John Finn | Christopher Newport University (original) (raw)

Papers & Book Chapters by John Finn

Journal of Latin American Geography, 2020

With this special issue celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Conference of Latin American ... more With this special issue celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Conference of Latin American Geography (formerly the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers, or CLAG), we present the inaugural installment of a new, recurring section of JLAG: JLAG em Tradução / JLAG en Traducción. This new section will feature translations—either from Spanish or Portuguese to English, or from English to Spanish or Portuguese—that will be published in the same issue of JLAG as the original article, and that have the potential to make broad and long-lasting contributions to theoretical, methodological, and topical debates in Latin American geography, but which may not achieve the readership they deserve. Furthermore, the Spanish or Portuguese version of the article will be made available open access for at least one year after its publication, ensuring that it is available to readers throughout Latin America who do not have institutional access to JLAG via Project Muse, JSTOR, or JLAG’s other online distributors.

Journal of Latin American Geography, 2020

To commemorate CLAG’s half century of engagement in Latin America, this special issue presents a ... more To commemorate CLAG’s half century of engagement in Latin America, this special issue presents a curated set of twenty essays reflecting the depth and breadth of Latin American geography, past, present, and future. This special anniversary issue also features photographs from over 50 years of fieldwork in Latin America in the ad hoc section “Photographs from the Field: Fifty Years of Fieldwork in Latin America.” Finally, with this issue we launch JLAG em Tradução / JLAG en Traducción, a new section of the journal that will feature translations of articles—published together with the original article—have the potential to make broad and long-lasting contributions to theoretical, methodological, and topical debates in Latin American geography, but which may not otherwise achieve the readership they deserve.

Journal of Latin American Geography, 2019

This special issue centers on modern-colonial geographies in Latin America, and was co-organized ... more This special issue centers on modern-colonial geographies in Latin America, and was co-organized and co-edited by Mara Duer and Simone Vegliò. The topical and geographical focuses presented in this issue are diverse, ranging from Argentinian landfills to the emotional geographies of natural resource extraction, from the historical and cultural legacy of colonial-era mining in modern-day UNESCO World Heritage Sites to the landscapes of feminicide and memorialization in Juarez, Mexico. Common across all contributions to this special issue is a focus on decolonial literatures emerging across Latin America, scholarship whose impact increasingly resonates within geographical scholarship on/in/of Latin America. Importantly, this special issue reflects JLAG’s editorial commitment to expanding the geographical range of authors that the journal publishes, to broadening the journal’s notion of Latin America as a region, and to more deeply and systematically engaging with geographic scholarship originating in Latin America.

This issue also features a JLAG Perspectives forum on activist scholarship in Latin America. This forum is prompted by the ongoing and escalating militarization on the Mexico-U.S. border and the criminalization of humanitarian work along the same border, the recent murders of several prominent activists in Latin America, and JLAG’s evolving editorial position that these and other issues present an imperative for critically engaged scholarship (see JLAG vol. 18, no. 2, p. 5). The goal of this Perspectives forum is to feature the voices of activist-scholars working in the hemisphere as they explore the theoretical, methodological, and ethical dimensions of activist scholarship, and/or reflect on projects that they’re currently involved in. Contributions from Kate Swanson, Scott Warren, and Geoff Boyce focus on the Mexico-U.S. border, while the focus of Veronica Gago and Liz Mason-Dees centers on the feminist movement in Argentina, Manuel Bayón and Sofia Zaragocin on the work of the Colectivo de Geografía Crítica de Ecuador, and Thelma Vélez on identity, scholarship, and positionality in post-Maria Puerto Rico.

Journal of Latin American Geography, 2019

It is with both excitement and humility that I take the reins as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journ... more It is with both excitement and humility that I take the reins as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Latin American Geography. Chris Gaffney’s four-year run as JLAG’s editor is going to be a hard act to follow. During this period the journal attracted an increasingly diverse set of authors and theoretical, methodological, and topical perspectives, it experienced sustained growth in readership, and it climbed in Google Scholar’s ranking of Latin American studies journals. is culminated with the recent announcement that the Conference of Latin American Geography (CLAG) was awarded the 2019 AAG Publication Award for its publication of JLAG. This is a huge honor, and a testament to the quality, importance, and impact of this journal. Congratulations to Chris and to the JLAG editorial team, and thank you to all the authors, reviewers, CLAG board members, CLAGistas, and everyone else whose e orts made this possible.

