Geographies Of The 2020 U S Presidential Election

This timely, insightful and expert-led volume interprets the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election from a geographical standpoint, with a focus on its spatial dimensions. With contributions from leading thinkers, this book highlights the unique circumstances of the election, including the Covid pandemic and a president who falsely alleged that it was a massive fraud, particularly after he lost. The volume offers an introduction and 11 chapters that examine the run-up to the election, the motivations of Trump supporters, the election results themselves, case studies of the battleground states of Wisconsin and Georgia, and the chaotic aftermath. Accompanied with an engaging plethora of figures providing a visual demonstration of data trends, both national and local case studies are considered throughout this book, as well as right-wing radicalization, the role of Cuban-Americans, race, and threats to American democracy. This book is an ideal study companion for faculty and graduate students in fields including geography and political science, sociology, American studies, media studies and urban planning, as well as those with an interest in U.S. politics more generally.

From presidential to congressional, state, and local tickets, this book explains the 2020 elections through more than 100 full-color maps that unleash the illustrative power of cartography. A mix of geographers, political scientists, and historians provide a comprehensive examination of the elections from the primary campaigns to the final results.

This book provides an interdisciplinary overview of the causes and impacts of COVID-19 on populations, economies, politics, institutions and environments from all world regions. The book maps the causes, effects and impacts of the virus and describes the impact of the virus on among others health care, teaching and learning, travel, tourism, daily life, local and regional economies, media impacts, elections, and indigenous populations and much more. Contributions to this book come from the humanities, social and policy science disciplines as well as from emerging transdisciplinary fields including climate change, sustainability, health care and epidemiology, security, art, visualization, economic and social well-being, law and borderland studies. As such, this book will be a rich source of information to all those geographers, social scientists and urban and regional planners working in this field.

Census data are widely used by practitioners to understand demographic change, allocate resources, address inequalities, and make sound business decisions. Until recently, projects using US Census data have required proficiency with multiple web interfaces and software platforms to prepare, map, and present data products. This book introduces readers to tools in the R programming language for accessing and analyzing Census data, helping analysts manage these types of projects in a single computing environment. Chapters in this book cover the following key topics: • Rapidly acquiring data from the decennial US Census and American Community Survey using R, then analyzing these datasets using tidyverse tools; • Visualizing US Census data with a wide range of methods including charts in ggplot2 as well as both static and interactive maps; • Using R as a geographic information system (GIS) to manage, analyze, and model spatial demographic data from the US Census; • Working with and modeling individual-level microdata from the American Community Survey’s PUMS datasets; • Applying these tools and workflows to the analysis of historical Census data, other US government datasets, and international Census data from countries like Canada, Brazil, Kenya, and Mexico. Kyle Walker is an associate professor of geography at Texas Christian University, director of TCU’s Center for Urban Studies, and a spatial data science consultant. His research focuses on demographic trends in the United States, demographic data visualization, and software tools for open spatial data science. He is the lead author of a number of R packages including tigris, tidycensus, and mapboxapi.

This book explores the geographical dimensions and implications of the post-truth era. Opening with a defense of the Enlightenment and the continued significance of science, objectivity, and truth, it then provides three key perspectives on the concept: The first is a philosophical analysis of post-truth. Social theory in various forms has sutured knowledge and power, in the process relativizing the nature of truth. This process reaches its apogee under post-modernism, which questions the very nature of truth itself. The second is the examination of the historical origins and development of the post-truth world. While post-truth has a history that can be traced back to the 18th and 19th centuries, more recently it has growth prolifically through the use of social media. The book examines post-truth as it appears in the yellow journalism of the Hearst newspapers, Holocaust denial, and contemporary attacks on science itself (e.g., the anti-vaccine movement, denial of evolution). Post-truth becomes a central issue in Western politics following Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, who uses it frequently to advance a reactionary political agenda. Russian hackers weaponize it to interfere in the politics of Europe and the U.S. Fox News and other right-wing outlets also play a central role. One result is the proliferation of unfounded conspiracy theories such as QAnon. Today, autocrats and dictators the world over use fake news to maintain their power. Finally, this book links the rise of a post-truth society to the dynamics of contemporary economic geography. Knowledge-intensive capitalism has greatly elevated the significance of symbolic workers or the creative class. Geographically, contemporary capitalism has accentuated the agglomeration of producer services in large urban areas in which such workers labor. Conversely, rural areas and small towns have largely become repositories of the undereducated, and thus are more susceptible to fake news.

Using case studies from Florida and the Caribbean region, this book summarizes the state of coral reef conservation today. The question this book answers is, what is the best way to protect the vulnerable coral reefs, with an ever-worsening climate crisis? The book’s contribution is looking closely at people’s avenues to participate in coral reef management, and how the public is increasingly making their voices heard in the management process.

Exploring what it means to enact feminist geography, this book brings together contemporary, cutting-edge cases of social justice activism and collaborative research with activists. From Black feminist organizing in the American South to the stories of feminist geography collectives in Latin America, the editors present contemporary case studies from the global north and south. The chapters showcase the strength and vibrancy of activist-engaged scholarship taking place in the field and serve as a call to action, exploring how this work advances real-world efforts to fight injustice and re-make the world as a fairer, more equitable, and more accepting place.

The Oxford Handbook of Political Participation provides the first comprehensive, up-to-date treatment of political participation in all its varied forms, investigates a wide range of topics in the field from both a theoretical and methodological perspective, and covers the most recent developments in the area. It brings together research traditions from political science and sociology, bridging the gap in particular between political sociology and social movement studies; contributions also draw on crucial work in psychology, economics, anthropology, and geography. Following a detailed introduction from the editors, the volume is divided into nine parts that explore political participation across disciplines; core theoretical perspectives; methodological approaches; modes of participation; contexts; determinants; processes; outcomes; and current trends and future directions. The book will be a valuable reference work for anyone interested in understanding political participation and related themes.