Bouke van Gorp
Description: Bouke van Gorp is a Professor of Geosciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on Human Geography, Spatial Planning, and Geographic Education. In this episode, we talk about how geography helps us understand the world and its interconnectedness. We also discuss how the study of geography helps individual regions maintain their identities, as well as the role of media outlets in shaping our understanding of a given region. Professor Van Gorp explains how she is trying to expand geographical education to get students directly involved in the subject matter and shares the crucial role of a strong geographical perspective in our ever-globalized world.
Websites:
Publications:
Foster a Relational Sense of Place Through Video Documentary Assignments
Learning to Teach Climate Change
Making News: Newspapers and the Institutionalization of New Regions
Qingdao International Beer Festival: Place Identity and Colonial Heritage
Courses:
GEO3-3405: Geography, Representation and Media
Show Notes:
[0:00:01] Professor Bouke van Gorp's Journey to Academia
[0:03:11] Geographers' Perspective: Looking at Places from a Different Lens
[0:05:52] Geography: A Broad Discipline with Diverse Focus Areas
[0:09:27] Institutionalization of Regions: Exploring Symbolic and Administrative Shapes
[0:13:02] Lack of Identification with a Region
[0:15:30] Researching the Traction of Regional Identity
[0:21:54] Critical Geopolitics: Legitimizing State Actions
[0:27:58] Doubts about using something
[0:28:04] Big Tech Companies and Government Cooperation
[0:30:21] The Importance of Real-World Connections
[0:32:36] Starting the Renewal of the Undergraduate Human Geography Program
[0:35:54] Incorporating Sustainability and Landscape Studies into the Program
[0:41:55] Understanding the Interconnectedness of Places
[0:44:29] Using media to showcase global connections in Utrecht
[0:47:55] Visualizing and explaining the experience through documentation and reports
[0:48:29] Space-Time Compression: The End of Geography?
[0:49:58] The Impact of Covid on Travel and Interconnectedness
[0:52:44] Beer Festivals and Colonial History in Qingdao, China
[0:56:53] Connecting Geography to Hobbies: Formula One Racing
Unedited AI Generated Transcript:
Professor Bouke van Gorp's Journey to Academia
Brent:
[0:01] Welcome, Professor Bouke van Gorp. Thank you for joining us.
Bouke:
[0:05] Yeah, well, so great for you to come to Utrecht for this conversation.
Yeah, really interesting.
Keller:
[0:11] We'd love to start off by hearing a little bit more about your story, how you got to Utrecht, and why you chose academia.
Bouke:
[0:19] Yeah, so I think the first thing you need to understand in the Netherlands, undergraduate university programs, bachelor programs, they are organized by discipline.
So you you don't study something broad but you you really have to choose geography or sociology or law um so already in secondary school in high school you have to be clear on yourfuture uh i wasn't my 15 16 year old self wasn't so clear about the future i knew what i didn't want but not particularly what i wanted and then um i don't know i like the economy classes ihad in school So I decided that was my future.
And then at the graduation ceremony of the high school, my geography teacher, he said, oh, there goes a geographer lost.
And I simply replied to him, oh, well, if I don't like it, I'll just switch.
[1:10] That said, after half a year, it was clear for me that the economy was not the thing I needed to do.
So after a year, I switched to geography. and then i um yeah i was really at my the place where i needed to be um i didn't go to classes because i because i had to but i really enjoyed it andi enjoyed reading the material so that for me was really like okay so clearly i'm a geographer i don't know why i don't know how uh but uh yeah my geography teacher saw it correct yeahso looking back on it what about geography do you think you fell in love with and why you pursued it?
[1:51] Well, first of all, I think geography is about the world outside.
So there's a very clear connection of everything that you learn, that you hear about in class.
It's all out there. And if you follow the news, it's more than the news.
It gives more explanation.
It gives more critical questions about what's going on. So it's very much out there.
And not to be bashing other disciplines, but that was, I think, the major thing that I missed when I was studying economy.
They were all working with models.
And I was wondering, if you look outside, the world is different than the model.
And geography is all about this world outside.
So that, for me, was very strong.
And also, yeah, when you're studying geography, you're not just learning a language, concepts, theories, but you're also very much learning a particular way of looking at the world, thekind of questions you ask.
And we also, we always say to students, you will develop spatial lenses.
You're asking these spatial questions.
So you're looking at the spatial behavior of people. You're looking at the landscape and how it's organized.
And you're looking at specific patterns and processes in places.
So it's all about this spatial lens.
Geographers' Perspective: Looking at Places from a Different Lens
[3:11] And probably one of my teachers already said it when I started studying here.
Like at some point in time, you will feel that you are a geographer.
And I really, you know, I still remember the moment. I was walking in the town near where I live.
And I went to high school there. So it was a very familiar place.
And suddenly I realized I was not looking at the shops, at the windows of the shops. But I was looking at other things.
