David Butz - Seeking MA Students

David Butz - Geography

David Butz - Seeking MA Students


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Negotiating a washout on the Karakoram Highway, Pakistan

Road construction and social change in rural areas of the global South

In my own current work this interest involves investigating the implications of a newly constructed road for the daily lives, identities, and spatialities of residents in a small agricultural village in northern Pakistan. Funded opportunities exist for qualified and interested students to work with interviews, testimonial information, archives and photographic evidence relevant to this particular road-building project. I would also be interested in supervising students who would like to work on this general topic in relation to other geographical contexts.

 

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Nyabinghi Drummers - Jamaica

Geographies of Music

My interests are in (a) sound as a resource for understanding and representing spatiality, (b) music's role in constituting specific spaces, (c) the concept of acoustic space, and (d) relationships among music, identity and place. I have thought about these issues most carefully in relation to reggae music, but my supervisory interests are not constrained by genre preferences. I recently supervised a student who studied how the use of i-pods is shaping the constitution and experience of public transit environments.

 

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Interviewing medical staff at an IDP camp in Danyore, Pakistan

Qualitative research methods, especially ethnography and autoethnography in their various forms

I am eager to work with students who wish either to use or interrogate the use of these approaches in geographical research. Students entering graduate school seldom realize that methodology itself is a dynamic area of research. Ethnography, and especially the place of the self-reflexive researcher-self in ethnographic research, is an especially dynamic area of research on methodology, that I would be interested to help interested students explore.