Inquiry        
 

Most of my work centers around a careful consideration of knowledge, expression, meaning and discourse and how (geo)social power is exercised through the production, reproduction and control of narrative and other expressive forms. In my work, I consider how manifold human relations are mediated through the exchange and control of narrative, how community is circumscribed by narrative and thought, and how society is impacted by the liberatory and carceral potential of ideas.

      
         
 

The central focus of my work is the concept of power/knowledge –

      
         
 

“if we seek to ascertain what knowledge is…we need to understand what the relations of struggle and power are. One can understand what knowledge consists of only by examining these relations of struggle and power, the manner in which things and men hate one another, and try to dominate one another, to exercise power relations over one another.”

-- Michel Foucault from "Truth and Juridical Forms" Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984: Power. vol.3, p.12

      
         
 

"Here we have a triangle: power, right, truth...what rules of right are implemented by the relations of power in the production of discourses of truth? Or alternatively, what type of power is susceptible of producing discourses of truth that in a society such as ours are endowed with such potent effects?...There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association. We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth."

-- Michel Foucault from "Two Lectures", Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977, p. 93

     
         
 

More practically, I study specific institutional forms such as libraries, institutional practices (such as the activity of collection development within libraries), and cultural artifacts/narratives themselves (images, books, poetry, ideas, maps, etc.) and the interrelated power configurations in the social and cultural expression and exchange of meaning produced through these means.

      
         
  My interest in geography covers the expected oeuvre - 1.) an appreciation and understanding of space (virtual, physical, mathematical and otherwise) as a container for events and social relations, 2.) an appreciation for the fact that place matters, that locality, community, region, nation, and tribe are significant constituents of identity, society and consciousness, 3.) an appreciation for the work of landscape - how culture and ideology both work together to produce and are simultaneously shaped by landscape, and finally 4.) an awareness of embodiment and all of the implications within the relationship of the living, corporeal human body to the natural world.      
         
 

As is quite evident in how I have articulated my area, the philosophical traditions that inform my work are the usual suspects:

  • sociology of knowledge
  • cultural studies
  • geographic thought
  • Afrocentrism
  • post-colonial studies, and
  • feminist thought
      
         
 
I am <click here> Foucauldian in my approach.
      
         
 

In terms of methods and approaches - I have a marked preference for qualitative constructivist approaches to inquiry though I am perfectly capable of producing the positivist, quantitative stuff. I personally prefer constructivist approaches because of the variety and richness of the types of questions you can pose and answer from this framework of inquiry.

     
         
 

At the root, I guess I am an (eeeeek!!!!) American pragmatist after all - in a phrase, my approach is one of the "whatever's clever" school of thinking. I'll adopt an approach that seems suitable and reasonable for the question that I am seeking to answer.

      
         
 
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