I was asking questions about why is it here? How can I explain this being here? What is it connected to?
And that was the moment where I thought, okay, so I am a geographer. It happened.
And that's something that we tell our students. We hope that it will happen to them as well, that they will look at places from a different perspective and that they use this spatial lens.
And I think if we want to explain people that are not studying geography, like what is it?
It's something out there. It's this spatial lens behavior of people.
But very often we say okay so it's about three very basic questions it's what where and why is it there so the why there is very important so you're looking at.
[4:29] Explanations, understanding how things are connected.
If you want to understand gentrification in Utrecht, how it takes shape and at which particular spots in Utrecht, then you need to have an understanding of very different things.
You need to know something about Utrecht, but you also need to know something about real estate in the Netherlands.
You need to know something about housing in the Netherlands.
And you need to understand how local government operates and what policies they can put in place or not.
So there's all these different disciplines where you use information from, but your focus is always on this spatial aspect.
And I think that's very much what geographers do.
Brent:
[5:14] Yeah. It seems to be like a reverse engineering of what you witness versus like using a model and trying to apply it. It's like kind of the opposite.
Bouke:
[5:23] Yeah, of course. In geography, there's also theories, concepts, and models, of course, trying to explain.
But I think to get a sense of what geographers do, the way they look at the world, they are always looking for these connections, how to explain this.
Why is this happening in this particular spot and not in that spot?
What clues can I find to sort of explain this?
Brent:
[5:51] Certainly.
Geography: A Broad Discipline with Diverse Focus Areas
Keller:
[5:52] Does that allow for the department itself to have a lot of different voices?
Because within each Y, you could be looking for five different departments.
And so, on a given floor, you might be able to really get a lens from agricultural to environmental to even some of the sciences.
Bouke:
[6:10] Yeah, so I think geography in itself is a very broad discipline.
Even if you look at Utrecht, you have a rather large department on human geography and spatial planning.
And you have people that focus very much on economic geography.
They are very much into quantitative models, explaining innovation.
I don't know why firms located place X and not place Y.
But we also have people that are studying cities and whether the city is accessible for everyone, whether everyone can actually enjoy the city.
My background would be more in the cultural geography, really issues of representation.
That's very far away from colleagues that are studying very quantitative topics.
So, yeah, I think geography itself is very broad as a discipline.
And, yeah, we connect to many other disciplines as well. Yeah.
Brent:
[7:19] When you started talking about what you do and kind of the cultural identity aspect of geography, could you maybe start to go into what a region is and why they are important, howthey're formed?
Bouke:
[7:32] Yeah. Yeah, so a few years ago with a colleague, we...
Dove dived yeah dove dove into into regions as a as a concept and uh how regions are formed and i think it's um important to understand that in what is now now we call the new regionalgeography new meaning late 1990s early 2000s new um means that a region is not something that is is out there, independent of its own. Region is a construct.
So if we now look at the world, we see regions, but we mainly see stakeholders creating regions for specific purposes.
And so with the colleague, I looked at these processes of how regions are formed, how regions are created, and why some regions really take shape, and other regions, yeah, they are therefor a while, maybe only in policy documents and they never really get going and they disappear again and maybe to be replaced with another name and other partners, but still only inpolicy documents.
[8:49] Whereas other regions that may likewise originate in policy documents, spatial policy, somehow gain some kind of momentum and become something that people start identifyingon the map, that people relate to, that people even use in newspaper articles, something that actually exists.
So that's the kind of the process that we looked into.
Like how is this happening and can we explain the differences between why some regions did take shape and others didn't?
Institutionalization of Regions: Exploring Symbolic and Administrative Shapes
[9:27] And we used the work of a famous Finnish geographer, Ansi Pasi, who described this process of what he called institutionalization of regions, where he explained that for a region tobecome something, that there's four different shapes.
It's the symbolic shape, which is, for example, the name.
But also it could be slogans that people relate to this region.
Or it could be… With a flag. Yeah, something like that. So that could be the symbolic shape.
Then there is also the administration of a region.
[10:14] There is the way the territory is. Is it kind of bounded or not?
Is it organized in a certain way?
So there's these four shapes that he describes and, um.
[10:26] If in some way there are developments in these four shapes that are somehow entwined, then you can get a region that becomes recognized by both people living in the area orpeople outside of the area.
[10:40] So that's one of the concepts we used.
And we also used the idea of thick versus thin regional identities, entities where thin regional identities are often related to, say, more project-based, initiatives.
[11:02] So for this particular research, we looked at five different regions in time.
They somehow were created in the south of the Netherlands, the region where I live.
That's so nice about geography. You can work about the topics that you're really interested in. And that could also be the region where you live.
So we looked at these five different regions. And one of them was a cooperation between five cities.
And these five cities, they wanted to cooperate together to not compete.
For example, for logistical firms that are, of course, looking for the most.
But they're looking for a place that's accessible, that has good highways, etc.
