My research interests are in economic geography although I have increasingly wandered from the straight and narrow. I began as a hard-nosed spatial scientist (albeit from the other side, political economy). After I was appointed at UBC in 1983, I became interested in understanding my own province, and at the time, the sector that drove its economy, forestry (alas no more). My work has charted more than anything its decline and fall. From the beginning of my studies, even as an undergraduate, I was interested in philosophical questions, and I have taken them up in different forms within economic geography (and best represented by my 1996 book Logics of Dislocation). Spurred by the literature of science studies, I have more recently become interested in where the ideas of economic geography come from, and which has led me into the archives, and from biography to war, both the hot and the cold kinds.

Current Projects

• The history of American geography from WW II to the 1970s
• German geographers during the Nazi period
• The nature and implications of epistemological pluralism for economic geography
• The creative industries in Vancouver and Seattle (with Tom Hutton).