Uppsala Lecture in Human Geography

The 2025 Uppsala Lecture in Human Geography took place on November 12–13 with speaker Professor Tim Cresswell from University of Edinburgh.

We are excited to welcome Professor Matthew Gandy from the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge to give the 5th Uppsala Lecture in Human Geography. The lecture is organized by the Environment & Landscapes Research Group.

Attentive observation: walking, listening, staying put

Tuesday, 5 November 2024, 13:15, Ekonomikum, Hörsal 4

In this lecture Professor Matthew Gandy suggests that a renewed emphasis on “attentive observation,” as both a form of radical empiricism and a source of imaginative insight, might contribute towards building a more nuanced conception of fieldwork that is better attuned to the multisensory and multispecies textures of material geographies. In this, he focuses on interactions with nature, landscape, and nonhuman others in an urban context. But the argument has wider connotations for concerns with embodied methodologies, critical phenomenology, and slower forms of research.

Conducting research in Germany, France, the US, Nigeria and the UK, Matthew Gandy has for more than two decades been at the forefront of both theorizing and historically uncovering the place of more-than-human nature, particularly in relation to cities and processes of urbanization. In eleven monographs or edited volumes, numerous academic articles, and two documentary movies his work has concerned the political ecology of water networks across the world, urban wilderness and unintentional landscapes, waste, epidemics, film, and methodology, as well as the cultural and natural history of the moth.

More information can be found here on Professor Gandy.

We are excited to welcome Professor Mei-Po Kwan to give the 4th Uppsala Lecture in Human Geography. The lecture is organized by the Space and Economies research group, in collaboration with the Applied Spatial Analysis research group.

Mei-Po Kwan

Choh-Ming Li Professor of Geography and Resource Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Director, Institute of Space and Earth Information Science
Director, Institute of Future Cities

Big Data and Geospatial Technologies for Health Research

Monday, 27 November 2023, 13:15, Ekonomikum, Hörsal 2

The rapid development and widespread use of advanced geospatial technologies such as GPS, remote sensing, mobile sensing, and location-aware devices in recent years have greatly facilitated the acquisition of enormous amounts of high-resolution space-time data. To build smart and healthy cities, we need to integrate these multi-source geospatial big data acquired by earth observation technologies and mobile sensing technologies to provide more accurate assessments of individual exposures to environmental or social risk factors, and to develop planning policies to improve health for all. In this presentation, I will discuss how these new developments can provide new insights into the relationships between people’s mobility, health behaviors, and the complex spatiotemporal dynamics of environmental influence Drawing upon my recent projects on individual exposures to green/blue spaces, light-at-night, and air and noise pollution, I explore how the collection, integration, and analysis of high-resolution space-time data enabled by advanced geospatial and mobile technologies (e.g., real-time mobile sensing and GPS tracking) can help identify the “truly relevant geographic context in space and time” and provide new insights into the relationships between human health, people’s daily mobility, and the complex spatiotemporal dynamics of environmental influences.

Professor Mei-Po Kwan has been awarded many Outstanding Academic Achievement Awards by the American Association of Geographers. Her recent projects examine the health impacts of individual environmental exposure (e.g., noise, air pollution, green space), urban and mobility issues, the space-time dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic and the perception of data privacy; and the protection of geoprivacy via the development of a Geospatial Virtual Data Enclave (GVDE).

More information can be found at: http://www.meipokwan.org

Professor Mike Crang, Durham University

The Values and Valuing of Food: trust, traceability, terroir and transport

The lecture will be held on March 22 2022 from 15:15-16:45 in the Humanities Theater.

This talk will explore the way food is bound into rapidly changing values in China. A food system that has been revolutionised in 40 years, and now must feed the rapidly changing food demands of increasingly affluent consumers. It will examine how rapid transformations go alongside a revalorisation of various forms of tradition. In a system that has modernised, with online delivery platforms and digital payment prevalent, there are persistences of old forms, such as ’wet markets’ which are valued for their food quality as much as their value for money. There is the reinvention of traditional forms of cuisine in themed restaurants and in the blossoming of tea house culture. There is the import of food styles and food concerns over sustainability leading to the ‘new farmers’ of alternative food networks. And amid this there is the widespread, and largely justified, anxiety over safety and lack of trust in the quality of provision.

The Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University, presents:
On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Gerd Enequist’s installation as the first woman professor at Uppsala University, and the first professor in Human Geography.

Gunnel Forsberg, Professor Emeritus in Human Geography with a special focus on urban and regional planning at Stockholm University

Gerd Enequist – A multiple pioneer

23 October 2019, 10.15–12.00 in Hörsal 2, Ekonomikum, Kyrkogårdsgatan 10, Uppsala.

Gerd Enequist, the first woman professor at Uppsala University, was a pioneer in various ways. With the help of her archive containing a collection of letters, diaries and manuscripts, we can get a glimpse of her private life and her scientific contributions in her own voice. This talk will present some aspects of a pioneering woman geographer.

Linda McDowell, Emerita Professor of Human Geography, University of Oxford

Writing working lives: Feminist Geographies and generations

23 October 2019, 14.15–16.00 in Hörsal 4, Ekonomikum, Kyrkogårdsgatan 10, Uppsala.

The rise of a service-dominated economy has transformed the nature of work and employment in the UK and elsewhere, altering associations between gender and employment opportunities for both women and men. Drawing on personal narratives of working lives, I will explore arguments about the causes and consequences of changing gender divisions of labour, focusing on periods of economic crisis between 1945 and the present. The examples are British but have, I think, many parallels with changes in Sweden.

The First Uppsala Lecture in Human Geography

Laura Pulido, Professor of Ethnic Studies and Geography, University of Oregon

“Environmental Deregulation, Spectacular Racism and White Nationalism in the Trump Era”

Monday, 22 October 2018, 15:15, Universitetshuset, Sal IV

In this talk, Professor Pulido shares research which compares the environmental and racist agendas of the first year of the Trump administration. She and her colleagues found that the racist agenda was far more chaotic and included relatively few policy actions in comparison to the environmental deregulatory agenda. The push to deregulate was extremely well-orchestrated on multiple levels and consisted of far more policy actions versus rhetoric. Professor Pulido and her colleagues argue that Trump’s spectacular racism is at least partly designed to nurture a white-nationalist base while obscuring vast regulatory changes in the environmental arena.

Laura Pulido is Professor of Geography and Ethnic Studies, and Chair of the Dept. of Ethnic Studies, at the University of Oregon. She works at the intersection of geography and critical ethnic studies, especially Chicanx Studies, to explore how racial, class and gender hierarchies shape places and how places inform racial and economic processes. She has published widely in academic and popular venues, and is the author and editor of several books, including Black Brown Yellow & Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (California, 2006), A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (w/ L. Barraclough & W. Cheng, California, 2012).