Becky Mansfield
Associate Professor
Department of Geography
Ohio State University
1036 Derby Hall
154 North Oval Mall
Columbus, OH 43210
USA
ph: 614-247-7264
fax: 614-292-6213
Education:
Ph.D. University
of Oregon, Geography, 2001
M.S. University
of Oregon, Environmental Studies, 1996
B.A. University
of California, Santa Cruz, Environmental Studies, 1991
Teaching:
On sabbatical for the 2011-2012 school year
Recent courses:
Geographical
Perspectives on Environment and Society (Geog 430)
Globalization and Environment (Geog 635)
Research Design (Geog 795)
Past courses:
Political
Geography (Geog 460, H460)
Conservation of Natural Resources (Geog 630)
The Production of Nature: Perspectives on Economy and Environment (Graduate
seminar: Geog 840, 2002)
Governance, Regulation, and the State-Economy Relationship (Graduate seminar:
Geog 840, 2003)
Qualitative Research Methods (Graduate seminar: Geog 840, 2004)
Privatization, Property, and Markets (Graduate seminar: Geog 840, 2004)
Readings
in Nature-Society Relations (Graduate seminar: Geog 840, 2005)
Neoliberalism
(Graduate seminar: Geog 840, 2007)
Research Interests:
My broad interests are in Nature-Society Relations, Political
Economy, Health and the Body, and Politics
of the Environment. I draw from feminist,
poststructuralist, and Marxist theoretical approaches. My current research is
in four main areas:
1. Biopolitics of environmental
health. A current project is about
gendered neoliberal biopolitics of nature and risk. It takes as its object contaminated seafood
and current public health efforts to use risk to manage effects of women’s
seafood consumption on fetal neurodevelopment.
I am interested in how contemporary risk management approaches position
women as the insecure boundary between nature and society, in need of policing
to secure the population from environmental health threats.
2. Posthuman, postnatural,
socio-natures of the 21st Century. While socionatures is no longer a
new idea, it is time to move beyond discovering and describing novel, “strange”
natures, and instead to understand how particular socionatures work and to
whose (human and non-human) benefit. My
research on health and bodies fits here (the body remade by environmental
contaminants is definitely a socionature), as does much of my work on
fish-as-food. Currently, I am also
involved in a collaborative project examining the socioecological processes of
forest recovery in Appalachian Ohio, following a century of devastation from
mining and other extractive activities.
We are interested in understanding both the drivers and effects of
socionatural change across the 20th century and ongoing today, with
particular attention to the visions and actions of local residents.
3. Neoliberalism and nature. A long-standing focus of my
research has been understanding, explaining, and countering neoliberal
environmentalism, with its emphasis on the free market as a means to spur
economic growth and environmental protection. Key themes include neoliberal
contradictions, scale and scalar relations (including the ongoing role of the
national state), and privatization and property regimes in environmental
management and political economic change. The “commons” is a long-standing
theme of this research, with a particular focus on challenging “tragedy of the
commons” explanations of environmental degradation. The main empirical target of this research
has been fisheries policy in the United States and in global context.
4. Challenging dominant discourses
of human-environment relations.
Overlapping my interest in neoliberalism and nature is a longstanding
interest in challenging ubiquitous and problematic understandings of
human-environment relations and how these are used to promote particular
explanations of and solutions for environmental problems. While the “tragedy of the commons” has been
forefront in my research, I also challenge the focus on population growth as a
central problem and economic development as a main solution (the rich will not save the earth).
Prospective Graduate Students:
Prospective
students interested in working with me should contact me by email describing
their theoretical and topical interests, and explaining the match between their
interests and mine. Note that my current research focuses more prominently on the
first two items above, while I continue to have ongoing interests in the last
two items.
Publications:
BOOK
Privatization:
Property and the Remaking of Nature-Society Relations (Editor).
2008. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
ARTICLES
Environmental health as biosecurity: “seafood
choices,” risk, and the pregnant woman as threshold. Forthcoming. Annals of
the Association of American Geographers (Special Issue on the Geography of
Health).
Gendered biopolitics of public health: regulation
and discipline in seafood consumption advisories. Forthcoming. Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space.
Crisis, change, and continuity: living in
interesting times (Commentary). Forthcoming. Dialogues in Human Geography.
