Dr. Jamey Essex

Assistant Professor

Department of Political Science

University of Windsor

Windsor, ON N9B 3P4 Canada


Contact info

Office: 1139 Chrysler Hall North

Email: jessex (at) uwindsor.ca

Phone: 519-253-3000 ext 2358


A geographer by training, I have teaching and research interests in political and economic geographies, geographies of globalization and development, agriculture and food studies, environmental studies, and Marxist state theory. Information on my research, publications, and courses can be found below. Please feel free to contact me directly with any questions you may have, and I will be happy to discuss my teaching and research with you.


Education


PhD, Geography, Syracuse University, 2005 (Advisor, Dr. Tod Rutherford)

Dissertation: The state as site and strategy: Neoliberalization, internationalization, and the Foreign Agricultural Service


MA, Geography, Syracuse University, 2001 (Advisor, Dr. Anne Mosher)

Thesis: Economic Restructuring, Agrarian Organization, and Regional Transformation: Kentucky and Tennessee’s Black Patch, 1873-1914


BA, Geography and History, University of Kentucky, 1999

Summa cum laude, Departmental honors in Geography and History



Courses


I teach several courses at the University of Windsor, and links to current and recent syllabi are provided below.  I will also post these links and other relevant documents and class announcements on the University of Windsor's CLEW system.  You can read my statement of teaching philosophy by clicking here.


45-160 Issues in World Politics


45-238 Political Geography (Fall 2009 syllabus)


45-249 Political Economy of Agriculture and Food (Winter 2010 syllabus)


45-356 Theories of International Political Economy (Fall 2009 syllabus)


45-465 Globalization and the State (Fall 2009 syllabus)


45-530 Politics in the Developed World (Winter 2010 syllabus)


58-100 Introduction to Environmental Studies



Research


My research concentrates on three broad areas:



I am currently examining shifts in geostrategic framings of, approaches to, and connections between hunger, food aid, development, and national security among major development assistance providers.  My most recent projects in this research track examine the links between food security and geopolitical security in US food aid to Indonesia over the last decade, the neoliberal geopolitics of food-for-work programs in food aid delivery, and the positioning of hunger and the hungry as geopolitical and geoeconomic threats.  I have also brought my concern with food security to the local level in Windsor, where I have been involved in an urban agriculture and community food security organization called FedUp Windsor for the last two years.  This work has focused on building and maintaining community food security and food democracy through collective garden projects in the city. More broadly, I am interested in the potentials and limits of local food activism in urban settings, and in how such local projects and activism could be scaled up to create alternative political economies of food and governance.  Finally, I am interested in the changing geographies of labor, and especially in the labor of state workers.  I will investigate how globalization and neoliberalization alter the character, position, and geographies of bureaucratic state labor, focusing on spatial divisions of labor within government institutions and the workspaces in which bureaucratic labor is undertaken.  I am also part of a research team at the University of Windsor that is investigating the relationship between ethnicity, race, and immigrant status in reporting of workplace injuries in Ontario, with funding provided by a grant from the Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB).


My PhD dissertation examined the Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), the US Department of Agriculture’s principal trade agency, as a means of investigating the state’s position within processes of internationalization and neoliberalization.  I have also completed research on economic restructuring in the late 19th- and early 20th-century US tobacco industry, agrarian movements among tobacco farmers in Kentucky and Tennessee, farm policy and environmental degradation in the US South, and the commodification of social memory and landscape at Georgia’s Stone Mountain Park.



Principal publications


Refereed articles


Essex, J.  (2009)  “The work of hunger: Security, development, and food-for-work in post-crisis Jakarta.”  Studies in Social Justice, 3 (1): 99-116.


Essex, J.  (2008)  “Biotechnology, sound science, and the Foreign Agricultural Service: a case study in neoliberal rollout.”  Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 26 (1): 191-209.


Essex, J.  (2008)  “Deservedness, development, and the state: Geographic categorization in the US Agency for International Development’s Foreign Assistance Framework.”  Geoforum, 39 (4): 1625-1636.


Essex, J.  (2008)  “The neoliberal geopolitics of food security: The case of Indonesia.”  Human Geography, 1 (2): 14-25.


Essex, J.  (2008)  “The Neoliberalization of Development: Trade Capacity Building and Security at the US Agency for International Development.” Antipode, 40 (2): 229-251.


