Meghan Cope

BIO

Meghan Cope is an urban social geographer who is interested in the ways that social, economic, political, and environmental processes influence cities and communities, as well as the ways that people's everyday lives create meaningful spaces and places within, or even against, the larger-scale processes operating on them. Her focus has always been on social/spatial processes of marginalization and disempowerment through gender, race/ethnicity, class, and youth. Dr. Cope is currently working on a new project called Mapping American Childhoods, focused on the 20th and 21st Centuries, which takes a look at themes of mobility and migration, health and mortality, the cultural production of ‘childhood in place’, and young people’s experiences of racial segregation and suburbanization from a ‘critical youth geographies’ perspective. She recently won the Frank Bryan Summer Research Award from the Center for Research on Vermont to fund part of this work based on historical records of indigent children in Burlington at the turn of the 20th C.

Dr. Cope is a qualitative researcher who uses ethnography, participatory mapping, archival research, and other methods to learn about the geographic meanings and processes that matter to socially and economically marginalized groups. Dr. Cope has written extensively on qualitative research in the field of Geography, from basic ‘how-to’ chapters on coding and analyzing qualitative data (in Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography, 2010) to reflections on broad historical trends in the field (see ‘A History of Qualitative Research in Geography’, in DeLyser, et al. 2010, The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Geography). She is also co-editor of the 3rd Edition of Key Methods in Geography, which will be published in 2016.

Over the past 15 years Dr. Cope has developed an associated interest in critical perspectives on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and has explored methods of combining qualitative research with GIS through novel analytical approaches such as ‘grounded visualization’ (Knigge & Cope, 2006). With her colleague, Sarah Elwood (University of Washington), Dr. Cope co-edited a book on mixed-methods in Geography, Qualitative GIS: A Mixed-Methods Approach (London: Sage), which was published in 2009. More recently, Dr. Cope has been active on the UVM campus in promoting creative ways to incorporate mapping and data visualization in cross-disciplinary applications. She co-organized a workshop called Mapping Worlds for 15 faculty in the College of Arts & Sciences in 2013, coordinated the UVM Faculty Honors Seminar on ‘Big Data’ in 2014, and is now involved with four colleagues in a project funded by the Humanities Center called Visualizing Ideas in the Digital Humanities.

Courses

GEOG 070 – SU: SPACE, PLACE AND SOCIETY

Everything happens somewhere… but why there? And how do combinations of events and processes come together to create unique places? How do the actions and decisions of human societies construct meaningful social spaces? And, how can we use a geographic approach to understand human society better? Recognizing and analyzing the ways that human societies create places and in turn live in and through those places is one of the core tasks of this course. Along this path we will identify the main tools geographers use to understand the relations between space, place, and society, with a particular focus on the tension between globalization, sustainability, social justice, and cultural identities in places around the globe. We will pay particular attention to spatial patterns and discovering the processes that generate them. Geographic concepts we’ll explore include diffusion, mobility and migration, scale, construction of place, and the powerful intersections of economic, political, and social processes with natural environments.

GEOG 170 – HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY

The intersection of Geography and History is explored here through a critical examination of American childhoods of the late 19th and 20th centuries. We use diverse readings and resources to uncover the conditions of childhood, including everything from child labor to conditions of housing, from childhood diseases to immigrant experiences, and from schooling to the material culture of books, toys, and games. We ask questions such as: How is ‘childhood’ constructed socially and culturally over time and through different places? How are diverse experiences of ‘childhood’ related to broader social, economic, and political contexts? We will take five key dimensions of social life as central to understanding past childhoods, and in turn, this allows us to build a better understanding of American culture, places, and histories. These five key dimensions are: Mobility and Migration; Social Inequalities (Race, Class, Gender, etc.)

GEOG 186 – SL: QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN GEOG

This is an introductory, hands-on course for social science/humanities students of all disciplines. It is particularly helpful as preparation for internships, thesis work, and advanced methods courses. The class is designated as 'service-learning' so that we can work with a community partner - feel free to email me at mcope@uvm.edu for more info on that. How do geographers and other social scientists make sense of the social world? How do people construct meaningful places, experience social/spatial differences, resist oppression, or simply make everyday life tolerable? What is in the ‘toolbox’ of qualitative research on social and spatial issues? This course takes several approaches to answering these questions.

Area(s) of expertise

Urban social/cultural geography, focusing on critical historical geographies of childhood. Using and writing about qualitative research, ethnography, participatory mapping, archival research, and other methods to learn about the geographic meanings and processes that matter to socially and economically marginalized groups.