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[MUSIC PLAYING]
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>> Welcome to Conversation with the Geographer. I'm Mike DeVivo, Professor of geography at Grand Rapids Community College. And today, we have, as the star of our show, Steve graves, Professor of geography at California State University Northridge otherwise known as CSUN. Steve, thank you so much for being with us today. >> You're welcome very much. Always glad to hang out with you, Mike. >> Hey, I appreciate it. >> Steve, you really have an interesting career.
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You've explored different aspects of geography and we'll get into a little bit of that. But first I'm going to ask you, what really inspired you to consider geography as a career? Did you have any childhood experiences living in Ohio that really evoked an idea of doing geography? Ohio State, ha? >> I was an undergraduate at Ohio State and I majored in essentially so the ontology. It was a big program in the 80s. And then I graduated and the Soviet Union went out of business two years later.
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>> That was rude, wasn't it? >> Yeah it was very inconsiderate of the Soviets to leave me with nothing to study or nothing to do.
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My sister, she was over there at that time and wound up having also a lot less to do. I wound up going back to school looking to get a new degree, particularly in education because I couldn't think of what to do with my now useless political science degree. And so I went to Ohio University down in Athens and was essentially a history major. So I could teach high school as what I thought I was going to do. In the process, I had to take a cultural geography class.
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And it was like getting hit on the head with a hammer. Then I had realized that I had spent four years, or five at that point, studying in the wrong program. I had not-- >> Who taught the class? >> A guy named Hubert Wilhelm who was-- >> Hu Wilhelm. >> Yeah, Hubert Wilhelm. He was-- >> Was he a Nefyn student? >> Mhm? >> Wasn't he a student of Fred Nefyn? >> Yeah, he was one of Fred Nefyn's guys. And he had come out of that LSU. And I think before that, maybe he was in Kansas.
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He'd escaped over the Berlin Wall as a teenager and came to the United States as a refugee. But he was towards the end of his career, but the guy brought so much enthusiasm for everything to the table. He was an expert on folk barns. So he was a barn guy. He had a PBS thing there in Ohio where he would-- it was like-- I don't know, Hugh Hauser out here, but he just visited people in their barns and talked about what part of Germany or Scotland or whatever that the people came from.
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And I just thought the guy was great and he was so enthusiastic that I got talking to him afterwards and he said, well, you like this stuff, why don't you come and sit-in on it and take an upper division class. And he was teaching another class that was a capstone for geography majors. And I just jumped in and I wrote a paper for him and he encouraged me to consider graduate school. He liked my paper on the-- it, was a historical geography of the canal the Ohio Erie
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Canal, as it continued to have an effect on my hometown, Chillicothe Ohio. And so he said, look, this is really good. Why don't you consider getting a master's in geography? So I did. It was in that first class also that I would-- he assigned Larry Ford's 1971 paper on the geography of rock and roll. >> [LAUGHS] I know where this is going. >> Well, my night job was disk jockey at a club. And during this time, I noticed there was a lot of new music coming out of Seattle, Washington.
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It's the era of grunge of Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains and Temple of the Dog and even sir Mix-a-lot, the rap guy. All out of Seattle within a few years. And I thought, well, there's an interesting question and that was supposed to be my master's thesis. And I didn't go back to Ohio University, I went over to Miami of Ohio. Culturally about as different as two schools as you could get. But they both had very good geography programs. And I went over to Miami and wound up
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doing a tourist geography master's thesis, which was a valuation study of the Ohio River because it was part of a paid internship and, of course, I was a starving grad school. So if somebody was going to pay me to write my master's thesis, I was down with that. >> Who do you work with there? >> Richard Smith who was a good-- he was a good guy. He was a tourism geographer.
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He'd been in the game a long time and did a lot of consulting on the side where basically, he got to go to resorts all over the world and play golf. And you could see the attractiveness of that as a career. Also, I was very grateful to a guy named Cy Young, just like baseball player, who taught a very introdu-- a very early, GIS. He had written his own GIS program called I-map. Was a brilliant thing. It was all his. It was a raster style, and he used that to teach business geography, retail site
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location. So most of the guys in that program did that and they left and immediately started working for McDonald's or Walgreens or something making a ton of money. I stupidly went on to a PhD over at Illinois. Richard Smith, my advisor at Miami, was friends with John Jakle at Illinois and both of them did tourism geography, different things. And that was the way that worked that. Dick Smith pulled me aside at the AAG down in Atlanta. And I think that was about 96 and said,
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here, this is John Jakle.
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John, this is my student, Steve. He's going to apply to your PhD program over there and that's where I wound up. >> I mean Jakle is certainly well known in historical geography circles and highly regarded. Interestingly, given that we're producing this in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Jakle spent part of his early career at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo before he went to Illinois.