But of course, they're also looking for which government is the nicest to us, the most inviting.
And they said, okay, so we don't want this kind of competition amongst ourselves.
[12:02] And we also want to team up together to get as much money as possible from the national government so that they don't forget our region. So they had this idea of we want to worktogether.
But of course, a region that exists of five cities loosely cooperating, that sort of identifies itself as, yeah, we have a highly skilled workforce, which of course is a very, yeah, it's not aregional characteristic.
It's a characteristic of the Netherlands in general. So they don't have a lot of characteristics that people can really identify with.
So this region is much more like a project, project-based, and it had a very thin identity.
They had these nice, on their website, they had these nice promotional videos where they were explaining how beautiful it was, but it...
Lack of Identification with a Region
[13:02] It was kind of difficult for people to really identify with and to really understand what it was.
And so the newspapers were not writing about it so much.
And they were mainly writing about it when the cities were arguing amongst each other.
But they were still competing about this. Logical, statistical firms, that would be, or where there was supposed to be a very big shopping mall, which eventually never came.
But then they were arguing, and that was what the newspapers wrote about.
So this region never really took shape.
In a way that people could identify with.
Whereas different projects, which was much more related to landscape conservation, that really tied into the classical image that people have of the area.
[13:48] Of being farmland and cozy and this particular kind of landscape.
And so this region, that was much more a thick identity. It related to history, to culture, to this landscape, and people really started identifying with it.
So there was, these two initiatives were happening simultaneously.
So this Brabantstad, this combination of cities, and this national landscape policy, they were happening at the same time.
But one really, you know, took shape. If you now walk in the area, you see, for example, signposts for walking routes that have this logo that refer to this region.
You have these maps saying, welcome to this area with the name.
And you can walk around this particular area. You have...
[14:42] You even had newspaper articles that were using the region as an argument to say, okay, so we can't be drilling for gas in this region because it's this particular landscape. It doesn'tfit the identity.
And we should be developing this and this tourism because it fits our identity.
So this is happening simultaneously.
One state, a sort of policy project of a few people that were identifying with it, but not like the local community.
And the other was much more in something that many people picked up outside of those that were involved in this landscape policy.
And you can really see it in the landscape. It's there, sort of.
Brent:
[15:25] And then as a researcher, like how do you identify this is taking traction?
Researching the Traction of Regional Identity
[15:30] Are you looking through like media outlets? Like how many mentions or like are you polling people?
Bouke:
[15:36] Yeah, well, this particular research, research as i said it's in the area where i live and um i had heard about this national policy for national landscapes so i was aware of things thatwere going on and then suddenly i was eating in this particular restaurant and they gave me this um i don't know the english word the piece of paper that that you put your plate on okayyeah placemat yeah placemat okay so it's the same word and it had the the print of the region with the name welcome to this area and it had all these kind of things that you could do inthis region and i was so surprised like wow so it's no longer just a region or a project on paper on on national landscapes but this restaurant is using it as a as if it's a region so that sort ofstarted my curiosity then of course i was looking around a a bit more and then with a colleague we were talking about these things like okay we could.
[16:35] You know, we could research this a bit more. He had been working on this thick and thin identity already.
So it's about combining ideas.
[16:45] And then in this particular research, first we looked at the official promotion by these kind of organizations.
So we looked at the website of the province.
We looked at the website of this, for example, Brabantstad, this combination of cities.
Are they communicated about this region and then for a next step we said okay so what is it that national newspapers and regional newspapers can add to our perspective so now we knowhow these organizations themselves talk about these regions that they have created um what can we learn from studying the newspapers um because yeah there's many different things thatyou can you know grasp from how newspapers write about it for example if journalists keep explaining the name of the region so every time they use the region they give an explanationthen it means that they think their readers are not very familiar with the place on the other hand if they start using the name without any explanation that means that they think their readersknow this place that it has some meaning for them.
[18:01] So that was one of the first things that we started with. Like, okay, so can we, if we look at many articles from these regional and national newspapers, can we, for example, saysomething about whether these journalists think that the regions...
[18:19] Have meaning to their readers. Well, I think the first thing that we discovered is that national newspapers write very little about this province.
So they don't write about these upcoming regions or newly developed regions.
But regional newspapers write about them a lot more.
[18:40] And then we could, again, already see differences over time with the different regions that we looked at.
So this national landscape, there was a lot of articles about this region, but there was much less articles about these five cities cooperating.
And then the tone of the articles, what they actually write about.
So with these five cities cooperating, in the end, it was mainly about bad news, because that's what gets the newspaper.
Paper it's about these cities arguing or it's about these cities going together to the capital of the netherlands saying hey government we need more money we are way more important thanyou think we are so give us more money um and and this uh national landscape region there we we saw a lot more than we even expected so for example we thought okay so we can lookat whether the region is explained or not and what kind of explanation is given and who is using the name of the region.
