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ResearchOverview | Themes | Pre-PhD | 1990s | Recent
Overview When I'm asked about my research interests, I usually reply in pairs:
Yet these categories tend to confuse more than clarify, because usually we describe our research like it's a little compartment of expertise, or a clear subcommunity of scholars with whom we work. But my research does not fit into a well-defined box or community in geography (or any other discipline for that matter). So how can I describe it to you? At the top of this page is a sketch showing five primary themes and how they have unfolded in research topics running from my undergraduate years until now. Their placement reflects one primary theme (in some cases an arbitrary choice!) and the approximate date I started working on each—though all are still relevant in many ways. As you can see, each topic blends several themes. No, life is not some linear unfolding of intellectual pursuits: there are lots of twists and turns, lots of gaps, lots of interconnections not represented on this nice neat diagram. But time's arrow does march on, and the farther I go the more I realize I've been thinking about many of these things for some time now. Click on any of the five themes or thirteen topics in this diagram to get to the brief discussions below, with links to resources and publications where applicable.
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| www.geog.ucsb.edu/~jproctor/rsrch.html Last modified: 19 August, 2004 |
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I
grew up in rural Oregon, surrounded more by forests than civilization.
Little wonder, then, that nature has been central to my research,
except that this work has primarily concerned ideas of nature rather
than nature itself. That's why each of the research topics above
with the little green theme also have the little purple one: nature
and culture are interwoven, conceptually and practically, far more
than the term "nature" generally implies, with important implications
for how we think both about nature and about culture. 
To
me, culture
means more-or-less shared meaning. My interests in culture
are severalfold. If you read my bit on nature above, you'll know
that this is a primary interest. Another concerns philosophy (epistemology
and ethics), which I generally mix with analysis of lay and scholarly
culture. Another concerns religion, which is a notoriously difficult
aspect of culture to define but still speaks of an important force—for
better and for worse—in this world. 
As
noted above, religion is hard to define. The reason is simple
enough: religion, like nature, is a thoroughly human concept—even
though, just like nature, the objects of religious devotion may be
real. My first undergraduate degree focused on philosophy and sociology
of religion; and recently I've brought religion back into my research
in conjunction with science, in the context of environmentalism,
and as a means to understand authority in modern societies.
I
enjoy teaching, but like any teacher the first thing you learn is
how tricky it is. So I've done occasional research on education:
during my early years at UCSB I did a good deal of work applying
technology to education, and more recently I've worked in conjunction
with a nonprofit group in Oregon to explore ways of bringing GIS
and the Internet into K-12 forest education. We've pursued the latter
with an emphasis on sustainability, the watershed approach, and experiential
learning—all ways to mix nature and culture, hopefully to the benefit
of both! 
A
longstanding, though rather behind-the-scenes, interest concerns
the diversity of claims to knowledge in the academy, especially along
the continuum from the physical and life sciences to the social and
behavioral sciences to the humanities. I've derived a great
deal of intellectual benefit from working with diverse groups of
scholars, and in bringing these scholars together. In fact, I'm convinced
that we would be thinking about nature, culture, religion, education,
etc. quite differently if we scholars got out of our specialized
corners and arrayed ourselves in heterogeneous mixings more often.
The result is admittedly a bit cacophonous, but it sure challenges
unspoken assumptions about knowledge! 
My
first big research project was my undergraduate thesis on congregational
growth dynamics in the Unitarian Universalist Association.
One popular scholarly theory of the 1970s essentially blamed theological liberalism
for why mainstream Protestant denominations were declining for the first time
in American history. I chose to examine the most theologically liberal denomination
of all, using longitudinal attitudinal and membership data provided by the Unitarian
Universalist Association as well as related metropolitan statistical data, and
discovered that church growth and decline statistics were quite specific to region,
community type, and church size, and not at all attributable to one underlying
cause such as theological liberalism. Upon filing my thesis I graduated and went
straight to Africa with the Peace Corps, so unfortunately this research
was never published. 
Having
spent four years in Swaziland working for the Peace Corps, I chose
to research a topic from southern Africa when I entered graduate
school.