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>> Yeah, he had a twisty path and I didn't do landscape geography there. I took all of his classes and there was another guy whose name I can't remember at the moment over in landscape architecture who was a JB Jackson protege. So between the two of them, I had a lot of landscape study, but my dissertation wound up sticking with the geography of rock and roll or the geography-- >> The historical geography. And I have to say, it's a good dissertation.
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>> Oh, it was entirely too long, but I looked at scenes, why do certain-- why do certain places foster or invite musical innovations? Essentially, new genres which is what I was looking at. And so we looked at places like Liverpool and Memphis, the Bronx with hip hop, and Seattle with grunge and San Francisco with psychedelia and Southern California where I live now with a half a dozen different musical genres that were launched from the Sunset Strip in various moments.
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>> Now, were you in some of Jakle's classes? >> Yeah, every class he offered to graduate level, I joined in, and it was mostly landscape geography. >> How was the class directed? How was it administered? Can you comment on the learning experience you had? >> I thought Jakle was brilliant in that he was able to discipline himself enough, and this is something I've always wanted to emulate, but to talk for a while and then just show slides. And he would bring--
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I would imagine-- one of those 140 carousels or two carousels of 80 to a class that was well set up for slides. And he had an enormous collection of photographic slides of every conceivable location in the United States. I think the guy just drove laps around the country with his camera out the window taking pictures of vernacular landscapes. And he would-- the last 20 minutes of class-- just a slow roll through photographs without much commentary.
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He would occasionally stop and ask us to read the landscape. What do you see here?
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Can you tell where we are in this photograph? What are the clues, or how do you connect the red soil in this photograph to maybe the mobile home that's in the background, or can you guess what kind of trees are here? These are loblolly pine. So it was an immersive thing, and I thought it was brilliant that he just didn't talk the entire time. >> That's fascinating that he gave students and the class not only time to think but place the onus of learning
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on their shoulders in terms of analyzing landscapes depicted in the photographs. I wish I had better talent at that myself.
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>> Yeah, I think it was really good, and it was a fabulous counterpoint. So this was old-school JB Jackson, Pierce Lewis landscape geography. And at the same time, I was enrolled in Illinois' extremely high-end cultural studies program, which had Larry Grossberg and Paula Tripler. It's the '57 Chevy book, basically. That's what that cultural studies book is referred to, and so I was also eyeball deep in Habermas and Foucault and that kind of thinking about the truth about truth.
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The production of knowledge, and that kind of stuff. And so it was an interesting battle of--
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what would you call it-- ways of thinking, ways of understanding the world, ways of seeing things that layered on top of what I had gotten at Miami. >> Conflicting or complementing paradigms maybe? >> Yeah, yeah, definitely different paradigms, and I was really in over my head to begin with, and I suppose I remain that way, which is not unusual in the world of critical theory that even the faculty, oftentimes, say, I don't really know what's going-- I don't know what he means or what she means
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or what [INAUDIBLE] means by this. But we waded through it, and it eventually helped me with fashioning my dissertation. >> Another question about faculty at Illinois. Did you have any classes with Norman Pounds? >> No, I didn't. David Wilson was my other on-campus advisor, and I had an outside advisor that was George Carney down at Oklahoma State who was well known for music geography. He ended his career in some bit of infamy, but-- >> Fairly sad.
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>> Yeah, he was a kind man that helped me with a number of the music geography things. And I think Jakle knew him from many years. That old-boy network, and so we brought him in on that. >> Well, Carney had-- if I'm not mistaken-- a distinguished professorship and a pretty solid reputation until very close to the end of his career. >> Yeah, I always think of it as, since he was a musical geographer and studied-- was a big fan of country music, old-time music,
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he treated other people's turns of phrases and paragraphs, even, much like musicians in that era did that it was public, and it wasn't necessary to give credit to another guy for a particular guitar lick or something. And so, yeah, he got-- he was exposed as a plagiarist. >> Yeah, there was an expose in The Chronicle of Higher Education at the time, sadly. So you went from-- go ahead. >> Yeah, I thought that was-- he was at the end of his career, and I
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thought it was a little bit vindictive at that point. You're like, OK, just let the guy go. >> Sure. >> He was out the door at that point anyway. >> And, unfortunately, he was ill as well, I guess. >> Yes, he was. >> But you went from Illinois to Louisiana Tech. >> Yeah, doing a PhD on music geography in the late '90s when every-- it was not a particularly smart idea on my part.
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There were a couple of issues. One, I started the PhD program with a massive cohort because there was a recession at the end of the Bush I years, early during that Clinton trans-- the Clinton transformation or whatever. The Clinton transition. It's the economy, dummy. And so when I went in, there was a massive cohort. Then we all came out at the same time. And so one of the jobs I applied for, they said, yeah, we've got 400 candidates, and it's like, oh my God, I'll never have any chance.