Is it only policy makers that are interviewed for whatever reason or is it also other stakeholders that are using it that are somehow identifying with it or think, hey, this is a good initiative, Ican somehow connect to it.
[20:00] But we even saw, as I said before, that policy, region region was sometimes used as an argument and that's something that we didn't expect, and um yeah at some point in time therewas to be this drilling and uh people were saying no you can't do this in this particular landscape you can't do it in this region because of this in this identity yeah um it's very interestingdo you use the local newspapers as a proxy to the local consciousness or will you conduct interviews with the people in these different local regions these regional regions directly youknow for this research we we only analyzed a lot of newspaper articles but we didn't interview people um yeah and for the other article the first article we looked uh in the landscape itselfbecause you know i'm from this region so it's visible to me and we looked at the websites of the organizations.
But that could be a next step to really interview people, whether they know the region, what kind of associations they would have.
So that would also have been interesting.
Brent:
[21:12] Yeah, and then when you talk about identity of a region, could you explain the idea of a geopolitical code and what that might mean? Yeah.
Bouke:
[21:22] So geopolitics is a slightly different topic than regions, of course.
I think what is important to understand is that critical geopolitics tells us that if we look at the world, if we look at international relations, if we look at how countries relate to or statesrelate to each other, it's important not just to focus on.
Critical Geopolitics: Legitimizing State Actions
[21:54] Actions practice but also to look at the representations so if we look at for example the situation in in Ukraine and other countries that want to join NATO then we we not only lookat who's helping who but also what do they say about how do they legitimize whether they are helping other countries or not?
How do they explain to the international community as a whole, but also to their own people in their own country, the taxpayers, for example, or the parents of the children that go into thearmy?
How do they legitimize these actions and also these, you know, ways of looking at the world?
So critical geopolitics is about this, is that geopolitics is not only about the state actions or about intelligence services, but it's also very much about how all these things are legitimized,represented.
[23:00] And the geopolitical code is an idea, a concept used by, for example, Colin Flint.
And he explains it's the way countries position or states or other geopolitical actors position themselves in the world.
So it's about who are my friends, who are my allies, but also who are my enemies.
What kind of threats do we need to be aware of? How can we defend ourselves to these threats?
But it's always also about this. How do we explain this to the international community, to our own people?
Keller:
[23:40] And when you're looking at the legitimacy of actions, how do you gauge that?
What metrics are you looking at to see, okay, are they following through on their action? Are they just giving money and that's it?
Or how do you kind of back it up and to build a more whole picture of the action itself?
Bouke:
[23:58] So, we use the whole idea of geopolitics also for a course in the bachelor program for first-year students.
And we just let the students focus on a particular conflict area and they had to look at how different...
[24:17] Stakeholders in this conflict were communicating about this conflict so speeches they would give interviews they would have policy documents if they are for example the thenational government um so we mainly uh looked at documents texts um and how these stakeholders represented it so yeah and then when you're looking at all these documents do youview them as, they are just representing the discourse that is out there or do you also view them as like they are influencing the discourse present in that region i think uh it's it's it's um,both ways around so uh the texts don't exist outside of these processes on the other hand text influence the world.
[25:17] So it's, yeah, these policy documents or these reports by the intelligence services, they represent how these stakeholders think about the world, about threats, strategies that shouldbe used.
And in the way they create this narrative in this document, they also try to legitimize this position, like, okay, we really should be afraid of this and this or we really should be wary of thisand this stress and we need to do more about this so and so and so.
So these documents are, yeah...
They try to influence how people look at these situations.
Keller:
[26:05] And in your time studying these different outlets, have you seen an increase in the way the discourse is portrayed as divisive?
Because I know for us, especially coming from the US, it seems like a lot of our media is written in a way to incite division.
Is that something that's just kind of always been around, or have you seen an increase?
Bouke:
[26:25] Um well i think the the american news media landscape is very different from other countries or is different from other countries um where it's much stronger like, news outletsidentify with the political parties and therefore will also strongly support or be very critical of whatever the government decides to do also in the international political stage i think in inother countries it may be um a bit less divided like that but still i think yeah a social media media sometimes seem to be more about making statements than really getting into properdiscussions.
So sometimes you can wonder if you try to study representations of areas like the regions, should you focus on newspaper?
How many people are still reading newspapers? papers. Yeah.
On the other hand social media maybe used more media, But they may not be telling so much.
Keller:
[27:53] Have you looked at social media for any of your papers?
Doubts about using something
Bouke:
[27:58] I'm wondering if I used it. No, I don't think I used it.
