Panther Geographer Spring/Summer 2009, Volume 5, Issue 2 http//:www.uwm.edu/Dept/Geography Inside this issue: Letter from the Chair Linda McCarthy 2 Professor Judith Kenny returns from No doubt, you have heard that we class of Geography majors – in Geog 600 China “live in interesting times.” As the financial – are preparing to present their semester Larry Knopp 3 crisis made daily news, we waited anx- research in a departmental colloquium on visits UWM iously at the beginning of the semester to their way to graduation. Julie Anderson hear what the Governor’s budget meant (MA ’96), director of planning for Racine for UWM and our own department. As County, joined the Geog 600 class re- Faculty News 4 that planning goes forward, Geography is cently to talk to these seniors about her relatively comfortable – or, at least as own progress through the UWM Geogra- comfortable as one might hope for when phy program. While acknowledging that Graduate Stu- 5 living “in interesting times.” Our enroll- the job market would be challenging, she dent News ments are strong and an expansion of our encouraged them to think of their educa- online course offerings provides us with tion as an investment that no one could funds to help offset the anticipated reduc- take away from them. –An investment that Alumni News 6 tions. they may very well decide to add to. While this signals a delay in our As the instructor for the capstone planned program expansion, UW- course, I enjoyed hearing Julie’s stories Alumni News, 7 Milwaukee is clearly viewed as an integral and cont. part of the southeastern Wisconsin econ- advice. ...and Poetry omy. The Governor’s budget includes It was funds for the new School of Freshwater particu- Farewell, Wen! 8 Sciences and the School of Public Health. larly Geographers are involved in the campus gratify- planning for these important additions as ing be- befitting a department focused on issues cause Additional Info of the urban environment. How quickly we she was • AAG Conference in Las will get there is not clear but there will be my first Vegas, NV (March 23- progress. gradu- Julie Anderson with students from 27, 2009) In the meantime, certain aspects of ate ad- Geography 600 • Sustainable Cities visee Conference will be the spring schedule continue. We are pre- held at UWM from paring for next year’s incoming graduate and I had watched her start her graduate April 17-18, 2009, students as recruitment/admissions are un- career, her planning career at Racine featuring UWM De- County, and her family. She is an inspiring partment of Geogra- derway. And leaving – thus far, two of phy’s Harold Mayer our doctoral students have accepted posi- balancing act as her daughters (Lauren 15, Lecture Series guest, tions for next year. Wen Lin joins the Ge- Rachel 13), husband Steve, and Racine Jennifer Wolch from County are well aware. the University of ography Department faculty at UW- Southern California LaCrosse in the fall and Deanna Schmidt We look forward to seeing her will be on her way to the University of again for additional mentoring sessions. – Houston-Clear Lake. Congratulations to We would appreciate hearing from you as them both! well. Best wishes. Members of the large (32 member) Page 2 Panther Geographer A New Research Agenda Hard at work while on sabbatical, Professor Pearl River Delta that was organized by the Univer- Linda McCarthy returns to us with a new research sity of Hong Kong for the invitees. We visited many agenda on the mind. She shares some of her experi- major new urban developments like the Guangzhou ences from China. International Convention and Exhibition Center and During my 2007-08 sabbatical year, I spent had meetings with planners and economic develop- part of the time doing research in Guangzhou, China, ment officials at the Urban Planning Bureaus in and attending a symposium in Hong Kong. Having Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Guangzhou. done research on the automobile industry in the One of the most memorable experiences for United States, I was inter- me was sitting beside Peter Hall on the coach one ested in establishing a day as he told me the story of how he came up with research agenda for a the idea for Enterprise Zones (EZs) three decades study of the automobile earlier. He had been invited to give a talk to the industry in the Pearl River Royal Town Planning Institute and needed to come up Delta. Working with Pro- with a topic to present. Having just returned from a fessor Lachang Lu from trip to Hong Kong, he used his presentation to the Guangzhou University, planners to ponder the success of Hong Kong as a we undertook some pre- capitalist bastion in the otherwise centrally-planned liminary fieldwork and Chinese economic context. He concluded that the less interviews. Professor Lu’s restrictive regulation of business in Hong Kong was connections greatly facili- an important