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E-mail: akg1@ems.psu.edu
Curriculum Vitae
September 12, 2007. Reframing Poverty: Geography Knowledge to Create A New "Poverty Knowledge" Coffee Hour. Department of Geography, Penn State.
August 23, 2007. Reframing Poverty: Geography Knowledge to Create A New "Poverty Knowledge" To Stimulate a New Politics and Policy to Combat Economic Insecurity. Congressional Hunger Center. Washington D.C.
June 29, 2007. Trends And Challenges In America's Urban Areas: How Cities Will Succeed In An Era Of Globalization Huazhong University Of Science And Technology, College Of Public Administration, Wuhan, China.
June 28, 2007. Spatial Segregation And The Creative Class: Revolutionary Change Or Blue Smoke And Mirrors? Second Global Conference On Economic Geography. Beijing International Conference Center, Beijing China.
June 20, 2007. Stories From The Field: The Social Implications Of (Assorted) Biofuel Futures Workshop On Economic, Environmental And Social Dimensions, Issues, And Implications Of Bioenergy Production A Joint Workshop Of DOE and The CSREES Of USDA, Washington D.C.
April 13, 2007. Ellen Semple Annual Lecture. University of Kentucky, Department of Geography. March 30, 2007.
Informing Grant Making: A Discussion of Poverty Concerns Tri-State Teleconference on Poverty Trends, Grantmakers Association of Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia.
March 24, 2007. Social Science Data and Mapping for the Legal Services Field. Denver Colorado.
March 2, 2007. Breaking the Habit: Oil Addiction and US Competitiveness in Global Renewable Energy Industries. 2007 J. Douglas Eyre Distinguished Lecture. University of North Carolina.
February 25, 2007. Job Creation Opportunities in Appalachia's Renewable Energy Sectors. Appalachian Governors Winter Meeting, Quorum. Washington D.C.
January 23, 2007. Expert Testimony. House Committee on Transportation, Infrastructure, Subcommittee on Economic Development, Infrastructure and Disasters. Washington DC.
January 12, 2007. Regional Needs for Telecommunications Infrastructure to Support Renewable Energy Development. Southern Tier Local Development District. New York.
January 8, 2007. Information at Your Fingertips: Data to Inform Grant Making in Rural Areas. Council of State Community Development Agencies. With Priscilla Salant. Washington D.C.
Kieron Brance
John Bodenman
Cynthia Brown
Guo Chen
Tracey Farrigan
Kurt Fuellhart
Christy Jocoy
Robin Leichenko
Chandrani Ohdedar
Michael Patullo
Ann Myatt James
Matt Stern
Amy Welch
Lawrence Wood, Jr.
Pennsylvania State University Rosemary Schraer Mentoring Award. January 2006.
The John D. Whisman Appalachian Regional Scholar. August 2005-August 2006. August 2006-2007.
An Atlas of Poverty in America: One Nation, Pulling Apart, 1960-2003
The Atlas on Poverty in America provides an historical and contemporary account of economic opportunity in the United States. The United States is a nation pulling apart to a degree unknown in the last 25 years. A decade of strong national economic growth in the 1990s left many of America's communities falling far behind median national measures of economic health. The topics displayed in the Atlas were selected based on many factors, most importantly the historical record of poverty in America and the lived experience of being poor in our nation today. A central theme is the enduring character of poverty in America, consistently electing groups of individuals and places over time. A key message of this Atlas is that America's poor are people who work or who are dependents of people who work and face limited opportunity, often due to living in places that are seriously disadvantaged because of geography or history or both. The story also is one about public policy and the extent to which public intervention has been sufficient to ensure that all persons in this country have an equal chance to achieve their highest potential.
View the Atlas at http://www.povertyinamerica.psu.edu/ and purchase the Atlas at Amazon.com
In 1989, I traveled to Bejing four months before the Tiananmen Square crisis occurred. It was March, cool and windy. No one had personal cars and transportation by bike, bus, or the occasional taxi was the major means of mobility. Food was scare and bland, and shopping was limited to state run stores. The quality of goods was highly variable and very simple. Foreigners were not allowed to venture out and about without a guide. Guides were young graduate students seeking advanced degrees in physics, chemistry, all hard sciences. Life was still.