Big Tech Companies and Government Cooperation
[28:04] There was one student I supervised. She did a very interesting project on the big tech companies, and their cooperation with the government, government with the ministry ofdefense in the u.s and what they were explaining about this whether they were open about it and she also looked at the blogs or social media the official, channels used by these companiesbut they were very silent about these corporations they were not using social media so much yeah um but other than that i have not used it personally in my research and then as the worldbecomes more and more digital and there's even talks of having like virtual landscapes or like different developments like that do you guys do you see like geography and like thegeosciences going into an area where people's identity might not be a physical region but a virtual region or like these geopolitical landscapes are going to be more these people whoidentify with this group be it virtual not physical have these certain types of discourses or tendencies and those type of things um well i think um identifying with virtual regions um.
[29:31] Has um well we don't study it a lot as geographers i think but um some have studied You know, you have these large games, World of Warcraft, these kind of big games that havethis whole world created that there is a group of people that play these games a lot and they identify maybe more with this world than with other worlds or they fully understand that this isa virtual world, but they very strongly, you know, they also have a geography.
They identify with specific places and they know all these routes.
So, yeah, I think some geographers have already studied this as a sort of virtual world that people connect to.
The Importance of Real-World Connections
[30:21] Regarding your question whether all this digital stuff that we are connected to would make the real world less important for people. Thank you for watching.
I doubt it. I think it's still important.
And of course, there's people that are more like cosmopolitic.
[30:48] They feel very connected to Europe or to the world as a whole.
And other people are much more locally connected.
They identify very strongly with not even a city, but a particular neighborhood within the city. And the rest is...
Is less important to them so i i think you see different developments at the same time you have people that really focus on the nation state a lot nowadays see it all the outside world as athreat, see europe the eu as a threat that sends out all these ridiculous policies and we don't want this and whereas other people are much more focusing, okay, so there's a lot of problemscoming at us.
We need to work together in Europe, for example, to really deal with these issues.
So I think it's, you can't say it's going in one direction or in the other directions.
Maybe that's part of why these times are so complicated, not because of the issues that we need to deal with, but also because of the responses of people.
So people will focus much more on, yeah.
Brent:
[32:02] It just seems like another element that people will be factoring in.
Keller:
[32:07] When we're talking about identifying with a region, whether it be a city or even a neighborhood, could you explain the concept of the right to a city?
Now that plays into the study of geography.
Bouke:
[32:21] I'm not very much involved in this issue, so I'm not really...
I think it's related to making inclusive cities then. Do you refer to that?
Keller:
[32:31] Yeah, that's what I thought. Yeah, we can just skip that. Yeah.
Starting the Renewal of the Undergraduate Human Geography Program
Brent:
[32:36] So, that's what I think. Sweet.
Keller:
[32:43] Yeah. You're now leading the renewal of the undergraduate human geography program here at Utrecht and Spatial Planning.
We were wondering if you could walk us through that process and kind of what you're looking to build on and what that process looks like in terms of getting student feedback and whatmetrics you look to see whether the change is really clicking. Yeah.
Bouke:
[33:06] So it's a long-term project. I think we started in 2019, where we formed a small group of people, like a core team, that were sort of thinking about the bigger picture.
So what is it that we aim with this program?
What would our vision be? What do we want students that have completed this bachelor program?
Who are they and what have they accomplished?
And we also looked at, so what is the core of our discipline?
Which concepts or which ideas do we think that students should have?
We also looked at which skills do they need to have?
And from there on we um yeah we sort of built a program we have a bachelor of three years our students can take four years they can do extra courses and so on but the basic is three yearsum and so we assigned the courses to it um, and then the next year we started with the team that were going to teach the first year courses and they were going to design their course.
And we had these sort of, yeah, projects.
[34:28] Overall structure, guiding principles, and we had specific skills assigned to specific courses.
And then, of course, yeah, these are all geographers and planners from our department.
They are experts in their field. So we sort of set the boundaries like, okay, in your course, we're going to teach students how to write, starting with, you know, the basics, theargumentation, how to build a proper argument in your text.
And you'll, of course, be something about globalization and development.
But it's up to you to come up with the book or whatever text you think is important and to do the lectures. I'm not meddling with this.
They are, you know, experts. They know best.
But we sort of try to create the overall picture. So what is it that we want to have in the first year?
Of course some students come to geography and planning because they're really interested in planning so there's one course that's you know has this strong identity other students theycome because they want to change the world they are very much into development studies so we need at least one course that has this more global perspective and and one thing that wesaid we we felt was very important that in the Netherlands, that's very particular for the way geography is organized in the Netherlands.
Incorporating Sustainability and Landscape Studies into the Program
[35:54] We have different bachelors. We have a bachelor of human geography and spatial planning.
And we have a bachelor, we used to have a bachelor of physical geography, but now it's a bachelor of earth science.
That means where in many other countries you have a bachelor geography, you have human and physical geography in one.
So our students, if we don't put it in the program, they learn nothing about where they are planning houses or where, the kind of the landscape.
And yeah, with all these issues playing out nowadays, we said, okay, so we need to add something to the program that brings in this more bigger sustainability questions.
Questions, and the whole fact that if you, many of them will be working in the Netherlands in planning or housing, all these kind of areas.
