towns. The United States is woefully behind in both the urban design aspects of child-friendly cities and the question of youth participation in local planning and governance, such as through youth councils or 'youth policy filters', which assess the impacts of all new regulations and development projects on young people. I plan on applying for new funding in 2006 to explore the conceptual and practical issues of 'child-friendly cities' and consider some possibilities for US cities and towns to implement new strategies.

Qualitative Research:
With my friend and colleague, Sarah Elwood (University of Arizona), I am co-editing a book on Qualitative Research and GIS. This comes out of my interest in Geographic Information and Society Issues (see GEO594 below), and work that my students and I have done toward integrating ethnography and GIS. The target publishing date is mid-2007.

In 1999 I started the Qualitative Research Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers because there was no formal mechanism or forum for discussion of issues in doing qualitative geography, yet I saw that many colleagues and graduate students were engaged in critical, qualitative geographic research. Thanks to the efforts of many committed people (see the QRSG website for a list of current officers), the specialty group now has 235 members, sponsors 30+ sessions at the annual meetings, and offers $500 research awards to students in the process of doing qualitative geography projects.  I am currently working on a chapter for the Handbook of Qualitative Research in Geography (Sage Publications) that will be an overview of the history of qualitative work in our discipline.

 

Recent Projects (1995-2001):

• Researching the effects of welfare reform on non-profit social service organizations to understand their roles in shaping local labor markets in Buffalo (see publications list for relevant papers).
• Monitoring a housing discrimination restitution project for low-income people of color in Buffalo, with MA student, Dan Trudeau.

Click here for my full CV or here for just my Publications

Teaching  (Click on the Course number for enrollment info. Click on the Course name for the course website.)

    Undergraduate Courses

GEO 102     Introduction to Human Geography (Fall 2005)
GEO 367     Urban Social Geography (Spring 2006)
GEO 426     Gender and Geography   (Not currently offered)

GEO 496    Children's Urban Geographies (cross-listed with GEO596) (Fall 2005)
 

    Graduate Courses

GEO 528    Geography and Social Theory  (Spring 2006)
GEO 633    Critical Urban Issues  (Fall 2004)
GEO 594    Geographic Information and Society (co-taught with David Mark) (Spring 2005)

GEO 596    Children's Urban Geographies (cross-listed with GEO496) (Fall 2005)

I have been fortunate to work with many wonderful graduate and undergraduate students. Here are some highlights of past and current students I have advised:

Past Students:

Nicole Reid (BA, 1999). Nicole currently works as an analyst for the national office of the Poison Control Center in Washington, DC.

Daniel Trudeau (MA, 2001): Place Politics: Exploring processes of residential segregation through relations of gender, community, work, and race. Dan is now finishing his Ph.D. in Geography at University of Colorado, Boulder.

Tom Stieve (MA, 2003): Border Identity Between Niagara Falls, NY and Niagara Fall, Ontario. Tom is now a social science librarian at Brown University.

Deirdre McManus (MA, 2005): Finding Employment: Using a GIS to Restructure Opportunity. Deirdre used data on low-income women participating in a job-search support program to evaluate how their home location, wages, and journey to work were taken into account when they became employed. Deirdre now works as a GIS analyst for a company in Buffalo.

Joanna Rogalski (MA, summer 2005) Theater, Qualitative Research Methods, and Children's Spatial Perspectives. In working simultaneously for an MA in Geography and a Masters of Urban Planning, Joanna used mixed methods based on the concept of performance as a route to knowledge-building to examine such questions as memory inscribed in space, the 'child's-eye view' of urban space, and children's concepts of 'haunted spaces'.

Current Students:

Shannon Azzarelli (MA) Shannon is a second-year MA student doing her research on the intersections of race, segregation, crime, and incarceration in Buffalo.

Matt Eggleton (Ph.D.) Matt is a second-year student working on geographies of power.

Lynn Hepburn (Ph.D.) Lynn's project topic is still emerging but her interest is in historical geography.

Jacquie Housel (Ph.D.; ABD) Jacquie is working on a project examining the nexus of race, place, and power. Her particular focus is on policing and how two marginalized social groups (young black men and older white women) living in Buffalo's highly segregated neighborhoods view the various forms of power and racialization of place.

Jin-Kyu Jung (Ph.D.) Jin-Kyu is working on an innovative approach to integrating ethnographic, qualitative methods and GIS at the software level. He is using a community study of two Buffalo neighborhoods as a case example of ways to integrate analysis through combining Atlas.ti and ArcGIS.

LaDona Knigge (Ph.D.; ABD) LaDona is nearly done with her work on community gardens in Buffalo, how they are constructed -- both physically and socially -- and their meanings for local residents and gardeners. She has used a combined methodology of ethnography, photography, and GIS to understand the potential for community gardens to serve as "emerging public spaces" that are largely outside of the gaze of capitalist development because of their marginal locations and surrounding poverty.

Frank Latcham (MA) Frank has taken some of the Children's Urban Geographies ideas and really run with them, documenting in particular the effects of the 2004-2005 budget crisis of Erie County on children and young people.

Will Poppe (Ph.D.) Will is a first-year doctoral student interested in immigration, city planning, and critical social issues in US cities.

Graduate Committees

I also serve on half a dozen graduate students' PhD committees in Geography, as well as the committees of several students in the School of Social Work and the American Studies Program.

University Service

• For several years I served on the Steering Committee of the Community and Identity Program of the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy
   
• I am a member of the Graduate Committee of the Department of Geography, and also serve on the Grievance Committee.
   
• I recently assisted in the formation of the Buffalo Racial Justice Seminar, a group of faculty and staff at UB who are interested in highlighting and supporting research by faculty and graduate students on racial justice issues in Buffalo and beyond. We held a workshop in late September, 2005 (click here for the details) to showcase existing work and hope to engage in 3-5 additional activities in the coming academic year.

Service to the Discipline and Academia

• In 1999 I founded the Qualitative Research Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers. I have also written a few papers in the area of Qualitative Research in Geography and feminist epistemologies (see publications list).
• I have served as board member for several specialty groups of the AAG: Urban, Political, Qualitative Research; and been Chair of the Political Geography Specialty Group and the Qualitative Research Specialty Group. I have also been newsletter editor for the Urban group and webmaster for Urban and Qualitative Research.
• I currently serve on the Review Panel of the National Science Foundation that evaluates Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants in Geography and Regional Science.

Community Service

• In many ways, my research is simultaneously community service. I help out in an after-school program on the West Side of Buffalo at least one day per week. While we often run geography-related projects, my students and I also spend a lot of time helping with homework, being a supportive adult, listening without judgment, and just talking and playing with the children.
• I helped to found and now am co-chair of the Pedestrian and Bicycle Board, which serves in an advisory capacity for my local municipality. We do research on bike and pedestrian issues in the village and town, monitor projects (parks, roads, etc.), and advocate for human-scale, ped/bike-friendly policy and facilities. Most recently I conducted a survey of over 300 high school students to evaluate their journey-to-school practices and what they wish they could do to navigate between home, school, and other locations.

  Learn more about the National Science Foundation's CAREER Awards.

 Information about the  Qualitative Research Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers.  

Look at some useful sites on qualitative research in social sciences.

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