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Journal of Latin American Geography, 2019

Table of Contents: Unsettling territory: Indigenous mobilizations, the territorial turn, and th... more Table of Contents:

Unsettling territory: Indigenous mobilizations, the territorial turn, and the limits of land rights in the Paraguay-Brazil borderlands (Joel E. Correia)

Geographic Rift in the Urban Periphery, and Its Concrete Manifestations in Morelia, Mexico (Brian M. Napoletano, Jaime Paneque-Gálvez, Yadira Méndez-Lemus, & Antonio Vieyra)

Indigenous Survival and Settler Colonial Dispossession on the Mexican Frontier: The Case of Cedagĭ Wahia and Wo’oson O’odham Indigenous Communities (Blake Gentry, Geofrey Alan Boyce, Jose M. Garcia, & Samuel N. Chambers)

La frontera en el septentrión del Obispado de Michoacán, Nueva España, 1536–1650 (América Alejandra Navarro López & Pedro Sergio Urquijo Torres)

Can the Use of a Specific Species Influence Habitat Conservation? Case Study of the Ethnobotany of the Palm Iriartea Deltoidea and Conservation in Northwestern Ecuador (Maria Fadiman)

La agricultura en terrazas en la adaptación a la variabilidad climática en la Mixteca Alta, Oaxaca, México (Gerardo Bocco, Berenice Solís Castillo, Quetzalcóatl Orozco-Ramírez, & Adrián Ortega-Iturriaga)

In Good Faith: Land Grabbing, Legal Dispossession, and Land Restitution in Colombia (Max Counter)

Trump’s Border Militarization and the Limits to Capital (Jeremy Slack)

Bolsonaro and the Inequalities of Geographical Development in Brazil (Nelson Rojas de Carvalho & Orlando Alves dos Santos Junior)

The Embers of Radical Ecology and Revolutionary Ideology in Nicaragua’s Protests (Michael A. Petriello & Audrey J. Joslin)

Truncated Transnationalism, the Tenuousness of Temporary Protected Status, and Trump (Ines Miyares, Richard Wright, Alison Mountz, & Adrian Bailey)

Journal of Latin American Geography, 2020

2020 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Conference of Latin American Geography (formerly the C... more 2020 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Conference of Latin American Geography (formerly the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers, or CLAG). Since its emergence in 1970, CLAG has pursued its mission to foster a better understanding of Latin America’s environments and peoples. From the start, CLAG has published a wide range of studies on Latin America in its Publication Series, Proceedings, Yearbook, and, since 2002, in the Journal of Latin American Geography (JLAG). To mark CLAG’s 50th anniversary, the Journal of Latin American Geography will publish a special issue, to be released in conjunction with the January 2020 CLAG meeting in Antigua, Guatemala, focusing on the history of Latin American geography, dominant themes in contemporary Latin American geography, and future trajectories of Latin American research. Instead of conventional full-length articles, for this special issue JLAG seeks to gather a wide variety of voices that express the unique diversity of geographical and academic perspectives in research on Latin America. With this CFP we invite proposals for 2,000- to 3,000-word essays that explore the history, the importance, and the future of CLAG, and of Latin American geography more generally.

Journal of Latin American Geography, 2017

Beginning with his announcement of his Presidential candidacy, Donald Trump’s campaign rested on ... more Beginning with his announcement of his Presidential candidacy, Donald Trump’s campaign rested on a foundation of racism, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant hysteria. Now several months into his presidency, he’s attempting to deliver on his promises. The Department of Homeland Security is accepting bids for the rst phase of “the wall,” the administration’s attack on sanctuary cities has commenced, the notoriously anti-immigrant Attorney General Jeff Sessions is attempting to expand the role of the Justice Department in immigration enforcement, and the stories of deportations and deportation raids are increasingly troubling. These and other actions have provoked a call-to-action among a wide variety of groups. The Latin America Specialty Group (LASG) and the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers (CLAG) felt a need for Latin American and Latin Americanist geog- raphers to come together and discuss how we could, should, and frankly must respond to the Trump Administration’s executive actions and legislative priorities. To that end, we organized a special panel session during the 2017 annual meeting of the American As- sociation of Geographers to explore how our research, teaching, public engagement, and activism can be mobilized in response to the Trump agenda. This forum is the result of that panel discussion.

