B.A.Sc., McMaster University; D. Phil (1999) Oxford University

"I work at the intersection of economic and environmental geography. My primary research interests span political economy, political ecology, environmental studies, development studies, and resource and environmental management. I conduct research in both the 'developing' and 'developed' world, and consequently have an interest in debates over postcolonialism and development. My theoretical interests currently focus on the debate over the use of markets and market instruments in environmental management (the 'neoliberal nature' debate). My primary research focus for the past few years has been on water governance in the context of neoliberalism (water privatization, decentralization of water management). I am also developing new research projects on the geography of food, and on resilience. I would particularly welcome students working in these latter two areas."

 

Dr. Bakker holds the Canada Research Chair in Political Ecology.

 

Website: www.geog.ubc.ca/~bakker

Website: www.watergovernance.ca

Email Contact: karen.bakker@geog.ubc.ca

Office Phone: 604-822-6702

Room Number: GEOG 142

B.Sc.-Econ., University College London; M.A., Ph.D. (1983), University of Minnesota

"I have three main research projects. The first is investigating Vancouver's new economy and its effects on the city. I am undertaking this project in collaboration with Tom Hutton, School of Planning UBC. We have examined the video game industry, as well as architecture, and plan also to investigate the film and TV, and fashion industries. The second is a history of American geography from the Second World War through the Cold War. The project stems from an earlier one concerned with geography's quantitative revolution. It became clear that the roots of that revolution lay in Cold War, and earlier, Second World War, social scientific methods, aims, and above all money. The research is primarily archival. The last is a continuing interest in forest economies, primarily BC's, but also those in the Antipodes."

 

Website: www.geog.ubc.ca/~tbarnes

Email Contact: trevor.barnes@geog.ubc.ca

Office Phone: 604-822-5804

Room Number: GEOG 140C

B.Sc., London; M.Sc., University of Edinburgh; M. Urban Planning, University of Melbourne; Ph.D. (1986), Monash University

"My current research focuses on aspects of economic geography in the Pacific Rim, including Japanese trade and investment patterns in East Asia, urban and regional change in Japan, Japanese tourism in Canada, and multicultural planning in cities of Pacific Rim countries. One major project has been examining the rebuilding of Kobe after the 1995 Hanshin Earthquake. This has been carried out with a Japan Foundation Grant and in the context of changing urban governance systems in Japan. Another study looks at Japanese electronics firms and their production networks in the Greater China Circle. This is funded by the SSHRC and is being carried out in conjunction with Dr. Roger Hayter (SFU) and graduate students. Through my PhD student, Tom Woodsworth I am becoming interested in environmental challenges in China and the problems surrounding e-waste. In Vancouver, I have a project studying how local governments in the Vancouver region have taken responsibility for including non-mainstream populations in the preparation and amendment of local plans as well as local social services."

 

Website: blogs.ubc.ca/dedgington

Email Contact: david.edgington@ubc.ca

Office Phone: 604-822-5612

Room Number: GEOG 215C

B.A., St. Olaf College; Ph.D. (1990, 1999), University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

"I am currently carrying out research, funded by a grant from the Hampton Fund, on the formation of regional business networks in East and Southeast Asia during the Cold War period, focusing especially on firms from the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand."

 

Website: blogs.ubc.ca/glassman

Email Contact: jim.glassman@geog.ubc.ca

Office Phone: 604-822-1892

Room Number: GEOG 140B

M.A., Ph.D. (1981), University of Cambridge

"My research has two interconnected themes. Most generally, I am interested in the spatial modalities of late modern war, where military violence, occupation and peace bleed into one another. My focus for these investigations is the Middle East, specifically Iraq and Israel/Palestine, but I also consider Afghanistan/Pakistan, East Africa and the geography of the global war prison. My particular concerns are in the production of spaces that make war possible and permissible via practices of locating, inverting and excepting and in the production of imaginative counter-geographies through artwork, drama and literature. I am also interested in cultural and political geographies of bombing, from Europe bombing its colonial populations in the early twentieth century through Spain, the Second World War, the wars in Korea, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, to the Gulf War, Afghanistan / Pakistan and Iraq. In both cases I draw (critically) on ideas from cultural and political theory/philosophy (including Agamben, Butler and Foucault) and from the visual arts and literary studies (including Said and Sebald)."

 

Honours: Fellow of the British Academy; Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; Dr. h.c (Heidelberg); Dr. h.c. (Roskilde); Peter Wall Distinguished Professor

Website: geographicalimaginations.com

Website: www.pwias.ubc.ca/people/distinguished-professor/derek-gregory.php

Email Contact: derek.gregory@geog.ubc.ca

Office Phone: 604-822-4719

Room Number: GEOG 140F

BA, University of Tartu; MSc, Western Washington University; Ph.D. (1999), Syracuse University

"My research focuses on political geography and geopolitics -- particularly on security and state power, borders and surveillance, and policy-making processes in complex bureaucratic structures. In broad terms, I investigate how political practices are underpinned by spatially defined categories like center and margin, inside and outside, Self and Other. These categories, I contend, are central to the processes by which complex political issues come to be defined and managed in a particular manner. Within that problematic, my interests converge on the question of how specifically spatial categories function in daily politics at various sites -- for example, within foreign policy bureaucracies. I have also worked on, and continue to be interested in, political identity and subjectivity, nationalism and transnationalism, and citizenship and belonging, especially in contemporary Europe. By virtue of my regional expertise, I am keenly interested in the ways in which places and regions are written onto our mental maps on a daily basis."

