This paper reflects on teaching sport in political geography undergraduate courses in the United States, through which I simultaneously aim to de-essentialize geopolitics and de-essentialize sport. I integrate sport examples in diverse courses on political geography and teach a dedicated "Geopolitics of Sport" course. By framing my…

In this media-saturated society, students need to think more critically about the media they encounter and that they are producing. Through filmmaking, students can link geographic theory and the real world, bridging the distance from readings/lectures/discussions to the geography on the ground, making the abstract concrete. But constructing films…

The purpose of this dialogue was to begin grappling with notions of neutrality and academic development in three non-western contexts: (1) Jamaica; (2) Ethiopia; and (3) Japan. The authors were asked to describe the political geography of academic development in their countries and to explore questions of neutrality. This dialogue therefore tries…

In this article, I examine literacy artifacts placed by students in different locations of a state-run secondary school in the city of Madrid, Spain. The data were gathered as part of a two-year long multilevel ethnography focused on the social and academic trajectories of immigrant students in Spanish compulsory secondary education. The analysis…

The cityscape holds the memories of indigenous bones and bodies that resurrect a deep sense of place that exists in the landscape of the city of Toronto. This deep sense of place is part of a connection to the land and stories of place. In this article, the author bridges the creative work of Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore with the living…

In this paper, the author argues that the problematization of territorial movements in the process of globalization can provide important insights to understand some educational aspects of contemporary migration, especially if the theoretical ingredients involved in the political analysis of the signifying dimension of this process are articulated…

Geographers, along with anthropologists and sociologists, have been debating the homeland concept as it applies in North America for decades. In recent years, the political ideology of the war on terror has added another dimension to this discussion. If the attention given to the concept by introductory textbooks is any indication, homelands are…

The purpose of this essay is to discuss current views of public writing and contribute notions of qualitative research and cultural geography to these conversations. The author also provides two pedagogical examples of how these contributions inform student writing and civic participation in various public spaces. The author believes that public…

Little that occurs in contemporary academic geography will surprise members of the National Association of Scholars, for a large part of the field has joined the other humanities and social sciences in the bawdy saloon of progressive politics, cultural nihilism, and subjective epistemology. That geographers are in there roistering with the…

This paper explores how photographs can be used to teach urban social geography to second- and third-year university students. In it the author describes her work acquainting students with the skill of "directed observation". She argues that teaching geography through photography is not merely asking students to take pictures but rather, the…

This essay reports on a university-school oral history project at an elementary school in Brooklyn, New York. It theorizes the dialectic of place and history as expressed in the voices of the school community and goes on to suggest some tenets for a public sphere pedagogy rooted in material rhetoric and economic geography. (Contains 14 notes.)

University instructors are increasingly drawing on active learning exercises to engender critical thinking skills among students. In this article, we introduce the design and implementation of an active learning exercise about mobility and transportation that we assigned in an introductory human geography class at the University of Georgia. The…

This article compares and contrasts the theories of three major writers on societal change: Chirot discusses the economic power struggles within and among core, peripheral, and semiperipheral societies, Toffler exposes a future in which major power shifts could have cataclysmic results, and Bruner emphasizes the importance of education to temper…

The American economy has had the fastest and most dramatic development of all the world's major economies. Four hundred years ago, the economic output of the area that became the United States was negligible by world standards. Yet only 250 years later, the U.S. economy had become the largest in the world, surpassing all other countries, including…

This article presents a dialogue with Monte Joffee. Joffee has been an active leader in the small school and charter school movements in New York City for over 20 years. He is a cofounder of The Renaissance Charter School in New York City and served as its founding principal (1993-2007). In this dialogue, Joffee articulates the ways in which…