Human Geography, 2017

This special issue of Human Geography was prompted by a sea change in U.S.-Cuba relations beginni... more This special issue of Human Geography was prompted by a sea change in U.S.-Cuba relations beginning in December 2014 when U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro announced that representatives from the two countries had been meeting in secret to discuss renewing diplomatic relations between the countries. Since then, the U.S. and Cuba have come a significant distance toward normalizing this fraught relationship, including reestablishing formal diplomatic relations, reopening embassies, and significantly loosening travel restrictions on U.S. citizens to Cuba. While the popular imagery of Cuba in the U.S. may tend to reduce the island and its inhabitants to caricature, most journalistic (and even some academic) treatment of Cuba tends to frame the country through one of two ideologically-driven narratives. Cuba, it seems, is either a tropical utopia or a communist dystopia. To us, both of these positions are too ideologically rigid and politically over-determined to be analytically useful. This special issue, then, is our effort to use newly shifting U.S.-Cuba relations as context in which to engage in a more nuanced and complicated analysis of the geography of Cuba. Specifically, we aim to use a spatial lens to highlight different ways of analyzing a dynamic society across multiple geographical scales and historical periods. In doing so, we have made a specific effort to recruit and include diverse styles of expression from differing political viewpoints, methodologies, and experiences with and in the country.

Human Geography, 2017

Fennia, 2017

There have long been discussions about the need for an alternative publishing model for academic ... more There have long been discussions about the need for an alternative publishing model for academic research. This has been made clear by the September 2017 scandal involving Third World Quarterly. The editor’s deeply problematic decision to publish an essay arguing in favor of colonialism was likely meant as click-bate to drive clicks and citations. But we should not lose sight of the fact that this latest scandal is only one recent manifestation of a long-simmering problem that has periodically commanded signi cant attention in the academic literature, blogs, email lists, conference sessions, and the popular press. As a direct result, over the last decade or more, new journals have been created that speci cally endeavor to o er routes around corporate/capitalist academic publishing, and several existing journals have removed themselves from this pro t- driven ecosystem. In this commentary, the editorial team of the journal Human Geography weighs in on what we see as the nature of the problem, what we are doing in response, what our successes have been, and what challenges remain.

The Virginian-Pilot, 2017

I recently returned from leading seventeen teachers from across Virginia on an eleven-day educati... more I recently returned from leading seventeen teachers from across Virginia on an eleven-day educational tour of Cuba, sponsored by the Virginia Geographic Alliance. Based on our collective experience, we believe that President Trump’s planned roll-back of former President Obama’s rapprochement with the island nation, and his apparent desire to return to a more antagonistic U.S. policy toward Cuba, is misinformed and will negatively affect Cubans and Americans alike.

As a direct result of both the renewed interest in Cuba, and the increasing ease with which Ameri... more As a direct result of both the renewed interest in Cuba, and the increasing ease with which Americans can travel to Cuba, it is no surprise that geography educators are among those who are increasingly traveling to Cuba. Several member states of the Geographic Alliance network have organized trips to Cuba during summer 2016 and 2017, and in July 2016 I will co-organize and lead approximately 40 geography educators on an eight-day “GeoTrip” to Cuba in conjunction with the 2016 annual meeting of the National Council for Geographic Education in Tampa, FL.

As someone who has spent approximately three cumulative years on the ground in Cuba since 2002, two things have really surprised me about Americans’ collective response to the warming relationship between the US and Cuba. First, this idea that somehow Cuba is an island trapped in time, stuck in the late 1950s or early 1960s, as if the island’s existence in history is constituted only relative to the United States, as if cutting diplomatic ties arrests time. And second, the idea that now, with a warming political relationship and more and more American travelers visiting the island, that Cuba will soon be simply an extension of South Beach (a sentiment that was ironically captured on the cover of the April 20, 2015 issue of the New Yorker Magazine, Figure 1). As if the effects of this changing/evolving/warming relationship will be purely on American terms, as if Americans are the subjects, and Cuba the object.

In 2015 the National Council for Geographic Education invited me to write an essay on geography p... more In 2015 the National Council for Geographic Education invited me to write an essay on geography pedagogy, and to reflect on how I approach teaching geography. I wrote that one of the most important things I do as a geography educator is to teach my students how to remain skeptical about the way the world seems to simply exist in a particular social and spatial order. As geographers and geographic educators, our goal should be to demystify that which seems natural, to denaturalize that which seems to be just the way it is. Our goal should be not to simply describe the world, but to understand the social, cultural, economic, and political processes that bring it into being in one particular way rather than in infinite other possible ways. That is, our goal should be to mount, together with our students, a ruthless criticism of the existing socio-geographical world, to ask not just how (and where) things are, but why things are the way they are, how they got to be that way, and if that’s the way they should be.

