Assistant Professors Christine Biermann and Megan Ybarra, UW Geography’s two most recent faculty hires, were awarded Royalty Research Fund (RRF) grants from UW’s Office of Research. The purpose of the RRF grants is to support faculty in developing new research projects that will generate “important new creative activities and scholarly understandings.”
Professor Megan Ybarra’s research will investigate recent developments on the US-Mexico border by building on political geography literature that shows how the US externalizes its border policing. Her research “will contribute to an understanding of border cooperation, where the Mexican state plays an active role in shaping the meaning of the ‘21st century border.’” The research is designed as a multi-sited ethnography along the migrant route to explain how government officials, service providers and migrants themselves understand the role of the state in everyday practices of immigration policing.
Professor Christine Biermann’s project will investigate conservation’s "molecular turn" as it has proceeded in native fish conservation in the American West. She will consider how genetic and genomic knowledge-practices have become dominant in fisheries conservation and how new technologies and scientific advancements are contributing to the reshaping of conservation policy and practices, funding priorities, and spatial claims to nature.