And then we said, okay, so we need them to understand that they are living and working in a Delta kind of region.
So they need to understand something of the landscape, something of the challenges.
So that's one of the courses that we really decided it needs to be in the program.
[37:06] Yeah. And so the first group of students that's in the new program, they will, from September on, start in their third year.
So we're doing it gradually, year by year, we're in. Yeah.
Setting this new bachelor program in place. We do a lot of follow-up of the students, so each new course we ask the teacher if they invite students for a sort of advisory group, that theyask a few students and chat with them informally like two times during the course to get a feeling of how they think the course is, whether they see issues, whether they have havesuggestions we have the course evaluations of course where we also look at and we have the teachers that after the course get together we look also at the products that the students,created like is this what we expected when we said beforehand this was to be a course where you learned how to do a literature review and then if we look at the end products like Like, isthis what we're expecting?
Is this what we're wanting?
Do we need to change the assignment? Do we need to tweak it a bit?
Yeah, so that's the kind of way that we look at it.
Brent:
[38:27] And are you hoping that these students go into government to plan, work for companies?
What do you think the end goal for this major would be for the most part?
Bouke:
[38:39] Well we um the department um follows up on the on the on the students um especially after master graduation so we have like each two years there's this large um a survey ofpeople that studied here did a master's degree on human geography or spatial planning so we have a pretty good understanding of where they end up.
Many of them end up in consultancy related to mobility, transport, housing, spatial planning.
They end up in different layers of the government, the national government, local governments.
They end up in NGOs. A few of them become teachers, geography teachers.
Yeah, so many of them find a job very soon after graduation.
Brent:
[39:36] Yeah.
Bouke:
[39:38] And they are in this whole field of...
Brent:
[39:44] Spatial issues yeah and then could you maybe also expand that you touched on it briefly before like how important the environmental changes that the world is witnessing is andlike maybe not only how, you guys may be teaching about it but also just the field as a whole has to start to incorporate some of these ideas a bit more yeah yeah so um i think in generalyou know people um, very often when you tell people outside academia that you're a geographer, they look at you like, what's that?
Bouke:
[40:21] And some of them ask the question that will annoy any geographer, saying like, ah, so you know where, and they come up with a capital city of whatever insignificant state wherethis is located.
And you're like, no, but you can use an ad-lib if you want to know.
[40:38] But I think what we as geographers feel like, Like what we have to add to the world, our way of looking at the world, looking for connections, this holistic perspective where youuse information from different disciplines to understand what is going on in this particular place.
This whole holistic, yes, it also needs to include issues of sustainability.
You also need to understand something of not just the location, but also maybe of the soil, of the kind of environment you're operating in.
So, yeah, I think geography has something to bring to this world because of this holistic perspective.
Perspective and um because we we are aware that you need all this information to really make decisions and also that it's complex and that's never you know just one quick good answerand that things are much more complicated um yeah but i think that's also something that we want our students to understand certainly and it's very much i think related to the way we Welook at the world.
Understanding the Interconnectedness of Places
[41:55] Yeah, this...
Holistic, looking at the place, the interconnectedness, understanding that what happens here in Utrecht is related to national policy as much as to international perspectives, internationaldevelopments that are going on.
And that's why maybe a similar development looks very different in one place compared to the neighboring city.
But all these connections, interconnectedness, that's what geography is about.
So, yeah, it feels kind of natural to us to be thinking in these kind of ways.
Yeah we talked about some of the ways to develop a geographic lens and the reading and writing could you talk about how creating video documentaries is one way to help develop yourregional understanding regional thinking yeah yeah so in uh in one course that i i did with a colleague christina which is also my my my roommate here in the in the department, we hadpreviously had an exercise in this course which was about neighborhoods, different neighborhoods in Utrecht and she was new to the course and we discussed it a bit and we felt we could,do it a bit different and then she came up with the idea of the video documentary.
[43:24] Connecting to the work of Doreen Massey and And yeah, it worked wonderfully because if you're writing a paper, it's rather static perhaps.
But if you want to show that places are connected also to flows of people, if you're using video, you can actually see these things.
So although students are not allowed to film in the train station of Utrecht, they did.
It's not a public place. It's a privately owned place. So you're not allowed to film in the train station.
[44:01] But if you have images of this train station, then it makes a lot of sense to be talking about how this particular hub in Utrecht is connected to many other places in the Netherlands,the flows of people that enter this train station day in, day out, and what it tells about this place, but also...
So, yeah, so it's...
Using media to showcase global connections in Utrecht
[44:29] As a media, it helps, you know, really to show these connections.
And students could also, you know, bring in old maps, compare it to new maps, walk through places and show impressions of the places the way they look today and what they tell aboutconnections to other places in the world.