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So that was a big problem. There was just this glut of us all coming out of a PhD program at the same time. At the same time, there was a hiring downturn. So it wasn't that great, but the other thing was, everybody wanted somebody with GIS. And Louisiana Tech, despite the fact that it was a Polytechnic University, wasn't all that aware of GIS as they were hiring me. And so they were very interested in my historical geography and the fact that I had managed to complete a teaching
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certificate during my time at Ohio University. And so much of what they understood geography to be was something high school teachers needed to be trained up in. And so I went down there and engaged in their version of geography for a year or so, and then I introduced, along with my wife, who a geographer, a GIS to the University. And we started a parallel program, she in forestry and me and the social sciences. And it was all going very well until we
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decided we didn't want to raise our kids in North Louisiana. >> I see, and so you were offered a position at Northridge? >> Yeah, a friend of mine, Ed Jackiewicz, was already here. He had been hired a couple of years before me. He is now the chair. At that point, he was just another guy in the hallway. But he and I had gotten to know each other during graduate school going to conferences. They had a pretty robust critical geography conference, and there was this--
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I can't even recall if it had a name, but there was a bunch of grad students. We'd get together every fall at one of a half dozen campuses. Ohio State, Cincinnati, Kentucky, Indiana, in that area. And so I had a few beers with him after conference, and I remembered him being a laid-back guy, and so I called him up and said, what kind of place is Northridge? He said, I think you'll like it here. Please apply, and the job was, for the first five years, split between the Department of Geography,
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and I also held a fellowship with the Carnegie Endowment in a program called Teachers for New Era. Michigan State was the other massive school that had this thing, and what we were supposed to be doing was coming up with a new model for how teacher candidates were trained that mimicked a medical school. So you were, rather than just taking classes, that you were supposed to become a professional through practice. And, well, the way a doctor becomes a practicing physician.
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And after about five years, all that money ran out, and then I just became a full time-- super full-time geographer. >> Well, Northridge has always had a strong geography program, and there have been some stellar geographers there. Would you care to comment on some of the older geographers now long since retired that might have influenced you somewhat in your early years on the faculty? >> Well, yeah, the CSUN geography department apparently
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was the largest one in the Western world during the mid '70s with 36 faculty. >> Wow. >> Deans and provosts, I believe, were geographers, and the University, though it is not well known, sometimes called Cal State nowhere, is in a suburb, the San Fernando Valley. >> Was once known as San Fernando Valley College. >> It was indeed. Once San Fernando Valley college, and many, many geographers know the essay, The Four Traditions of Geography. >> Patterson.
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>> Yeah, Patterson was extremely well circulated.
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I forget what you call that the kind of writing, but his diatribe or his vision of what geography is.
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I thought it was fine. I read it twice in two different courses. Everybody has to read that first week of the dead geographers class as we called it. I would say it inspired me because I wrote something about the geography as the Jedi discipline compare-- it was my vision of what geography is, and it got published in the California Geographer a number of years ago. It's a popular talk more than a popular paper.
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So we had this massive program at CSUN through the '80s, and it, at one point, was producing as many publications as clear R1 universities like Berkeley. We were just cranking it out, and then over the years, as the university sought greater efficiencies, and people who were more vested in accounting than education, our department shrunk to 13, which is not a small department by any measure. And we have 150 majors, but it's not the behemoth that it once was.
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Demographic shifts in the student body here have also, I think, changed the popularity, have affected the popularity of geography as a discipline. It's a school now with a lot of first-generation immigrants, and many of their parents who sacrificed enormously to get them into college all insist that they major in business or engineering or something that they understand. And geography is not one of those things, right? We all know that. Oftentimes, the parents think--
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>> Well, we have what could arguably be considered as an esoteric discipline, and it's difficult to convince parents of-- especially parents of first-generation college students-- the value and benefit of geography, of pursuing study in geography. >> Yeah, it's hard enough to convince the students, and the parents, oftentimes, are gatekeepers to the choice of major for students. And if the parents have been schooled in geography, their ideas is it's--
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you're majoring in jeopardy kind of geography. And so there's always a challenge in convincing students that now it's a problem-solving discipline and that there are, in addition to getting a good liberal arts education, you will get high-tech training and advanced skills that are marketable and CSUN has become, in the last 10 years, in many ways the leading school on the West Coast for producing GIS majors. >> Well, I have to say, you have your share of excellent
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students, and I've seen them at the annual meetings of the California Geographical Society. Tell me about the CGS, the California Geographical Society. Tell me about your views on it, its benefits for students and faculty. I have a great affinity for the organization. You were president of the organization. You've received numerous honors. Talk about why the CGS is important, if you don't mind. >> Oh, I could-- I'd love to talk about the California Geo--
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>> But don't take don't take more than five minutes. >> OK, well, I think the conference attendance is transformative for a lot of students.