factor underlying its prosperity. He sug- tated getting interviews gested that the Hong Kong model of reduced taxes, with government officials, regulations, and red tape might work to promote Professor Linda McCarthy planners, and economic business enterprise and jobs in designated distressed development officers, as zones within cities in the U.K. He didn’t think much well as a guided tour of a new Toyota plant. One of more about it until he got a call from Michael He- the things I needed to learn more about is how the seltine, the U.K.’s Conservative government’s environ- political and economic context for automobile pro- ment secretary who asked to meet with him, and the duction in China is different from that in many other rest, as they say, is history. I thought that it was fan- parts of the world, including the United States. In tastic that Peter Hall was so down to earth and hon- China, for example, the U.S., European, and Japa- est about how the whole idea and implementation of nese automobile manufacturers are required to oper- EZs in the U.K. had come about! ate through joint ventures with a Chinese automaker. Following approval by the Chinese government, Toy- ota, for example, had entered into a joint venture with the Guangzhou Automobile Group in order to be able to manufacture cars in Guangzhou. I timed the research trip to coincide with the International Symposium on Mega-City Regions: Inno- vations in Governance and Planning, which was held in Hong Kong in early August 2008. The University of Hong Kong’s Centre of Urban Planning and Environ- mental Management invited a small number of inter- national experts who included Sir Peter Hall from University College London and Professor Saskia Sas- sen from Columbia University to present papers. In addition to presenting a paper at a really excellent Professor Linda McCarthy presenting at the International symposium, we all also enjoyed a fieldtrip into the Symposium on Mega-City Regions: Innovations in Governance and Planning Panther Geographer Spring/Summer 2009, Volume 5, Issue 2 Page 3 http//:www..uwm.edu/Dept/Geography S Spring/Summer 2009, Volume 5, Issue 2 Seminal research presented on venereal biopower in November By Chris Schroeder Is sex a weapon? It was depicted as such dur- volvement in an Urban Land Market” in Political Ge- ing a World War II public service campaign in Seat- ography Quarterly; and “Exploiting the Rent-Gap: tle — and women were the enemy. The Theoretical Significance of Using Illegal Ap- Dr. Lawrence Knopp, associate dean for The praisal Schemes to Encourage Gentrification in New Graduate School and professor of geography at the Orleans” in Urban Geography—all from 1990. University of Minnesota, Duluth campus, used adver- More recently, Knopp has written about the tising and media from World War II as part of his theoretical connections be- analysis of women depicted as “pathogen” during tween feminist and queer war-time Seattle. geography as well as the Presented in November 2008, “Race, Gen- theory, politics, and practice der, and Venereal Biopower in Wartime Seattle” of mapping queer popula- drew on Michel Foucault, the influential French phi- tions and cultures. His 2007 losopher, to illustrate the biopower and self- “On the Relationship Be- regulation used to keep servicemen free of disease, tween Queer and Feminist namely STDs or the term at the time VDs. The cam- Geographies” finds conver- Professor Larry Knopp paign was used by the military and the local health gences and divergences in agency to stop the spread of STDs by depicting the two theoretical bodies. women as seductive agents and men as innocent His body of work also pro- dupes, with the dual goal of keeping men healthy for vides examples of queering Professor Larry Knopp the war effort and reduce work load on the health traditional geographic agency. tools/concepts such as his Much of Knopp’s research focuses on the spa- work on queer diffusions and queering the map. tiality of sexuality, gender, and class. He has ex- Knopp is also involved in an ongoing map- plored links in the U.S., U.K., and Australia between ping project in collaboration with Professor Michael urban land, housing and labor markets, regional eco- Brown of the University of Washington and a commu- nomic change, and the construction of place-based nity-based gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender gay identities, communities, and political movements. history organization in Seattle. He also has a long- He has also studied the cultural transformation and standing interest in U.S. electoral geography, which conflicts associated with these processes, such as the has led to separate collaborations with Professor spatiality of media representations of gay men and Brown and University of Washington Professor Emeri- the relationships between sexuality and nation- tus of Geography Richard Morrill.