My M.A. thesis explored the clash between Malthusian and Marxist explanations
of resource crisis in subsaharan Africa, focusing on a longitudinal
case study from Swaziland, and concluding that both demographic growth
and resource maldistribution play a significant, though resource
and site-specific, role. Looking back, I can now tell that I was
not only attempting to understand the chronic rural resource crises
I saw in Swaziland; I was also trying to understand the
breadth of human-environment theory, with some scholars blaming environmental
problems on overpopulation and others deriding this concern over
demographic growth as masking the real political-economic causes
of social and environmental crisis. The thesis was published in 
Everyone
knows that facts and values are different things, right? Well, from
mid-graduate school until the present, I've had my suspicions, ranging
from a reexamination of "value-free" science to studying how
people justify their values by facts to observing how facts are
often grounded in nature but values in culture, thereby driving a
wedge between the two. Later, I realized that the fact-value dichotomy
was just a front for the subject-object dichotomy: facts are facts
because they reveal objects, and values are values because they reveal
subjects. I'm about the three millionth person to say this, but the
subject-object dichotomy is perhaps the root of all epistemological
(and possibly ethical) evil, not only in the academy but in popular
discourse as well. Imagine a world in which people couldn't bolster
their argument by claiming that something is a "fact" or "objective"!
Imagine a world in which values are not seen as our personal, subjective
prerogative but little more. This fact-value, and object-subject,
language is ubiquitous, no matter how problematic or philosophically
suspect. I have several papers on this: see for instance an 
Following
my Ph.D. dissertation on a related topic, the
early part of my career was devoted to bringing environmental ethics
into geography. I became interested in environmental ethics as
a graduate student because it addressed the important but often overlooked
normative, or values, dimensions of human-environment interaction.
From the start, however, my take on environmental ethics mixed
it with culture, so that for instance when I examined anthropocentrism
or the is-ought dichotomy I was as interested in how these notions
circulated as meanings as whether or not they were philosophically
justifiable. I was simply not convinced that a rational argument
was enough; indeed, many philosophically-suspect ideas seemed to
be doing fine and well as cultural meanings. I have a number of
papers that mix philosophical and cultural analysis of ethics; see
for instance a 
I
grew up amidst Pacific Northwest forests, so it's perhaps understandable
that I would be drawn to them as an early case study for my work.
My early experience was varied: I hiked the forests for solace and
worked the lumber mills for money. I knew how much my community depended
on logging for income and pride; and I knew that the human transformation
of Pacific Northwest forests was far greater than most people in
my community could ever fathom. I also know how divisive these forests
were in policy debates—how people who shared many of the same values
for the region would declare war on each other over the fate of these
forests. Starting with my Ph.D. dissertation, the Pacific Northwest
has thus been site for research; example publications include a 
Culturally-based
ideas of nature have been a continuing interest. They seem to violate
everything we think about nature: why, isn't nature by definition
that which is not human? Others may admit that their opponents suffer
from cultural bias in their ideas of nature, but they of course don't.
It seems such a threat to admit to ourselves that the very thing
we think of as good because it's natural, the very nature we work
so hard to protect, is as much cultural creation as autonomous
reality. For representative publications, see for instance an encyclopedia 
My
interest in the human transformation of Pacific Northwest forests
and related impacts on biodiversity led to a broader interest in
anthropogenic environmental change, not so much rooted in one particular
place as a general theoretical approach. Environmental change, especially
at the global scale, has been an important recent research topic
in the physical and life sciences, but the inclusion of humans has
been theoretically problematic, perhaps given this natural science
point of departure. I have several papers that attempt to redress
this situation, including an 
An
occasional research interest has concerned the application of technology,
primarily (but not exclusively) the use of the Internet, to enhance
education. Technology offers a number of learning opportunities,
but only if well evaluated and developed over time; I've had a number
of successes in my own courses by working diligently on integrating
technology into my pedagogical approach. Sample publications reporting
on some of these efforts include an 
Geography
and ethics follows from my earlier work in environmental ethics,
but also represents an attempt to meaningfully span the entire discipline
of geography—a microcosm of the intellectual landscape, with a wide
range of approaches to knowledge—with ethical considerations. I founded
a new specialty group in our professional association, organized
a series of scholarly sessions on geography and ethics, and co-edited
a 
This
topic gave me the opportunity to combine my longterm interests
in 
This
new research topic, an outgrowth of earlier work on 
Here
I build on my longstanding work on 
In
addition to my work on science and religion, religion has recently
reentered my research agenda in the context of modernity, and specifically
the phenomenon of trust in authority in late-modern societies.
As Adam Seligman has argued, "Modernity…is inherently
hostile to the idea and experience of authority and as a result has
difficulty understanding its persistence," as in the resurgence
of certain forms of religion in the US and elsewhere. One could argue
that trust in authority is an inescapable feature of our social lives,
but it often conveys a heightened level of ideological vulnerability.
Few of us, of course, admit that we are ideologically manipulated;
most would agree with the saying "Trust
Allah, but tie your camel." Yet
there is another saying: "Those you trust the most can steal the most," and
I think it rings true in many of our lives. So authority cuts both ways.
I recently explored this problem in a nationwide study of Americans, focusing
on four major
contemporary authorities: religion, science, the state, and nature. I have
a general