Because if you walk around Utrecht you don't see only Dutch shops or food places you see things that relate to places all over the world so it's very easy to show if you use a videodocumentary how these connections are there how they are visible for everybody and if the students are clever with editing they can add in an old picture and what it looks like today dayand connect to maps and all this kind of stuff so yeah we saw that the documentary.
[45:32] But also the reflection that the student had to write about the process of creating the documentary really helped them to start this process of thinking in this relatedness andunderstanding that the world is connected and some of them were very open you know they started like okay okay, so assignment, we have to go there once, and what will we see, younever know.
And then they were like, oh, wow, we really have to get back there again.
And we didn't look enough, so we had to go back.
And, oh, we have all these questions. Now that we're really looking into it, like, oh, we see so much more.
So the combination of the video with the reflection showed that these students, not all of them, but many of them were really starting, yeah, maybe to get this geographical lenses, to reallyunderstand that places are connected and what it meant, not just like by reading it, but by fully experiencing it.
Keller:
[46:34] Yeah, I'd imagine that creation process just feels a lot more, I guess, empowering to your understanding, as opposed to writing can sometimes feel menial. Yeah.
Bouke:
[46:44] Yeah, yeah. And you really have to think about, so, Which shots from which particular parts of the street will I be using to explain this?
Yeah, so there is a lot more thinking involved of which places actually illustrate, how can I visualize it?
Brent:
[47:05] Yeah, I think visual media as a whole make you notice a lot more of the details around you.
And the ways that you will discover there's a lot more influences here than you may, that you might just have walked by like or you might not have noticed there's 10 different ethnicitylike restaurants on your street but now when you're documenting it you realize like wow there's so much more here yeah i think in in general field work can do this when you have the theright prompts for students to look at.
Bouke:
[47:39] But this process of really visualizing it instead of just writing a report, seemed to add something to this whole experience of really looking critically and what did I see and how canI explain it to the audience.
Visualizing and explaining the experience through documentation and reports
Keller:
[47:55] And you mentioned for that assignment, you guys looked at Massey's relational perspective.
And we took a brief look at that paper and he talks about the space-time compression.
Could you talk about a little bit what that looks like today with the ease of travel internationally and social media making it seem really easy to connect with different places around theworld, how regions can maintain their interdependence?
Bouke:
[48:24] Yeah, so Doreen Messi, she...
Space-Time Compression: The End of Geography?
[48:29] She mainly wrote about this interconnectedness at space-time compression, I think relates to globalization in general, and that the world seemingly becomes a smaller place becausewe travel much easier from one place to another.
And I think when this process was really starting, many would declare the end of geography, the death of geography.
They even said because yeah if we can you know if we have internet and we travel from one place to another in a few hours then then location no longer matters right yeah it's the end ofgeography but i think the world has proven different uh geography is still very important um and not every activity is low can be located just anywhere and we see a lot of clusters takingplace so um we've proven that geography is not dead, geography is very much alive and location still very strongly matters.
Yeah, and I think that already shows that even with social media and further faster internet, all these things that, yeah, we still have, people still attach importance to their localsurroundings.
The Impact of Covid on Travel and Interconnectedness
[49:58] We had covid we suddenly had borders that were you know strictly guarded suddenly it was no longer travel uh possible to travel if you if you felt like it um yeah so maybe thiswas also a slightly wake-up call that okay we're all interconnected but maybe not always not as much uh there's still still a lot of people which can't travel so easily as you and I can.
So yeah, I think geography still matters, location still matters, and it still matters where you're from and what kind of opportunities you have to enjoy this.
Brent:
[50:43] Globalization and this time space compression yeah it seems like it certainly makes it a little bit more complicated but you can't just completely rule out where you're from like yourlocal ties and all those things but now more people might have to be dealing with more issues on their mind because they are facing online the world conflicts from all over the zone likeit's so easy to find atrocities all over the world and feel connected to it because it's deeply emotional but then still at the end of the day you have to worry about your house your housingprices your town and all the different things so it seems like it just got a little bit more complicated but not completely eradicated yeah i think but i think the the the social media and howit brings conflict to your life immediately.
Bouke:
[51:39] I think some geographers have already published about this in relation to the television news, how the Vietnam War became a war that was brought to your living room bytelevision.
And before that, it was the newspapers. In the 1900s, it was the newspapers.
And they you would even have like these kind of score sheets where you could you know color in the borders every day like see how the they were advancing uh so people were alreadyyou know following war at a distance but now it's much more immediate because you get these images um the very second that they may happen or may not happen you never know withsocial media what, what the information is that you're looking.
So yes, it's more in your face, more immediate.
But I think also a lot of people therefore don't go there. They don't look at it.
Beer Festivals and Colonial History in Qingdao, China
Keller:
[52:44] And as we transition a bit, could you talk to us about your work studying the beer festivals and how that gives insight to the colonial history of a region?
Bouke:
[52:53] Yeah. So, as you see as a geographer, we tend to draw in students that have a very broad interest in everything and anything, and that goes for me as well.
