Alison Mountz
Assistant Professor of Geography

amountz@maxwell.syr.edu

PhD  University of British Columbia, 2003
MA  Hunter College, City University of New York, 1998
BA  Dartmouth College, 1995

Office Hours (144B Eggers Hall):
Tuesdays, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
 

Research interests:
• Cultural geographies of transnational migration and refugee flows
• Immigration policy, human smuggling and border enforcement
• Political geography, states, and statelessness
• Feminist geography, gender and immigration
• Urban geography, Policing, and the city

I research the cultural geography of migration and refugee circuits and the implementation of immigration policy.  In the field, I’ve undertaken three transnational ethnographies within different communities on the move between states. These have encompassed work with undocumented migrants and asylum-seekers, and with a variety of institutional employees working in the field of immigration.  My writing dwells on the tension between migrants’ and states’ interpretations of immigration and refugee policies and negotiations at the border.  Empirical data from the encounters between institutional actors and migrants bring into relief the shifting boundaries of the nation-state and enforcement practices.

Current projects:
• Canadian Borders:  Understanding Security and Border Management
• Stateless by Geographical Design:  The Shifting Relationships between Migrants, Refugees, and States
• The City of Syracuse:  Gender, Geography, Architecture (with Lori Brown, School of Architecture, Syracuse University)
• From North to South:  Policing the Next Frontier in Mexico City (with Winifred Curran, Department of Geography, DePaul University)

Selected publications:
2004.  Embodying the Nation-State:  Canada's Response to Human Smuggling.  Political Geography, 23(3):  323-345.

2003.  Human Smuggling, the Transnational Imaginary, and Everyday Geographies of the Nation-State.  Antipode 35(3):  622-644.

2003.  Methodologically becoming:  power, knowledge, and team research.  Gender, Place and Culture 10(1): 29-46.  (with I. Miyares, R. Wright, A. Bailey)

2003.  The Interrupted Circle:  Truncated Transnationalism and the Salvadoran Experience.  Journal of Latin American Geography 2(1): 74-86.  (with I. Miyares, R. Wright,, A. Bailey, J. Jonak)

2002.  Lives in limbo:  Temporary Protected Status and immigrant identities.  Global Networks 2(4):  335-356.  (with R. Wright, I. Miyares, A. Bailey)

2002.  Feminist Politics, Immigration, and Academic Identities.  Gender, Place and Culture 9(2):  187-194.

2002.  Producing Salvadoran Transnational Geographies.  Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92(1): 125-144.  (with A. Bailey, R. Wright, I. Miyares)

2002  Immigration to British Columbia:  Media Representation and Public Opinion.  Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis, Working Paper Series, No. 02-15.  http://www.riim.metropolis.net. (with M. Mahatani)

2002.  The challenges to responding to human smuggling in Canada:  Practitioners reflect on the 1999 boat arrivals in British Columbia. Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis, Working Paper Series, No. 02-23. http://www.riim.metropolis.net.  (with A. Charlton, S. Duff, D. Grant, A. Mountz, R. Pike, J. Sohn, C. Taylor)

2001.  Interpretation, representation, positionality:  issues in field research in human geography.  In M. Limb and C. Dwyer (eds) Qualitative Methodologies for Geographers.  London:  Arnold, pp. 234-237.  (with D. Ley)

2001.  'Thank God she’s not sick.’  Health and disciplinary practice among Salvadoran women in northern New Jersey.  In I. Dyck, N. Lewis, and S. McLafferty (eds) Geographies of Women’s Health.  New York, London:  Routledge, pp. 127-142.  (with C. Kerner, A. Bailey, I. Miyares, R. Wright)

2000.  Legal Status, Gender, and Employment among Salvadorans in the US.  International Journal of Population Geography 6:  273-286. (with R. Wright, A. Bailey, I. Miyares)

1996.  Daily Life in the Transnational Migrant Community of San Agustín, Oaxaca and Poughkeepsie, New York.  Diaspora 6:  403-428.  (with R. Wright)

Recent grants:
Research and Writing Grant, MacArthur Foundation, Program on Global Security and Sustainability, “Stateless by Geographic Design” (2005-2006).
$75,000

Vision Grant, Syracuse University  (2005- 2006) “The City of Syracuse:  Gender, Geography, Architecture”. $5,000 with Lori Brown

Canadian Studies Faculty Research Grant, Canadian Embassy (2004-2005 “Understanding Security and Border Management in a Shifting Global Context”. $8,000

Current teaching:
Political Geography (Geo 372) Offered fall 2005.
This course explores the relationship between geography and politics.  Students discuss a range of contemporary political debates from a geographical perspective, including immigration, gay marriage, elections, human trafficking, and terrorism.  Three main questions drive discussion and debate.  First, what are “politics” and, more importantly, where do they happen?  Second, how do our locations (“where we’re at”) influence how, where, when, and whether we engage?  Third, what directions must the subdiscipline of political geography move in to make sense of a global world?

The City of Syracuse: Gender, Geography, Architecture  (Geo/Arch/Wsp 500) Offered fall 2005.
The course is cross-listed between geography, architecture, and women’s studies and designed to bring students of these programs together and out into the city for hands-on service learning.  They will begin by studying Syracuseans’ past in order to understand contemporary spaces of the city.  Course content will include lessons on the architectural design of downtown buildings and theatres, the labor histories built into the residential and work spaces of the city, and the geography of the urban region. 

The Urban Condition (Geo 563).
This course explores contemporary approaches to urban geography and will focus particularly on “the urban condition” of life in cities in an era characterized by global flows of people, capital, goods, and information.  Many urban theorists are grappling with frameworks to understand globalization and transnationalism and the ways in which cities – and our understandings of life in cities – must contend with these flows.  We will examine a diverse array of approaches to the city and seek to answer questions such as the following:  How do different facets of our identities- gender, race, ability, religion, and so on – influence the ways that we experience and conceptualize cities?  How are different urban residents bound up in and affected by global flows?  How do scholars and artists seek to represent urban life?   How do diverse research methods illuminate multiple realities of urbanization?

Research Design (Geo 602) Offered every spring.
This course leads graduate students through the process of research design and proposal-writing.  Students will be exposed to a range of research methods used by geographers and a range of philosophies on how to design and implement research methodology. Students experiment with and discuss methods in a collaborative environment.

Theories of the border and migration  (Geo/Wsp 700) Offered spring 2005, 2008.

Feminist Geography (Geo/Wsp 876) Offered spring 2007.
This graduate seminar explores the relationships between gender, space, and place.  Women and men shape spaces and experience places in distinct ways.  After reviewing some of the basic ideas of feminist geography, this course will explore the gendered spaces of everyday life as sites of oppression and resistance where identities are made and re-made across the landscape.  Students will then examine the ways that feminist geographers have utilized spatial metaphors, with a focus on geographies of the body and the border, sites that are particularly helpful to our understanding of the gendering of geopolitical relationships that structure human migration, labor practices in the global economy, and a critical standpoint from which to study men’s and women’s places in the world.