Twenty years later, things could not be more different. Traffic snakes on the city's overburdened arterials like LA rush hour on steroids. Pollution is worse than I ever experienced growing up in Southern California. By noon, a building only a quarter of a mile from my hotel had literally disappeared into the grey soupy dust and chemical residue that stood in for the air. Food was better and more plentiful, almost too plentiful. The contrast with my earlier journey was extremely stark.
Last year, Huang Dong, of GuangDong University in Wuhan, was a visiting scholar in our department. He arranged for me to visit to his campus and through friends made it possible for me to tour factories of widely differing levels of sophistication. By the time I left the country, I could see that the evolving global supply chain was tearing the nation apart. The environment was in major melt down and corruption was mentioned by everyone. While opportunities to get ahead were evident and signs of growth were everywhere, still there was a kind of weary fatalism in peoples' eyes. I was struck by the ingenuity and diligence of the Chinese people. Their generosity was compelling. And yet below the surface discontent was evident. While change had certainly occurred in the intervening years since I first walked the streets of Bejing, still nothing I saw 20 years ago could have prepared me for the remarkable transformation that had occurred in just two decades ago.
I came back from China and reorganized my classes to learn more about this Sleeping Giant. It is a fascinating place and certainly worthy of close investigation. Short term challenges such as those associated with the country's unregulated manufacturing economy will no doubt be resolved by central government edict. But the environmental challenges facing the nation are unprecedented and are likely to overwhelm even the best efforts of the national government. Time will tell.
Geography has had little to say about the existence of concentrated pockets of poverty in the U.S. despite its geographic footprint. An examination of the last seventy-five years of published scholarship indicates geographers have been disengaged from the public debate about the meaning and explanations of persistent poverty and social exclusion. Five years ago, I set about to develop a line of research, policy analysis, and public commentary on the spatial implications of persistent poverty.
This research trajectory has been supported through grants from the Ford Foundation and the Economic Development Administration and has allowed me to:
I have contributed to discussions of the need for new metrics to better define and understand the enduring nature of poverty in the U.S. In the next three months, I will publish an Atlas of Poverty in America: a Forty Year History. In addition, I have developed and operate a Web site that contains tools and analysis that community groups, private citizens, and governmental bodies can use to analysis their own geographic area. I have proposed and have been awarded a sabbatical leave to conduct comparative research in the U.K. examining poverty policy in the U.S. and U.K. of the last ten years.
In 2006, I began my second appointment as the John Whisman Appalachian Scholar. In that capacity I hve overlapping responsibilities: examine the continuing challenges of distressed and At Risk Counties in the Region and assist the Commission in developing an energy policy in light of recent energy trends. In integrating the issues, I explored the opportunities for the ARC region to experience industrial development associated with renewable energy industries.
The global demand for energy is increasing at a staggering rate, particularly as growing countries such as India and China develop at an unprecedented pace. The capacity of conventional resources to meet this growing demand for energy is in serious question. The composition of future energy supplies now dominates the international energy discussion, as it is formative of economic security and development. The influence of energy supply on global relations cannot be overemphasized, and the addition of billions of new energy consumers to already strained conventional energy supplies will further exacerbate energy related tensions. Increasing demand for energy is operating in tandem with increasing global concerns over the impact of conventional energy on our environment, particularly referring to greenhouse gas emissions. As this new energy paradigm continues to reveal itself, actions are underway to establish and grow new energy sources. New sources will not only provide additional opportunities to satisfy growing demand, but non-fossil fuel sources can provide climate friendly alternatives to conventional fossil based resources. Renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and biomass power are growing in importance as resources to address growing energy demand and the requirement to control externalities from fossil fuel consumption.
Over the last three decades, the roles of renewable resources have evolved from experimental afterthoughts to viable means of energy supply. Having evolved over the last thirty years, much of the technology of wind, solar and even biofuels have reached a level of maturity where production has achieved economies of scale and large producers have taken over several of the market niches. An almost singular reliance on fossil fuels has stunted the growth of renewable energy industries in the US. The US now lags behind its global competitors in these strategic industries. Only 20 years ago, the US was an innovator and recognized leader in this emergent sector. Today, while known in the industry group simply based on the size of the national economy, the US is a distant fourth or fifth player in an industrial group that collectively and consistently is growing by at least 25 percent per year for the last five years and is expected to continue or exceed this rate of growth in the foreseeable future. Wind energy is primarily dominated by European companies, with only one of the top ten manufacturers based in the US. India is already a significant global player in the wind industry and China is positioned to enter into this industry in force over the next few years. The Solar energy market is less concentrated than wind and biofuels, with both retail and wholesale markets, than the wind industry, but it also is demonstrating similar trends to wind in that the US is now a net importer of solar photovoltaic (PV) modules.