Seed governance at the intersection of multiple
global and nation-state priorities: modernizing seeds in Turkey. Forthcoming. Global
Environmental Politics. With Nurcan Atalan-Helicke (first author).
Is fish health food or poison? Farmed fish and the
material production of un/healthy nature.
2011. Antipode 43(2): 413-434.
Emerging themes in economic geography: outcomes of
the 2010 Economic Geography Workshop. Economic Geography 87(2): 111-126.
With Participants in the Economic Geography 2010 Workshop. First author on
section: “Economic geography of environmental change: understanding and
creating new socionatural futures.”
Does economic growth cause environmental recovery?
Geographical explanations of forest regrowth.
2010. Geography Compass 4/5: 416-427. With Darla K. Munroe and
Kendra McSweeney.
What counts as farming: how classification limits
regionalization of the food system.
2010. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 3:
245-259. With Jill K. Clark (first author) and Darla K. Munroe.
The
social nature of natural childbirth. 2008. Social
Science and Medicine 66: 1084-1094.
Health as
a nature-society question. 2008. Environment
and Planning A 40: 1015-1019.
Comments
on Daniel Bromley’s paper “The crisis in ocean governance”. 2008. MAST (Maritime Studies) 6(2): 23-25.
Privatization:
Property and the Remaking of Nature-Society Relations: Introduction to the
special issue. 2007. Antipode 39(3): 393-405.
Property,
markets, and dispossession: the Western Alaska Community Development Quota as
neoliberalism, social justice, both, and neither. 2007. Antipode 39(3): 479-499.
Articulation
between neoliberal and state-oriented environmental regulation: fisheries
privatization and endangered species protection. 2007. Environment and Planning A 39: 1926-1942. [pdf]
Assessing
market-based environmental policy using a case study of North Pacific
fisheries. 2006. Global Environmental Change 16: 29-39. [pdf]
Scale
framing of scientific uncertainty in controversy over the endangered Steller
sea lion. 2006. Environmental Politics 15(1): 78-94.
With Johanna Haas. [pdf]
Beyond
rescaling: reintegrating the ‘national’ as a dimension of scalar
relations. 2005. Progress in Human Geography 29(4):
458-473. [pdf]
Rules of
privatization: contradictions in neoliberal regulation of North Pacific
fisheries. 2004. Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 94(3): 565-584. [pdf]
Neoliberalism
in the oceans: “rationalization,” property rights, and the commons question.
2004. Geoforum 35(3): 313-326. [pdf]
Organic
views of nature: the debate over organic certification for aquatic
animals. 2004. Sociologia Ruralis 44(2): 216-232. [pdf]
Spatializing
globalization: a ‘geography of quality’ in the seafood industry. 2003.
Economic Geography 79(1):1-16. [abstract]
From
catfish to organic fish: making distinctions about nature as cultural economic
practice. 2003. Geoforum 34(3): 329-342. [pdf]
Fish,
factory trawlers, and imitation crab: the nature of quality in the seafood
industry. 2003. Journal of
Rural Studies 19(1): 9-21. [pdf]
‘Imitation
crab’ and the material culture of commodity production. 2003. Cultural
Geographies 10(2):176-195. [pdf]
Thinking
through scale: the role of state governance in globalizing North Pacific
fisheries. 2001. Environment and Planning A 33(10):
1807-1827, with Erratum (figure correction) 34(1): back page. [pdf]
Property regime or development policy? Explaining growth in the US
Pacific groundfish fishery. 2001. The Professional Geographer
53(3): 384-397. [pdf]
CHAPTERS
“Modern” industrial fisheries and the crisis of
overfishing. 2011. Pages 84-99 in Global Political Ecology. Peet, R., P.
Robbins, and M. Watts, eds. London: Routledge.
Sustainability.
2009. Pages 37-49 in The Companion to Environmental Geography. Castree, N., D. Demeritt, B. Rhoads, and D.
Liverman. London: Blackwell.
Global
environmental politics. 2008. Pages
235-246 in The Handbook of Political Geography. Cox, K., M. Low,
and J. Robinson, eds. London: Sage.
Neoliberalism
in the oceans: “rationalization,” property rights, and the commons question.
2007. In Neoliberal Environments: False Promises and Unnatural Consequences. Heynen, N., J. McCarthy, W.S. Prudham, and P.
Robbins, eds. Routledge. (Reduced from
article published in Geoforum, 2004).
Last updated August 2011