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For many reasons, geography education is a national concern. There is a need to combat the often-documented geographic ignorance of US schoolchildren (and adults), to understand the geographies of a globalizing world, and now increasingly, to teach spatial thinking skills to make informed and ethical use of geospatial technologies (GPS, GIS, remote sensing, and geovisualization tools).
For this reason, geographers at Penn State engage both in scholarly research and practical implementation. Over the past few years, graduate students at Penn State have worked on a range of topics including: the spatial rationales for the locations of the land grant universities; the physical and virtual infrastructures that support home schooling; the spatial diffusion of colleges and universities across the US; the ease of learning to use different GIS software packages by middle school teachers; and the success of programs for place-based education.
The Department has two education-related programs. The first, in collaboration with the College of Earth and Mineral Science's Dutton e-Education Institute, has pioneered instructor-led distance education programs in Geographic Information Systems and in Geospatial Intelligence. The second, through the Gould Center for Geography Education and Outreach, designs maps and other information graphics for other parts of the University. The Department is also active in the Pennsylvania Geographic Alliance and is the home for the Pennsylvania Geography Bee.
Faculty with interests in Geography Education:
Dr. Lorraine Dowler
Dr. Roger Downs
Research focused in the area of Feminist Geography examines the gendered dynamics of spatial processes. We investigate how gender affects the political, economic, cultural and environmental events that shape and are shaped by geographic processes. We combine feminist theory with critical race theory, post-colonial theory and Marxist approaches for understanding the social dynamics of power and resistance. At the graduate level, we offer a dual-degree program for students who would like to obtain a doctorate or a master's degree in both Geography and in Women's Studies.
Faculty with interests in Gendered Geographies
Dr. Lorraine Dowler
Dr. Melissa Wright
Cultural Geographers at Penn State examine the interdependent relationships binding culture, space and place. We look at culture as a fluid entity that both influences and is influenced by the processes of economy, the state, environment and social identity. We use different temporal lenses to examine cultural processes as they influence the making of past and present places. We also investigate geographical patterns through time, such as how people interact with their environment and create cultural landscapes. Consequently, we engage with and problematize international forces such as globalization, westernization and militarization and highlight how they vary across scales. We examine such processes through a range of theoretical lenses such as post-structuralism, post-colonialism, Marxism, feminism and critical race theory.
Faculty with interests in Cultural Geographies:
Dr. Lorraine Dowler
Dr. Deryck Holdsworth
Dr. Ikubolajeh Logan
Dr. James McCarthy
Dr. Melissa Wright
Social and environmental justice is an area of interest within various academic and policy realms concerned with the inequities experienced as a result of race, socio-economic status, and ethnicity. While much work in environmental justice has usefully focused on the disproportionate exposure of poor and minority populations to environmental hazards, geographers at Penn State University are working to expand conceptualizations of justice to include systematic and comparative research within urban and rural populations, industrialized and developing contexts, access to and control over resources for production and livelihoods and rights to environmental entitlements. Additionally, research and teaching examines the unwilling exposure to hazards, processes and institutions of environmental governance, and indeed the social processes that create and perpetuate inequality on the basis of race, gender, income, or other social categories.
Faculty with interests in issues of Justice and Nature are:
Dr. Amy Glasmeier
Dr. Brian King
Dr. James McCarthy
Dr. Petra Tschakert
Dr. Melissa Wright
Political economy examines the relationships between economic and political structures, processes, and outcomes. Collectively, political economists analyze the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth in a society, with an emphasis on who gains and who loses depending on how those activities are arranged. As the name suggests, political economy's critical insight is that politics and economics are always intertwined, not two separate spheres. It thus encompasses everything from trade policies and economic growth to income inequality and poverty, and everything from wage levels and labor relations to spending on parks, infrastructure, public health, the military, and other major government responsibilities. Political economy has a long intellectual history with roots in the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and other thinkers who predate the separation of politics, economics, and geography into separate disciplines, and whose work still provides examples of integrative analyses of large-scale questions about how modern societies work. Geographers working in the tradition of political economy conduct research on a wide range of questions, ranging from the effects of neoliberal versions of political economic theory, to classic questions of social reproduction, national regional growth, trade, and industrial location, to the political economy of new markets in carbon and other environment-related topics. What they have in common is a strong interest in how economic and political structures and processes shape the geographies of our world.
Faculty with interests in political economy:
Dr. Amy Glasmeier
Dr. Brian King
Dr. James McCarthy
Dr. Melissa Wright
Dr. Lakshman Yapa
Research focused in the area of political geographies at Penn State utilizes diverse critical theoretical frameworks to study the dynamics regarding states, citizenship, migration, nationalism, and global capitalism. We relate these dynamics to embodied subjectivities such as race, gender, sexuality and class. We examine the spatial dynamics that lead to uneven political processes across scales, and we investigate the connections linking global processes to the practices within specific places, such as cities, communities and households. We also encourage our students to make connections between their work as scholars and their activities in the places where they live and conduct their research.
Faculty with interests in Political Geographies:
Dr. Lorraine Dowler
Dr. Brian King
Dr. James McCarthy
Dr. Melissa Wright
With an increasing proportion of the global population residing in cities, the spaces and places that are designated "urban" are fascinatingly varied foci for academic study. These can include the small town Main Streets of rural regions, the towering office clusters that mark downtown in metropolitan areas, and the sprawling suburban realms where more and more people live, work and shop. Faculty and graduate students in the department research urban places as a way of understanding ethnic or social relations, or track gradients of well-being or deprivation, or probe the ways that broad regions are controlled by decision-makers in key urban nodes. We analyze and visualize census and real estate records, categorize the built environment, and construct ethnographic profiles to link people to place, past to present, and compare policy to practice.
Faculty with interests in Urban Geography:
Dr. Amy Glasmeier
Dr. Deryck Holdsworth
Dr. James McCarthy
Dr. Roger Downs
Dr. Melissa Wright
Dr. Lakshman Yapa