Mary E Thomas
Assistant Professor
1036 Derby Hall
154 North Oval Mall
Columbus, OH 43210-1361
614-247-8222
I hold a 50% appointment in Geography, which serves as my tenure home, and a 50% appointment in Women’s Studies. My teaching is split equally between the two departments, and I have advisees in each.
Education
Ph.D. Geography, with minor in Feminist Studies, University of Minnesota, 2002
M.A. Geography, University of Minnesota, 1997
B.A. Political Science and History, College of Charleston (South Carolina), 1992
Teaching 2010-2011
Winter: Women and Work & Population Geography
Spring: American Girlhood & Intro to Human Geography
Research interests:
US urban education, youth, and racialization
Urban school space in the US is a primary social context where racial segregation is often highly tense, regulated, and violently controlled by youth. Schools are also important normative spaces for adolescent youth sexualities and other gendered practices.
Girlhood and agency
Unlike most feminist and identity studies books on girlhood, I am concerned less with the political potentials of girls’ heroic power and agency and more with the identification and geographic practices of girls that maintain status quo racist, sexist, classist, and heteronormative relations.
Urban space and identity
My research to date has pivoted around feminine and urban youth identities and US city spaces, particularly schools, homes, and public space. While the central ideal of many urban theorists remains the adult, white, heterosexual male citizen, I find that this idealized subject results in a gross underrepresentation of the diversity of urban experience, struggle, and practice.
Subjectivity and space
By exploring the social and psychic processes of identification, my work contributes a perspective on how racism, segregation, and class stratification proceed at the scale of the individual. I argue that many multicultural programs in cities, particularly schools, are bound to fail by neglecting the trenchant attachments that social subjects have for the differences that divide them. When scholars do not examine the ways that people are deeply invested in social stratification, they fail to understand the root issues at stake in the foundational problems that US cities face, including youth violence, social exclusion, and the negotiation of diversity.
Potential graduate students considering social, urban, and/or feminist geography, or feminist identity studies, are welcome to email me. I am particularly interested in students exploring the following areas of research: identity and space; feminist analyses of girlhood; youth and public space; urban consumption practices; high school spatiality; US multiculturalism; racial segregation; subjectivity and psychoanalytic theories.