Globalization and Regional Development
At Syracuse, geographers research the relationship between flows and networks of activity, interaction and power that are producing an increasingly interconnected world, and the historical and geographical contexts within which the lives of people, and places, are being transformed. By focusing on globalization processes, we examine the complex and often contradictory mechanisms through which flows of capital, people, information and knowledge are sped-up, spread-out and made more intensive. By focusing on development, we pay particular attention to the inequalities created by these flows among groups, and in spaces and places that have been historically marginalized or subject to control within national and international systems. In both thematic areas, geographers seek to understand the forms of agency that individuals and groups employ to resist and transform the inequalities and exclusions associated with these processes. Current research includes transformations in local and regional labor market policies and governance in Canada and the United States under NAFTA; the impacts of restructuring of the global automobile industry;  the role of rural peoples’ organizations in mediating resource access and management in Latin America; colonialism and Latin American development; the effects of gender representation in spaces of decision-making on political engagement and governance in the Caribbean; gender transformations in work within India’s software industry; bodily security and the flow of undocumented migrants across the Korean/Chinese border; rural livelihoods and struggles over nature in communities living within protected areas in highland Ecuador; the global commodification of bodies and the production of anti-obese space.

Faculty
Alison Mountz (Migration and refugee issues; border enforcement and the body; states and statelessness; institutional ethnography; feminist methodology; political geography; and gender in the city)
Tom Perreault (Political ecology, environment and development, social movements, Latin America)
David Robinson (Colonial Spain and Portugal as the first historic globalization agencies; the Internet as a key current globalization process)  
Tod Rutherford (Political economy; labor market restructuring and governance; labor and the global automobile industry)

Related Courses
Undergraduate
GEO 173 – World Political Economy
GEO 325- Colonialism in Latin America (Robinson)
GEO 364 – Gender in a Globalizing World (Open)
GEO 372 - Political Geography (Mountz)

Graduate/Undergraduate
GEO 500 – Globalization, the Caribbean and the City
GEO 558- Sustainable Development (Perreault)
GEO 561 Global Economic Geography (Rutherford)
GEO 595 - The Internet and Geography (Robinson)

Graduate
GEO 605 – Theories of Development
GEO 700 - Human Migration (Mountz)
GEO 700 - Theories of the Border (Mountz)
GEO 755- Seminar on Political Ecology (Perreault)
GEO 764 – Gender and Globalization
GEO 876 - Feminist Geography (Mountz)