Posts

Islam and Muslim Peoples: One Faith, Many Worlds

 One of the easiest mistakes we make when we study the world is to turn living people into a category. We say “the Muslim world,” and suddenly a billion and more human beings become one thing in the mind. One civilization. One politics. One attitude toward women, science, democracy, tradition, law, family, modern life. But that is not geography. That is a shortcut. Islam is one of the great world religions, but Muslims are not one people in any simple cultural or political sense. They live in Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal, Albania, Bosnia, Malaysia, France, Britain, Canada, and the United States. They speak Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Bengali, Malay, Hausa, Wolof, Albanian, English, and many other languages. They live in monarchies, democracies, authoritarian states, secular republics, immigrant neighborhoods, farming villages, giant megacities, and university towns. A Muslim in Indonesia is not simply a version of a Muslim in...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mall of America as a Human Geography Landscape

 Mall of America as a Human Geography Landscape Most students in Minnesota have probably been to Mall of America at least once. Some people go there to shop, some go for food, some go for the rides, and some just walk around because it is something to do. At first, it might seem almost too ordinary to write about. It is just the mall. But human geography is often about learning to look again at places we think we already understand. In Human Geography: A Spatial Perspective , geography is not just about where things are located. It is also about how people shape places, how places shape people, and how space is connected to culture, economics, identity, and power (Bednarz et al., 2024). From that point of view, Mall of America is actually a pretty good example of human geography. It is a cultural landscape, an economic landscape, an urban-like space, and a privately controlled place that feels public but is not fully public. One important idea in human geography is that places ar...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World in a Cup: Tea, Coffee, and the Accidental Map of History

Image
 This is exactly the kind of map that looks simple until you realize it is really a map of ships, empires, habits, climates, plantations, breakfast tables, and human stubbornness. Look at the map and it seems to be about two drinks. Tea in green. Coffee in brown. But of course it is not about drinks. It is about history pretending to be a kitchen cabinet. Start in China, where tea becomes not merely something you drink, but something you do. A ritual. A pause. A civilization in a cup. From there it moves along trade routes, into Central Asia, Russia, India, Persia, the Arab world, and eventually into that odd little damp island off Europe that will become obsessed with it. Britain does not just drink tea. Britain builds a timetable around it. But then comes the great imperial trick. Britain wants Chinese tea, but China does not especially want British woolen socks, machine parts, or lectures. So Britain looks at India and says, in effect: splendid, we shall grow China over ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Three Romes and a Funeral for an Empire

 Three Romes and a Funeral for an Empire Here is one of the great strange ideas in world regional geography: sometimes a city stops being only a city. It becomes a claim. Rome was not just a place on a map. It was power, law, empire, roads, armies, aqueducts, Latin, bishops, marble, and a certain confidence that history had chosen its favorite address. Then Rome, the city, declined. The western half of the Roman Empire collapsed in 476. But here is the trick: the Roman Empire did not exactly die. It moved east. Constantine had already built a new imperial capital at Byzantium, renamed Constantinople, in 330. It sat at one of the best geographic locations on Earth, where Europe and Asia nearly touch and the Black Sea opens toward the Mediterranean. It was a tollbooth, fortress, trading hub, imperial capital, and holy city all at once. Not bad real estate. To the people living there, this was not “the Byzantine Empire.” That name came later. They thought they were Romans. They ...
Post a Comment
Read more

AI and the New Machinery of Dispossession

  AI and the New Machinery of Dispossession There is a habit, when a new technology arrives, of treating it as though it were self-contained. A machine appears, or a system, or now a model, and we speak of it as if it had descended from nowhere, immaculate, severed from history. We say: here is artificial intelligence. What will it do? Will it write our memos, drive our cars, diagnose our illnesses, perhaps compose our poems badly and our legal briefs passably? And because the machine dazzles, because it seems to speak, and because it answers in a tone of synthetic confidence, we imagine that the story begins there, with the glowing surface. But it does not. It begins much earlier, in an older pattern of human arrangement. It begins with the persistent genius of modern capitalism for finding new things to enclose, new spaces to reorganize, new habits to turn into property, and new forms of cooperation to convert into private gain. Artificial intelligence, in that sense, is not m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why I keep writing in different “styles”

  Why I keep writing in different “styles” You might have noticed that some of my posts sound different from others. That’s on purpose. I’m not changing personalities — I’m using different ways of seeing the world. In geography (and honestly in life), there’s never just one correct lens. Complex problems need multiple perspectives. So I’ve been writing through four different viewpoints to help practice that: The Networked View looks at how everything connects — how decisions in one place ripple through supply chains, ecosystems, economies, and communities. The Moral View asks what responsibility comes with knowledge and power. It focuses on people, consequences, and what we owe one another. The Inspiring View zooms out. It looks at humanity as one species on one planet, shaped by climate, resources, and long timelines. The Critical Lens asks harder questions: Who benefits? Who loses? Who controls the story? It examines power, inequality, and the systems beneath everyday...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rollover Neoliberalism: Extending Market Rule Beyond the Roll-Back/Roll-Out State in the Trump Era

  Rollover Neoliberalism: Extending Market Rule Beyond the Roll-Back/Roll-Out State in the Trump Era David McKay Abstract This paper revisits the well-known “roll-back/roll-out” framework of neoliberalization and proposes a related extension: rollover neoliberalism . If roll-back describes the dismantling of Keynesian/social-democratic protections and roll-out describes the building of new market-conforming institutions, rollover names a later tendency: neoliberal logics spilling into domains that were not previously central battlegrounds of market rule —a kind of “map rolling” beyond its old edges. Rollover neoliberalism is not merely privatization or deregulation; it is the proliferation of market metrics, contracting, quasi-markets, risk scoring, and managerial discipline into spheres such as immigration detention, platform-mediated work, digital information ecosystems, and administrative governance itself. The paper argues that Trump-era governance—across the first term (20...
Post a Comment
Read more