Lecturing at Toroweap Overlook with Prescott College’s Grand Canyon Semester, 2018. (Fuji Instax photo by David Lovejoy.)
Lecturing in East Los Angeles for my class Cultural Geography at California State University-L.A., 2012. (Photo by Ron Milam.)
From Maria McVarish, “Landscape Narrativity in 3DH,” 2018.
Digital Geo-Humanities
The paradox is: how can the latitude/longitude system of thinking spatially be the tool that reveals all kinds of new spaces? We need new types of visual geographies that do not rely on the data-to-grid model of representing and thinking through space.
From the module “Instead of Looking at it, They Photograph it,” 2018
Grand Canyon Semester
I was a guest instructor at Prescott College’s Grand Canyon Semester in 2018, where I taught a one-week course called Cultural Geographies of Tourism. There were two modules: the first based in web design, called “Immersive Geographies.” The second was called “Instead of Looking at it, They Photograph it,” intended to evoke critical thinking about why one takes the pictures they do at the Grand Canyon.
Field trip: “Reading the Urban Landscape,” 2016
Contemporary Geographic Thought
As you take this course you should be inspired to want to go into the world—to experience landscapes and know them richly—in order to make them better. You should want to experience places in all of their beauty and complexity, then share that beauty and complexity with others. This is doing geography, or writing the earth.
Uplifted coral from the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
Environment & Development in the Global South
Since the mid-20th century, as global capitalism and notions of state-centered development have continued to intensify, we have witnessed instances of severe socio-environmental inequalities in the global south, including 1) famines, 2) (un)natural disasters, 3) disease epidemics, and 4) toxic pollution.
Pershing Square, downtown L.A., 2009
Metro Los Angeles: Nature in the City
Environmental justice, natural disasters, nature-as-healer, and representations of nature are all part of the geography and history of nature in L.A. In this class we envision Los Angeles in a way that challenges our understandings of the natural world, what it means to us, and how we might act as global citizens in a global city in the 21st century in light of this new understanding of nature in the city.