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It introduces them to a wider world of geographies and that they understand that there's this whole thing out there that's much bigger than classrooms and tests and lectures, that it's an entire field, an entire discipline with practitioners from all over the place.
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It also has great field trips. >> Field trips are phenomenal. >> The field trips are awesome, and what I enjoy, and I know you enjoy, is the fellowship, that you have become part of a family that you didn't know you had. And students from different universities and colleges get to know each other. They hang out. They exchange information. >> It is a caring community. >> It's good.
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Sometimes, it's easy to lose faith in the world, and you go to one of those conferences, and you meet a very energetic and very caring, and they're working on saving the planet. They're working on economic justice and racial justice and environmental justice and all of those things, and you come away feeling like you just had a mental spa, that you got a great treatment at the high-end spa, this massaging. You walk away feeling really good, but it's really for your mind and your soul.
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>> That's a really good description. That really is a good description of a CGS conference. >> Well, you've been to it, and you come back home, and a lot of times, you come back from a conference, and you're like, oh, God, I'm so exhausted. I need a week to recover from that. But from the CGS, I come back, and I'm even more raring to go. I want to engage with students. I want to do research that's compelling. I want to be better. A better person, a better geographer, a better teacher.
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>> I think you hit the nail on the head. It inspires us to push the envelope a little with ourselves in a very kind way to be better geographers.
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Before we close in a few minutes, I'm going to ask you a little bit more about some of your research in California. You've done some excellent work that has been published in the APCG yearbook, for example. You did some work on convenience stores. Who else does convenience stores? You do convenience stores. Jakle looked over and apparently gave his imprimatur that it should be published. It's really fascinating stuff. You've gone to different areas.
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You've looked with others at shootings in Los Angeles by police, and would you care to comment on some of these pieces? >> Well, the cool thing about being a geographer is that it is a discipline, which means that you're not into a single topic. So even though I did my dissertation on the music industry, my first handful of publications were on high-cost lending, payday loans. And I became the payday loan guy. I had a paper in The Professional Geographer that's been widely cited, but then I
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had my 15 minutes of fame with the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. I was on NPR and World News Tonight all for my research on the spatial dynamics of the payday loan industry, which revealed that they were targeting communities of color. But more importantly, the military, and so that is probably going to be my legacy is the role that my research played in passing some federal and state legislation restricting payday lending or eliminating it in some states, like North Carolina.
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But the military really appreciated what I did, and so I felt really good about helping military families. But that industry changed a lot, and so there wasn't so much left to research. But if you can map it, you can study it. And so I have done officer-involved shootings, COVID studies, obesity in children across Los Angeles, convenience stores, gentrification, a couple of things on hip hop, folk music, you name it, you can do it as a geographer. And I think that keeps you fresh that you're not
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carrying that one backpack around all the time that you can switch things out. >> Well, these are all aspects of the cultural landscape that enable a good geographer to really keep exploring the region, wherever that may be, wherever he or she might be located. With just a minute to go, Steve, I'm going to ask you to reflect upon your career, reflect upon where you've been, and ponder some words of advice you might be willing to impart to students, prospective students in geography, students
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and geography today, or even colleagues in geography. Do you have any pearls of wisdom you'd like to share?
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>> Yeah, well, I don't know if everyone wants them, but one of the things that I impress upon my introductory students is that location matters. It really does, and that if you can ask the question where when you want to know why, you're going to come up with a different answer than those who ask when or just immediately go to why. And as you do that, as you ask where, you come up with a different idea. And I think many times-- or an answer that is different than the common answer.
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And so oftentimes, if you want to come up to me with a less biased understanding of how the world works if you start by asking where, understanding the spatial dynamics of questions, you're fine. The other little tiny bit is that I really like, and I borrowed this from my buddy, John Strait, who teaches blues geography, and I'm assuming he borrowed it from somewhere else, that the mind doesn't know what the eye does see. And so I encourage students to develop
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what I call Jedi goggles, start seeing the world, look at things that you don't normally look at, and understand how to read the landscape. And it's amazing. It's one of those things that once you start developing that skill, you'll see the world in a whole new way. It's like finding another flavor that you never knew existed because you had never been-- you'd never been taught to read the landscape as a book, as something that could be read and understood
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or as a stage upon which this grand act of life plays out. >> Those are very profound words, Steve. Put on the Jedi goggles and explore and attempt to understand the why of where. Steve, thank you so much for joining us today. It has really been great to talk with you and to listen to what you've had to say about your career and about the discipline. Did you have something else to say? >> Other than you're welcome, and I can't wait to see you again, hopefully, in the spring.
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>> Well, hopefully, yeah, Los Angeles CGS, April 21 to 23, I think. I look forward to seeing you. Thank you so much. This concludes this episode of Conversation with a Geographer. Thank you so much. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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