Kevin A. Gould, PhD

Associate Professor , Geography, Planning and Environment

Research areas: Political ecology, historical and economic geographies of the Americas and particularly Guatemala, social theory, entanglements of development and militarization, politics of expertise, post-disaster reconstruction

Contact information

Email:

kevin.gould@concordia.ca

Availability:

Office hours: Weds 10:30 - 12:00

Biography

Dr. Kevin Gould's research explores environmental and economic policy-making in the Americas. He is particularly interested in policies authorized by technical knowledge. Building on political ecology and economic geography literatures, Dr. Gould's work investigates the politics of market-assisted land reform, post-disaster reconstruction, and Cold War infrastructure development. Through his research, he seeks to challenge the often violent transnational processes and epistemologies that connect Canada, the United States and Guatemala. Dr. Gould has also facilitated course-based critical geography research on the university itself. Dr. Gould received his Ph.D. in Human Geography from the University of British Columbia (2009) and spent one year as a research fellow at Dartmouth College.

I am willing to supervise theses in the fields of political ecology and critical geography. Students interested in working on the political ecology of post-disaster reconstruction, broadly defined, are encouraged to apply as are students who would like to carry out field work or archival research in Latin America. I would also welcome graduate students who wish to study the critical geographies of the university and/or student movements.

Professional affiliations

Association of American Geographers

Canadian Association of Geographers

Latin American Studies Association

Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

The Latin American Studies Network of Montreal

Selected publications

Lizarralde, G., Bornstein, L., Robertson, M., Gould, K. A., Herazo, B., Petter, A. M., & Bouchereau, K. (2021). Does climate change cause disasters? How citizens, academics, and leaders explain climate-related risk and disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean.
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 58, 102173.
Lizarralde, G., Holmes Páez, A. O., Lopez, O., Bornstein, L. Gould, K. A., Herazo, B., and Muñoz, L. 2020. We said, they said: the politics of conceptual frameworks in disasters and climate change in Colombia and Latin America. Disaster Prevention and Management: An International Journal.
Gould, K. A. 2018. The old militarized humanitarianism: contradictions of counterinsurgent infrastructure in Cold War Guatemala. Critical Military Studies, 4(2): 140-160.
Gould, K. A., M. Magdalena Garcia, and Jacob AC Remes. 2016. "Beyond natural-disasters-are-not-natural": the work of state and nature after the 2010 earthquake in Chile." Journal of Political Ecology 23: 94-114.
Gould, K. A. 2014 Everyday expertise: land regularization and the conditions for land grabs in Petén, Guatemala. Environment Planning A, 46(10): 2353-2368.
Gould, K. A. and Estrada, I. A. 2014. Framing disappearance: H.I.J.O.S., public art and the making of historical memory of the Guatemalan civil war. Special Issue on Enforced Disappearance. ACME: International Journal of Critical Geography, 13(1): 100-134.
Dempsey, J., Gould, K. A., Sundberg, J. 2011. Changing land tenure, defining subjects: neoliberalism and property regimes on Native reserves. In Re-Thinking the Great White North: race, nature and the historical geographies of whiteness in Canada. Eds. A. Baldwin, A. Kobayashi, and L. Cameron. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Gould, K. A. 2010. Anxiety, epistemology, and policy research "behind enemy lines." Geoforum. 41: 15-18.

Selected conference presentations

Gould, K. A. 2021. Contradictions of transnational anti-colonial struggle: the post-WWII Guatemala-Israel alliance. Latin American Studies Association. Annual conference. Vancouver, British Columbia.

Gould, K. A. 2019. Peace created the space for this: a Guatemalannational land policy made by experts. Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Toronto, Ontario.

Gould,K. A. 2017. Extra-legal properties of Guatemalan land markets. International conference: Geographies of Markets. Karl Polanyi Instituteof Political Economy at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec

Gould, K. A. 2015. Whitening infrastructures: race and nation in Cold War Guatemala. Intersections Seminar Series, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto.

Gould, K. A. 2015. Emplaced histories of calculable land: the (un)making of a geodetic grid in northern Guatemala. Annual Conference of the Association of American Geographers, Chicago.

Gould, K. A. 2015. Entangled (post)colonialisms: military-led development in 1960s Guatemala. 7th International conference of critical geography, Ramallah, Palestine.

Teaching

Courses taught

Geography 210: Geography of global change

Geography 220: Space, place and identity

Geography 290: Environment and society

Geography 300: Environment: cultural and historical perspectives

Geography 400: Political ecology

Geography 407: Indigenous people and the Environment

Geography 418: Postcolonial geography

Geography 605: Graduate methodology seminar: Geography Worlds

Current Graduate Student Supervision

Adrián O. N. Íñiguez (MSc): Post-disaster struggles for housing: the case of the 2010 earthquake in Chile

Jamila Ewais (PhD): Chemical geographies: transnational governance via agricultural policies in the Middle East and North Africa

Harold Bellanger* (PhD): Integrating climate services and food policy: geographies of agricultural development in Guatemala

* co-advisor with Dr. Nicole Gombay

Masters students (graduated)

Noah Cannon (2020) Performing indigenous well-being: historical and political geographies of Canada's community well-being index

Kayleigh McSwain (2017) Whiteness and the politics of local food movement in Halifax, N.S.

Gwen Muir (2015) Temporary labor recruitment in Guatemala for Quebec agroindustry

Barbara Bottini-Havrillay (2015) Politics of road-building in Cold War Guatemala

Michelle Braiden (2014) Discourse and dispossession in the Chaco War, Bolivia

William Zullo (2014) Spaces of transgender youth in Montreal*

Julie Montigney (2013) Spaces of queer youth in Montreal*

* co-advised with Dr. Julie Podmore

Honors students

Devon McKellar (2019) The frontier and the wasteland: settler colonial cognitive spaces in Montreal's sudouest.

Daniel Belvas (2019) The privatization of public space in Montreal's privatization of public space in Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles

Montserrat Hernandez (2015) The path to sustainability: implementation of ecotechniques in a rural Mexican community

Noah Cannon(2014) The well-being index and Canadian First Nations

Angharad Wylie (2013) Alternative economies in Halifax, Novo Scotia

Alex Matak (2012) Neoliberalism within: Concordia’s student movement

Julia de Montigny (2011) What spaces exist for queer youth? On institutional discourses and regulatory imaginations

Alexander Pinheiro (2010) The Montreal BIOBUS Project: Simple, Pure, Green?