So I had the pleasure of supervising Zhao Lin she was from China she was a PhD student here and she looked at the city of Qingdao and its colonial heritage.
[53:26] It has a German colonial heritage and one of the aspects we were sometime invited to write a chapter.
And then we looked at the beer festival because the city, because it had a German origin, it had a German brewery there and which is now a large Chinese brewery.
And they organize a yearly beer festival. And so we were really wondering about how this festival was represented Because, of course, a beer festival very much ties into the Munich BigBeer Festival.
And we were wondering, like, how are they representing this particular festival as something quintessentially Chinese or very local? Like, this is Qingdao.
Or is it, how do they deal with this German history of this place?
Because beer was never there if it hadn't been a German colony.
So how do they deal with this?
[54:44] And we saw that, so Charlene is from the region, so she knows the place, but she, as part of her fieldwork, went there to look at the beer festival as well.
She even sent her parents there a few times to take some additional pictures.
Years and we could see that there would be some generic german bavarian types of images used, but there was not much about the german history or any sort of colonial issues seemed tobe there it was much more like a festival um you know a carnival kind of stuff um.
Brent:
[55:28] So it seemed that the Chinese basically took the idea of the beer festival, but they made it their own.
Completely, there wasn't a lot of German ties going back to it.
Bouke:
[55:38] No, there were some generic references in the images, but not the kind of images that were related to the particular colonial history of the city itself.
So that was interesting. thing but they have this sort of festival ground um partly or part of it is permanent and they have some sort of generic uh german old style houses built there butthey are not somehow related to the to the to the actual heritage in the city itself like the old buildings that are still there from the german time so it was more like a generic um beerfestival style than an actual story about the history of the city itself okay and a really good way to learn anything is to connect it to things that we like could you explain how we canconnect a geographical way of thinking to our hobbies yeah uh just do it just you know start wondering about the things that you do in in in in your free time uh from from your umgeographical lens so um um.
Connecting Geography to Hobbies: Formula One Racing
[56:53] I'm watching Formula One racing for 20 years, I think, a very long time.
And yeah, there comes this point in time where you're wondering like, why do they have these races in these places?
Why are these other races struggling, these circuits?
[57:13] Why do we no longer have a race in the Americas? Or why are they talking so much about a new race there?
And yeah so I was you know simply it started off with discussing the weekend like did you see the race with, someone else also a geographer who's interested in the races and we werelike yeah we could write an article about this yeah and then there have been some geographers in I think in the UK that actually studied.
[57:42] The rise of motorsport valley so they looked at the area near the Silverstone circuit and saw that many of these companies related to racing are located there.
And they wondered, why is there this cluster?
And they also looked at individual careers of people working with these big Formula One teams, but also with other teams.
And they saw that they, you know, they really stayed within this region even when they switched team.
So there was more geographers with this kind of idea. I think we wrote the first article about the geography of Formula One in 2011.
And then we predicted there will never be a race in the Netherlands.
We are not interested from a marketing perspective. Mm-hmm.
And then in 2020, we had to sort of write a second article. Okay, there will be a race in the Netherlands.
We didn't expect it. We thought globalization, all the races going eastwards, following the money, so to say, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and these kind of places.
But suddenly we have a few more races in Europe as well.
Brent:
[58:59] Yeah, that's definitely very interesting. So as we kind of wrap up here, do you have any words of advice of cultivating your geographical lenses and maybe why do you thinkstudents should be able to maybe at least like factor this in, even if they don't pursue geographical studies?
Bouke:
[59:17] That is um yeah i think um some would describe geography as the world discipline because it's about the world out there but also because it's it's about this understanding howplaces are so interconnected that um yeah it really helps you to understand what's going on it helps you to be critical you know to think critically about what politicians are saying whetherthey offer actually solutions that are viable or are just tying into sentiments but make no sense to what's actually going on so yeah i think geography as a as a way of looking at the worldhelps you to to understand the world and um yeah i think it's a shame that geography in high schools is not a compulsory a mandatory subject and that many people only see it astopography understand you know being able to place rivers on maps or whatsoever it's never about how we can help people make sense of the world and understand what's going on andalso realizing what they can do to shape the future because if you're only looking at the world from the perspective of there's a lot of.
[1:00:38] Disasters going on then yeah Yeah, it's not a very, but if you also understand that we make our future and understand how we can influence this, then yeah, I think we havesomething to add.
So not just for students, but I think it starts already in secondary school.
And I have a lot of colleagues that are looking into this, like what kind of geography would 15-year-olds need, 15-year-old students need to understand what's going on in the world, butalso to give them a perspective of you can help change this world.
We make this world. It's not only about understanding the problem and explaining it, but also about what can we do to deal with these issues.
Keller:
[1:01:23] Yeah, definitely. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much.
Brent:
[1:01:26] Thank you.
Bouke:
[1:01:27] Thank you.