Volume 16, Number 1, April 2017 Table of Contents Special Issue: Critical Geographies in Latin A... more Volume 16, Number 1, April 2017
Table of Contents

Special Issue: Critical Geographies in Latin America
Guest Editors: Anne-Marie Hanson and John C. Finn

Critical Geographies in Latin America
pp. 1-15 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0008
John C. Finn, Anne-Marie Hanson

The Incorrigible Subject: Mobilizing a Critical Geography of (Latin) America through the Autonomy of Migration
pp. 17-42 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0007
Nicholas De Genova

Space, Power, and Locality: the Contemporary Use of Territorio in Latin American Geography
pp. 43-67 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0009
López María F. Sandoval, Andrea Robertsdotter, Myriam Paredes

Geografías de sacrificio y geografías de esperanza: tensiones territoriales en el Ecuador plurinacional
pp. 69-92 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0016
Manuela M. M. Silveira, Melissa Moreano, Nadia Romero, Diana Murillo, Gabriela Ruales, Nataly Torres

Beyond Removal: Critically Engaging in Research on Geographies of Homelessness in the City of Rio de Janeiro
pp. 93-116 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0013
Katharina Schmidt, Igor M. Medeiros Robaina

Turismo, abandono y desplazamiento: Mapeando el barrio de La Boca en Buenos Aires
pp. 117-137 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0015
Jorge Sequera, Tomás Rodríguez

“I risk everything because I have already lost everything”: Central American Female Migrants Speak Out on the Migrant Trail in Oaxaca, Mexico
pp. 139-164 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0012
Leigh Anne Schmidt, Stephanie Buechler

JLAG Perspectives Forum:

Celebrating Critical Geographies of Latin America: Inspired by an NFL Quarterback
pp. 165-171 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0010
Sharlene Mollett

Geografiando para la resistencia
pp. 172-177 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0006
Colectivo de Geografía Crítica del Ecuador

Perplexing Entanglements with a Post-Neoliberal State
pp. 177-184 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0014
Japhy Wilson

The Challenge of Feminist Political Geography to State-Centrism in Latin American Geography
pp. 185-193 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0011
Zoe Pearson, Nicholas J. Crane

Attending to Researcher Positionality in Geographic Fieldwork on Health in Latin America: Lessons from La Costa Ecuatoriana
pp. 194-201 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0005
Ben W. Brisbois, Patricia Polo Almeida

What should an overtly critical Latin Americanist geography look like? That’s the question we exp... more What should an overtly critical Latin Americanist geography look like? That’s the question we explore in this introduction to The Journal of Latin American Geography’s first special issue dedicated to critical geographies in Latin America. About a year ago the journal’s editorial team published a new editorial position in which they set out an explicitly critical vision for the journal, writing: “As part of our commitment to critical and progressive scholarship, we seek to engage the most crucial scholarly and social debates of our times, while retaining a historical perspective and intellectual grounding in geographic theory” (Gaffney et al. 2016: 1). They go on to write that the journal specifically seeks to publish research focusing on environmental justice, human rights, political agency, and power, “from critical perspectives” (Gaffney et al. 2016: 1, our emphasis). Given that this special issue is the opening salvo in the journal’s turn toward a more explicitly critical editorial position, we feel that it’s worth briefly reflecting on what critical Latin American(ist) geography could and should be. To that end, we aim to make three distinct, though inter-related points: 1) that critical Latin Americanist geography must be overtly politicized and committed to the disassembly of unequal power structures throughout the region; 2) that we must rethink not only what Latin America is as a region, but the process through which we conceptualize and define the region to begin with; and 3) that critical Latin Americanist geography must do more to break down the scholarly barriers between North American and European Latin Americanist geography on the one hand, and Latin American geography on the other.

Statues, monuments, and memorials are part of the way that we celebrate our country’s history. Th... more Statues, monuments, and memorials are part of the way that we celebrate our country’s history. They are physical embodiments of local and national history cemented into the landscape. It is important to remember, however, that landscapes are not neutral; history inscribed in the landscape most often reflects those with the power to inscribe, and thus they naturalize their experience into that landscape. In the particular case of Hampton Roads, Virginia, a strong gender bias lurks in the monumental landscape. Through an analysis of all statues representing people in the Hampton Roads region, we found that the vast majority of statues celebrate powerful male leaders. Conversely, women are almost entirely absent from public art, and where they are present, they are portrayed as dainty, passive, and secondary. Based on our analysis, we argue that these monuments and statues constitute a gendered and gendering representational practice, which through the landscape, naturalize men into Virginia’s history, and minimize, mis- represent, or even erase the significance of women in the state’s past.