Geography Graduate Group Students

My doctoral dissertation challenges an idealized view that portrays San Francisco as a well planned, forward looking urban experience. By examining the marginality and power struggles that have been at play for over one century, I illustrate the hierarchy of power that lies beneath the surface of San Francisco. Governmental processes and institutions, including city and neighborhood planning, public health, and the variegated systems of law, have been employed to hide both those cast as marginalized, as well as the violence that is required to create this idyllic view. My dissertation is rooted in legal geography, urban planning, and critical theory

Katie recently received a MS in Community Development from UC Davis. Her thesis, “Food Logics: A Case Study of Dig Deep Farms & Produce” explored placed-based values for food security work in Ashland, California. She is currently a Ph.D. student in Geography at UC Davis, a student member of the Studies of Food and the Body Multicampus Research Program and a research assistant with Food Dignity, a national community food security research project supported by an Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Competitive Grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Her academic interests include community food security work, anti-racism activism, quotidian food habits, and family and community traditions. Katie has a BA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh and a certificate in L’Art de la Patisserie from the French Pastry School in Chicago

Natural Landscapes, Restoration

Food based development, conservation and agriculture

Comparative animal behavior, particularly between wild and captive populations , resource use (especially in areas where human-animal conflict exists), conservation, and community development

My academic specializations include animal biogeography, conservation biology, and habitat conservation. My dissertation research examines killer whale behavioral change in response to oceanographic indices such as bathymetry, tides and currents as well as human variables such as vessel quantity, distance and speed. My field research experience includes the use of non-invasive data collection techniques for wildlife research including the use of mobile remote sensing technology to record geospatial data, acoustic recording tags to measure received noise levels by whales, and scat detection dogs

Employing Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies, Foucault, and Black Feminist Studies in understanding geographies of nutrition and health of the African Diaspora in the USA.

Landscape and restoration ecology, environmental design & ecosystem processes and services

My dissertation examines how perceptions of rural character influence land use decision making along the rural-urban interface using three case studies in Calaveras County, California. Taking a political ecological approach, I consider three divergent instances of land management in the Sierra Nevada foothills, each representing a different outcome, a different way of dealing with changing landscapes and lifestyles. From these cases, I investigate the values various rural residents embrace and how they mobilize those values and ideologies to influence and enact land use change

The history of land use and environmental policy

Social Entrepreneurship: How the intersection of business, government, NGOs, academia, and philanthropy can work synergistically to solve large scale social and environmental problems

Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design, Urban and Regional Planning, Environmental Geography

Environmental and natural resource economics and policy, land use and ecosystem services.

Geospatial Web Technologies, Open Source Geospatial Software, Public Participation GIS

Indigenous Traditional Knowledge, Protection and Enhancement of
Indigenous Biodiversity in Chile and Latin America

Urban geography and the structure and possible re-structure of suburban areas to provide sustainability and a sense of place to communities

Social movements in Latin America, especially the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST); food sovereignty; agroecology, place-making and identity; critical pedagogy

Brian is a Ph.D. student in the GGG specializing in GIScience and Landscape Architecture. His research focuses on the application of GIS to the curation of living plant collections in public gardens. His forthcoming dissertation presents his work to develop an evolving GIS standard for public garden management, the application of it at gardens worldwide, and a complimentary web mapping application for collections research.

Brian is also the Director of the Alliance for Public Gardens GIS, a recent Putnam Fellow in Plant Science at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, and the GIS Manager at the UC Davis Arboretum. Recently he has been an invited speaker at the 2011 Harvard University Center for Geographic Analysis Conference, a lecturer at the Center for Public Horticulture, and a 2010 Esri Special Achievement in GIS award winner.

For more information please visit the Alliance for Public Gardens GIS website at http://www.apgg.org or download his CV.

Sustainable agriculture, participaty land use planning, conservation of biodiversity, knowledge and management of agrobiodiversity by Indigenous and local communities, and conservation in situ.

Laura Pascoe is a Geography PhD student with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research. Her primary focus is on using feminist, gender, and queer analyses to increase men’s involvement in gender justice and sexual and reproductive health and rights-related issues. Her PhD research will continue in collaboration with the same organisation she did her master's research with--Sonke Gender Justice, a South African-based NGO that engages men and boys in gender justice--where she will examine male-friendly health care clinics as an approach to engaging men in sexual and reproductive health and rights. Laura is also actively involved in global health, serving as 2010-2011 co-chair on the Student Advisory Committee (SAC) for the Global Health Education Consortium’s (GHEC), a global organisation that brings students, educators, health professionals, and institutions together to build capacity of the global workforce to meet the needs of underserved population.

My research incorporates political ecology and common pool resource in a case study of groundwater governance in Guadalupe Valley, Baja California--Mexico's largest viticulture region. I'm investigating the socio-economic, geographic and political variables influencing collective action in a local watershed based groundwater association through survey and interview of local groundwater users. Results from this research will hopefully inform future participatory policy of environmental resources

Historical ecology of the San Joaquin Valley

My interests lie mainly in cultural, historical, and regional geography with focus on land tenure and access issues. Additionally my work focuses on geographic representation, cartography and the importance of visual syntax to convey meaning along with keen interest in the examination of geography and literature. Other foci include political ecology, riparian geography, and modern geographic exploration.

Environmental geography, California studies, biogeocultural iconography

Cultural Geography, Geography of Religion (focus on Islam), Social and Cultural Theory, Flexible Citizenship, South Asian Diaspora Communities in USA, Youth Empowerment, Community Participation, Sustainable Development, Connections between Geography and Visual Arts

I am interested in interspecific vocal communication, and how communication is influenced by the environment. My dissertation focuses on anti-predator alarm calls of California ground squirrels. I am examining whether squirrels recognize different types of predators or different levels of threat that predators represent. I am also examining geographic variation in the alarm calls (also known as regional dialect). In the future I would like to study how climate change is affecting biogeography

Geography, Climate Change, Coastal Ecosystems, Landscape Ecology, and Wildlife Biology

I research California's beach plants using field measurements and remote sensing to assess human impacts on vegetation and comparing ground sampling measurements with data collected from images taken from a hobby remote controlled hot air balloon.

Decolonization theory for urban environmental sustainability, indigenous epistemologies, food sovereignty, globalization resistance and effects, Zapatistas, environmental justice, eco-feminism/eco-womanism