Vincent J. Del Casino

San José State University · Urban and Regional Planning

This report examines how social geographers are engaging with the questions that robots and robotic technologies provoke. First, it discusses Marxist analyses of machines and troubles the role that robots play in social production and reproduction. Second, robots as actors in assemblages of sociospatial relations are interrogated for their role in...

The rise of the robots suggests a technological revolution like no other. It heralds potentially profound impacts on jobs and labor markets. Geographers have so far remained relatively quiet about such transformations. This commentary suggests ways in which social and cultural geographers can expand upon a robust labor geography and the debates sur...

This paper builds on recent work on the embodied geopolitics of tourism to investigate the Titan Missile Museum (TMM), a Cold War‐era underground nuclear missile silo and command bunker in the southwest USA. In examining how visitors are not only persuaded to adopt certain attitudes towards the weaponry, but are enrolled in an embodied experience t...

In recent years scholars have explored the geopolitics of spectacle in exciting ways. While tourism presents a rich opportunity to think about the intersection of geopolitics and spectacle, only a small but growing number of researchers have explored this area where state-society relations unfold in complex ways. This article draws on this work and...

Political ecology of health (PEH) has become a robust subfield in geography. PEH scholarship deploys diverse theories and methods across analytical realms of political economy, social discourse, and materiality. Yet, within PEH the materiality of the body has been theoretically divided between an affective, visceral approach and one that views the...

In this chapter, the authors aim to broaden the way scholars theorise and empirically treat the increasingly complex relationships between robots and social life, especially in the context of our historically anthropocentric human geographies. They engage a range of diverse epistemological, ontological, and methodological commitments, but all in so...

Recent accounts of labor displacement highlight the automation of tasks in care work, long thought to require uniquely human skills. These developments call for a retheorization of displacement that addresses the shifting sites and relations of human labor, while also questioning the humanness of care. This intervention supplements a humanist conce...

This symposium aims to broaden the way scholars theorise and empirically treat the increasingly complex relationships between robots and social life, especially in the context of our historically anthropocentric human geographies. The authors of this symposium engage a range of diverse epistemological, ontological, and methodological commitments, b...

As spaces increasingly come to be described as “smart,” “sentient,” or “thinking,” scholars remain in disagreement as to the nature of intelligence, knowledge, or the “human mind.” This article opens the notion of intelligence to contestation, examining differing conceptions of intelligence and what they might mean for how geographers approach the...

The rapid expansion of online education compels debate over what accessible higher education should be, how it should be delivered, and whom it should serve. While geographers remain relatively marginal to this debate, they have engaged the question of the neoliberal university, where online education is sometimes characterized as another instantia...

Representation, including the presentation of spatial patterns in maps and diagrams, is a contested concept at the core of geography, cartography, and GIScience. Since the 1950s, scholars and practitioners engaging with maps as both products and practices have situated representation in the science of communication and geovisualization on the one h...

This report examines how social geography engages with nonhuman subjects; in this case, bugs. The report focuses on how social geography is rethinking its core concepts of difference and inequality through scholarship that examines the relations between bugs and human inequality, bug management and molecular intervention on/in bugs, and the biosoci...

This review discusses the social geographies of food, focusing on how social geographic research has been taken up in and influenced by the wider discussions of food geographies in the discipline. It does so with particular attention to: the spatial politics of food deserts, food security, and food justice movements; the socialities of food identit...

The development of Viagra in the late 1990s ushered in a new age of conversation about sex and sexuality, as men’s bodily abilities were put on display for all to discuss. In 2005, the video-sharing technology YouTube was launched. Taken together, these technological innovations – both biomedical and representational – have produced debate around s...

Being men and being healthy seem to be contradictory sociospatial states. Although research on the interrelationships between gender and health is strongly represented in geography, and masculinity has been examined, geographical perspectives examining the contradictory spatialities of men's health are lacking. This article addresses this absence b...

Sexual health has made its way into the larger agenda of the discipline of geography, as an increasing number of geographers tackle issues related to the transmission of HIV as well as other sexually transmitted infections. A recent initiative by the Association of American Geographers also emphasizes the study of drug use in the discipline. Despit...

Questioning the Normative “We”Social Geographical TurnsMapping A Companion to Social GeographyReferences

The geography of homelessness is often characterized as containment in marginalized spaces of cities or as placelessness necessitating continuous travel. These characterizations, which reflect discourses about ‘the homeless’ as an imagined deviant homogeneous group, have had substantial effects on policy formation and critiques of punitive turns in...

The discipline of geography is largely absent in discussions and debates about drug use practices and their relationships to sexual health. Given the important relationships among the use of drugs, performances of sexualized identities, and the practices of sex, it behooves medical and health geographers particularly, and social and cultural geogra...

We are writing as geographers attempting to engage a sociological audience on what we see to be two important domains of contemporary spatial theory. Our goal is to create bridges of understanding between disciplines that, as the editors note in their introduction, have for too long developed on nonintersecting paths. There are of course exceptions...

In recent years, there has been a push to further integrate history and geography within a framework of K-12 teacher training in the United States. Yet, there has been relatively little engagement conceptually, as historians borrow geographic concepts, such as the world region Asia-Pacific, without considering what this means in their own communica...

Over the past two decades, a growing number of geographers and cartographic historians have critically examined maps as products imbued with power, the social contexts of map production, and the intimate involvement of cartography in Western imperialism and the enlightenment project. More recently, a few scholars have applied critical approaches to...

Over the past two decades, a growing number of geographers and cartographic historians have critically examined maps as products imbued with power, the social contexts of map production, and the intimate involvement of cartography in Western imperialism and the enlightenment project. More recently, a few scholars have applied critical approaches to...

This paper examines how the practices of heritage tourism reproduce identities in and of Fredericksburg, Virginia. In particular, we focus on the everyday practices of tourism workers who are essential in the representation and reproduction of this heritage space. In so doing, we want to move away from research in geography that theorizes represent...

Authors of world regional geography textbooks have recently become more interested in the broader theoretical changes that have emerged in human geography. Relying on feminist and other critical perspectives, concepts such as space, place and scale are being re‐imagined in this ‘new world regional geography’. This paper intervenes on behalf of a mo...

In the wake of the AIDS crisis, 'traditional' Thai medicine has received new attention as a means by which people living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA) can receive some level of care. The revitalization of Thai medicine, however, is complicated by the competing organizational politics and social dynamics that regulate discourses and practices of health...

In this article, I contribute to our understanding of the plurality of approaches that construct the geographies of health care through an examination of the distribution of health care services for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in Chiang Mai Province, Thailand. In particular, I focus on the development of a network of support groups for PLWH...

In this paper, we present three methodological frameworks for the geographic study of organizations. These are situated within three meta-theoretical perspectives in human geography: spatial science, critical realism, and post-structuralism. Each framework offers a different theorization of organizations, and each prompts different research questio...

Tourism maps remain underexamined in geography. Despite recent trends in critical cartography and tourism studies that redefine the relationship between space and representation, these geographic texts are rarely explored for their intertextual relationships with the spaces they claim to represent. In this article, we argue that tourism maps and ot...

Typescript. Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1995. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-107).