The Geographers at UCI research cluster brings together faculty, students, and other community members to explore questions pertaining to how the organization, creation, and destruction of space and spatial relationships constitute a history of the present. As a fundamentally cross-disciplinary endeavor, our participants make use of geographical approaches to inflect their own methodologies and objects of study. While our participants come from a diverse array of disciplinary positions—from anthropology and urban planning, to history and cultural studies—our work overlaps in two areas: political economy and transnational frameworks.
Research cluster conveners: Yousuf Al-Bulushi (Global Studies) and Christopher T. Fan (English).
News & Events
- Dr. Daniel Gámez, “Lacustrine Urban Ecologies: Nahua Earthworks and Imperial Urbanism in the Anahuac-Mexico City”
Thursday, May 29, 2025
12PM, Social Sciences Tower (SST) 506
This talk explores the ancestral urban ecologies of the Anahuac by emphasizing the embodied experiences of the Nahua pueblo of Atlapulco and their earth and waterworks. From this perspective, it will provide a critical genealogy of imperial urbanism, and in particular, four centuries of hydraulic infrastructure and wetland desiccation with the rise of Mexico City. Dr. Gámez’s research builds upon interdisciplinary frameworks, counter-storytelling, and collaborative archival analysis to intervene in the fields of urban studies, hemispheric Indigenous studies, and decolonial methodologies.
Daniel Gámez is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of American Indian Studies & History at UCLA. He is also a postdoctoral scholar for the project “Race in the Global Past through Native Lenses,” supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He received his PhD in Geography from the University of British Columbia, and is an interdisciplinary human geographer specializing in the study of anticolonial thought, racialization, Indigenous sovereignty, and imperial urbanism in Abya Yala (Latin America).
Dr. Gámez’s visit is sponsored by Geographers at UCI, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Department of History
The Geographers at UCI Research Cluster is funded by the UCI Humanities Center.