What the evolving nature of manufacturing within these industries reveals is that the US is allowing itself to be shut out of one of the fasted growing industries in the world. As a nation with increasing annual energy demands itself, left unchecked, the US may well be reestablishing its future energy dependence on the manufacturing of energy equipment from beyond its own borders. Energy security issues aside, this means the US may not be positioning itself to capitalize on an energy sector it was foundational in creating. In particular, areas of the country that may have significant capacity to manufacture equipment for these industries may lose out on a tremendous opportunity for economic growth from the development of renewable energy technologies. It is from this perspective that I have begun to export the role renewable energy manufacturing can play the Appalachian region. Experienced in equipment and components manufacturing, and with substantial infrastructure on the ground, Appalachia may be in a position to engage this growing energy sector and provide local growth in jobs and investment.
I am currently writing a textbook with Michael Conroy, a colleague at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, for an introductory undergraduate course in economic geography. The book address issues typically found in economic geography textbooks, but from a new perspective, which takes into account the distributional implications of globalization. This book is in direct response to the findings of the NSF sponsored panel I convened five years ago to examine the future of the sub-discipline.
Energizing Appalachia: Global Challenges And The Prospect Of A Renewable Future. Appalachian Regional Commission. Washington D.C. 2007.
Beyond The Digital Divide: Broadband Internet Use And Rural Development In Pennsylvania. Center for Rural Pennsylvania. 2007.
Economic Development Potential Of Conventional And Potential Alternative Energy Sources In Appalachian Counties. With Tom Bell. Appalachian Regional Commission. June 21, 2006.
Broadband Internet Service in Urban and Rural Pennsylvania: Commonwealth or Digital Divide? Center for Rural Pennsylvania. Harrisburg, PA. Summer 2003.
Manufacturing Time: The Rise and Fall of Watch Industries and Regions Around the Globe. Guilford Press. New York. Early Summer 2000.
ON HOLD: Telecommunications in Rural America. With Lawrence Wood. Economic Policy Institute. Summer 2000. (monograph).
Global and Local Challenges to Theory, Practice, and Teaching in Economic Geography. The Institute for Policy Research and Evaluation and the National Science Foundation. Summer 1998. (monograph).
Branch Plants and Rural Development in the Age of Globalization. With Amy Kays, Jeffery W. Thompson, and Rob Gurwitt. State Overview Series, Rural Economic Policy Program, The Aspen Institute. 1995. (monograph).
From Combines to Computers: Rural Services and Development in the Age of Information Technology. With Marie Howland. (Chapter SUNY Press. 1995.).
The High-Tech Potential: Economic Development in Rural America. Rutgers University Press, Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University. 1991.
(E-mail akg1@ems.psu.edu for other published materials)
"Overhauling and Revitalizing Federal Economic Development Programs" Economic Development Quarterly. With Ann Markusen. Accepted for publication Spring 2007.
"Research design and the socially situated researcher." Handbook of Qualitative Methods in Geography. Stuart Aiken Ed. Under review. Spring 2007.
Landscapes of Inequality: Spatial Segregation, Economic Isolation, and Contingent Residential Locations. Economic Geography. With Tracey Farrigan. August 2007. pg 221-230.
"Neo-Liberalism, Democracy and the State: Temporal and Spatial Constraints to Globalization." With Ron Johnston. Space and Polity. Spring 2007.
Hotspot Detection and Prioritization GeoInformatics for Digital Governance. G.P. Patil, R. Acharya, A. Glasmeier, W. Myers, S. Phoha, and S. Rathbun. Spring 2007.
"Multiple Methodologies, Epistemologies, and Audiences" in Politics and Method. Edited by Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell. Spring 2007.
"The Economic Impacts of the Prison Development Boom on Persistently Poor Rural Places". With Tracey Farrigan. International Journal of Regional Science. Spring 2007.
The Self-Conscious Firm: Information Needs, Acquisition Strategies and Utilization Prospects. In Regions, Innovations, and Economic Growth. Ed. Karen Polenske.. Cambridge University Press. Spring 2007.