 

Website: www.geog.ubc.ca/~kuus

Email Contact: merje.kuus@geog.ubc.ca

Office Phone: 604-822-3443

Room Number: GEOG 235

Honours Degree, Universite d'Angers; M.B.A., Institut d'Administration des Entreprises; D.Phil. (1999), Oxford University

"My research interests bring together political geography, political ecology, and war studies. I have focused most of my work on the links between natural resources and armed conflicts, but also examined the political economy of war and reconstruction, the resource curse, corruption, as well as natural disasters and political crises. Most of my fieldwork has been conducted in South East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, but I also have a long-standing interest in Latin America. I tend to use historically grounded fieldwork approaches, occasionally using comparative and large-N quantitative methods. While remaining targeted at an academic audience, I have also thrived to make some of my work policy relevant. I am currently working on the political geography of oil, as well as post-conflict violence."

 

Dr. Le Billon holds a joint appointment in the Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts, and the Liu Institute for Global Issues, College for Interdisciplinary Studies.

 

Website: www.geog.ubc.ca/~lebillon

Email Contact: philippe.lebillon@geog.ubc.ca

Office Phone: 604-822-5218

Room Number: GEOG 216

B.A. Honours, Oxford (1968); M.S., Ph.D. (1972), Pennsylvania State University

"I have undertaken a number of (sometimes comparative) projects on immigration to Canadian cities. Topics have included: immigration and housing and labour markets; offsetting immigration and domestic migration in world cities; immigration and poverty; immigrant churches as service hubs; multiculturalism and the governance of diversity. An abiding focus has been the experience of wealthy business migrants. This work is drawn together in a forthcoming book: Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life Lines. I have always been concerned with processes of social and spatial change in older inner city neighbourhoods. A principle focus has been gentrification, processes of urban reinvestment leading to housing renovation or redevelopment and the replacement and displacement of poorer households by the middle-class. Currently, I am begining a project that extends the field site from Canadian Cities to the different economic and political contexts of Hong Kong."

 

Dr. Ley was Department Head (2009-2012). He was the UBC Director of the Metropolis Project, examining issues of immigration and integration in Greater Vancouver and beyond, from 1996-2003, and was appointed a Trudeau Fellow from 2003-2006. He holds a Canada Research Chair in Geography.

 

Honours: Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada

Website: www.geog.ubc.ca/~dley

Website: riim.metropolis.net/

Email Contact: david.ley@geog.ubc.ca

Office Phone: 604-822-3268

Room Number: GEOG 208

B.A. Honours, University of Manchester; Ph.D. (1988), University of Manchester

"I work, in the style of institutional political economy, on a range of issues relating to economic geography, urban restructuring, and state transformation. Much of my research is concerned with the ways in which ostensibly global processesfor example, forms of market-oriented governance (a.k.a. neoliberalization)are (re)remade through local sites and grounded practices. Ongoing projects include: (a) outsourcing expertise, a study of offshoring practices as a managerial technology; (b) policies without borders, tracing vectors of fast policy in globalizing urban governance and social welfare; and (c) remaking the Vancouver model, a critical analysis of the city's evolving development agenda."

 

Dr. Peck holds the Canada Research Chair in Urban and Regional Political Economy.

 

Honours: Academician in the Social Sciences; Guggenheim Fellow; Harkness Fellow

Website: www.geog.ubc.ca/~peck

Email Contact: jamie.peck@geog.ubc.ca

Office Phone: 604-822-0894

Room Number: GEOG 134

B.Sc. Honours, University of Toronto; M.A., Ph.D. (1984), UBC

"I am completing a 15 year research collaboration with the Philippine Women Centre of BC that has moved from looking at the circumstances of Filipino women working in Canada as domestic workers on temporary work visas, to the issue of family separation and the long term marginalization of families sponsored by domestic workers after they gain permanent resident status in Canada. This feeds into a larger debate about the growing number of temporary work visa and bridging immigration programs. We are experimenting with novel ways of bringing our research to a wider public, most notably through testimonial theatre. Our play, Nanay was performed in Vancouver in February 2009 and at the Hebbel Theatre in Berlin in June 2009. I have been preoccupied with how to put stories of family separation into circulation, with the politics of testimony and witnessing, and the obligations of witnessing beyond national boundaries."

 

Associate Dean - Faculty, Faculty of Arts July 2010 - June 2011

 

Website: www.geog.ubc.ca/~gpratt

Email Contact: gerry.pratt@geog.ubc.ca

Office Phone: 604-822-5875

Room Number: GEOG 140D

B.A., Trinity University; M.A., Ph.D. (1999), University of Texas, Austin

"My current project examines the environmental dimensions of United States' border security policies in the US-Mexico borderlands, with a specific focus on protected areas like national wildlife refuges."

 

Website: juanitasundberg.wordpress.com

Email Contact: juanita.sundberg@geog.ubc.ca

Office Phone: 604-822-3535

Room Number: GEOG 125