Essex, J.  (2007)  “Getting what you pay for: Authoritarian statism and the geographies of US trade liberalization strategies.” Studies in Political Economy: A Socialist Review, 80 (Autumn 2007): 75-103.


Non-refereed publications


Essex, J.  (Forthcoming, 2010)  “Food, Geography of.”  In B. Warf (ed.), Encyclopedia of Geography.  London: Sage.


Essex, J.  (Forthcoming, 2010)  “Review of Geographies of Development in the 21st Century: An Introduction to the Global South, by Sylvia Chant and Cathy McIlwaine.”  Growth and Change: A Journal of Urban and Regional Policy, 41.


Essex, J.  (2009)  “Review of Worlds of Food: Place, Power, and Provenance in the Food Chain, by Kevin Morgan, Terry Marsden, and Jonathan Murdoch.”  Social and Cultural Geography, 10 (1): 100-102.


Essex, J.  (2007)  “The Beijing Development Area: China’s Jobs Magnet.”  JobsGraveyard.ca, available online at http://www.jobsgraveyard.ca/?q=node/17.



Honors, awards, and grants


Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB), Research Advisory Council Solutions for Workplace Change Full Grant, Responding to Workplace Hazards and Injuries: The Influence of Ethnicity, Race, Discrimination and Immigrant Status, Co-investigator (PI, Alan Hall), 2008


University of Windsor SSHRC 4A Grant, Food is Ammunition: The geopolitics of food security in Indonesia, 2008


University of Windsor Grant for Humanities and Social Sciences, Development, security, trade, and the state: The case of USAID, 2006



Recent presentations


Conference presentations


“The limits of the local: Decommodification, local food activism, and FedUp Windsor.”  New Marxian Times: Rethinking Marxism 7th International Conference, Amherst MA, November 2009 


“Placing hunger and the hungry: The geostrategic discourses of US and WFP food aid programs.”  Canadian Association of Geographers (CAG) Annual Meeting, Ottawa ON, May 2009


“Idle hands are the devil’s tools: The geopolitics and geoeconomics of hunger.”  Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), Las Vegas NV, March 2009


“Hungry for labor: Security, poverty, and hunger in food-for-work programs.”  Security and Exclusion Workshop, Windsor ON, October 2008


“Praxis and place in FedUp Windsor’s local food activism” (co-authored with Maya Ruggles).  15th Annual Critical Geography Mini-Conference, Athens OH, October 2008


“Food is Ammunition: Scale and the geopolitics of food security in Indonesia.”  Annual Meeting of the AAG, Boston MA, April 2008


“Food is Ammunition: The geographies of food security in US development strategies.”  14th Annual Critical Geography Mini-Conference, Lexington KY, October 2007


“Deservedness, development, and the state in USAID’s Foreign Assistance Framework.”  Second Global Conference on Economic Geography, Beijing, China, June 2007


“Deservedness, development, and the state in USAID’s Foreign Assistance Framework.”  Annual Meeting of the AAG, San Francisco CA, April 2007


“USAID and trade capacity building: Development, security, and the state.”  Annual Meeting of the AAG, Chicago IL, March 2006


Panel sessions


Exploring the Political Economy of the Built and Green Environment through the Lens of the Regulation Approach.  16th Annual Critical Geography Mini-Conference, Athens GA, October 2009.


Hear No Evil? Interviewing the Powerful (Session chair).  Annual Meeting of the AAG, Las Vegas NV, March 2009

 

There Goes the Neighborhood? University Entrepreneurialism, the City, and Globalization, Part I.  Annual Meeting of the AAG, Las Vegas NV, March 2009


Critical Sports Geography, Annual Meeting of the AAG, Boston MA, April 2008


Environmental praxis: Whose responsibility is it? (Conversations in Social Justice Panel Series), Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Windsor, Windsor ON, January 2008

 

One Foot In III: Geographers Working in Other Disciplines: Academic Labor and Professional Development.  Annual Meeting of the AAG, Chicago IL, March 2006



Service activities (2009-10)


Spokesperson, Socialist and Critical Geography Specialty Group (SCGSG), AAG

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Representative, University of Windsor Senate

Director-at-Large, Executive Council, Windsor University Faculty Association (WUFA)

Graduate Committee, Department of Political Science, University of Windsor

International Relations Committee, Department of Political Science, University of Windsor


New Programs Committee, Department of Political Science, University of Windsor


Updated November 2009