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All talks will take place at 4 PM on Fridays in LA4-100 unless otherwise stated.
April 29th, Dr. Andrew Curtis, USC, American Studies & Ethnicity
Geography, GIS and Health vulnerability in Los Angeles: Case studies of Sexually Transmitted Infections and Diabetes
ABSTRACT: Socially vulnerable populations in the United States also tend to suffer from a disproportionate chronic and infectious disease burden. As has been seen during and after Hurricane Katrina this is a problem that can quickly spiral out of control with calamitous consequences. Geographers are well situated to contribute to the discourse on health vulnerabilities especially at the neighborhood-scale, while also potentially providing "real world" insight that can support intervention. This talk will illustrate this point by drawing from ongoing collaborations with clinicians and epidemiologists in Los Angeles. Discussions will include the importance of an intervention-friendly geographic scale for identifying patterns in sexual infections, the role of hotspot analysis to guide diabetes clinicians, how new geospatial technologies can inform local context, and the importance of spatial confidentiality.
February 25th, Dr. Lieba Faier, Assistant Professor, Geography, UCLA
Affective Investments in the Manila Mega-Urban Region: The Houses that Filipina Wives in Rural Japan Build
ABSTRACT: Dr. Lieba Faier focuses on the houses that Filipina migrants in rural Nagano, Japan, build for themselves and their families in gated communities and other suburban housing developments in the Manila mega-urban region of the Philippines. Scholars writing about gated communities and suburban developments have often focused on the roles that fears of crime and desires for exclusivity play in their making. This paper argues for a more complicated understanding of the ways feelings figure in the making of gated and suburban landscapes. Taking a Foucauldian inspired approach to affect as a power-laden site of subject-making, it suggests that the houses Filipina migrants in rural Japan build in the Manila region involve "affective investments." That is, they are shaped not only by the capitalist practices and state policies that have enabled urban development in the Philippines over the past several decades, but also by the discourses of hope, frustration, shame, fear, desire, and longing through which these migrant women make sense of their transnational lives. By focusing on these houses in this way, the talk draws attention to the ways transnational formations of gender and affect shape the political economics of gated and suburban space, and it shows the ways that the making of such landscapes is enabled by the production of certain kinds of gendered and affective subjects.
