Dr. Wolfgang Hoeschele
Associate Professor of Geography
Tel: (660) 785-4032
Email: whoesch@truman.edu
Teaching
Regularly taught courses:
Geography 111, The Geographic Perspective. I teach this introductory course every semester.
Geography 310, Environmental Geography. I teach this course every year, typically in the fall. It relates to my core research interest in human-environmental interactions and how to work toward a more environmentally sustainable economy. The course counts toward the Environmental Studies minor.
Geography 315, Political Geography. I teach this course regularly, but not necessarily every year. While I do not regard political geography as my primary field of interest, I do take a political-economy view on all the environmental issues that I study and thus teaching this course meshes quite well with my research interests.
Geography 317, Economic Geography. I have so far taught this course only once (in 2006), but plan to teach it more frequently in the future. The course relates to my interests in promoting a more environmentally sustainable economy as well as to my study of scarcity (see “Research” below).
Geography 322, Geography of Asia. I usually teach this course every year, typically in spring. The regional coverage extends from Pakistan in the West to Japan in the Northeast and Indonesia in the Southeast. I did my Ph.D. research in India and continue to be very interested in that country, as well as in Asia in general. The course counts toward the minor in Asian Studies.
JINS 336, The Environment: Border Crossings in the Forests of South and Southeast Asia. I have been teaching this course most years since 2002. This course relates both to my dissertation research (in a partly forested landscape in southern India) and to my ongoing interest in environmental issues. The course counts toward the Environmental Studies as well as the Asian Studies minors.
Research
The ongoing focus in my research has been the relationship between us humans and our natural environment. However, each research project has tended to lead me on to something different, and thus there are only one or two publications for each major topic.
I began my geographical research career with my dissertation at the Pennsylvania State University:
Land Degradation, State Power, and Peasant Livelihood in Attappadi (Kerala State, India). Ph.D. dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 1998.
In that study, I interviewed farmers and peasants of several different ethnicities as well as local and state-level government officials regarding their views of land degradation in a mountainous region on the borderlands between the humid state of Kerala and the much drier state of Tamil Nadu. I never got around to converting most of the dissertation work into published articles, but I did publish one article based on that research:
“Geographic Information Engineering and Social Ground Truth in Attappadi, Kerala State, India.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 (2): 293-321 (June 2000).
While the empirical work for this article was all from the dissertation, my theoretical arguments were new, focusing on geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing as means of exercising authority over the landscape, and the need for “intimate sensing” and “social ground truth” to give more attention to the voices of local people.
The next several years, I did not have a chance to resume fieldwork in India, but my experiences there (as well as in other countries) informed the next article I wrote:
“The Wealth of Nations at the Turn of the Millennium: A Classification System based on the International Division of Labor.” Economic Geography 78 (2): 221-244 (April 2002).
I had long found that terms such as “Third World” and “developing countries” are misleading in several different ways, and had tried to find different expressions to categorize countries in the world economy. In the classroom, I found this especially important, because I wanted to be able to talk about the world economy coherently without using categories that I consider to be on the intellectual level of a three-year-old. I find the system of categories I came up with reasonably adequate to deal with the complexity of the world economy (even while it still simplifies matters greatly, as all categories do).
In the summer of 2002, I did get to travel to India again (supported by an internal research grant from the university). My aim was to initiate a new research project on “wastelands,” a category frequently used in India for a wide range of land uses and that I had encountered in my dissertation research. I was interested in the meanings of this term according to various government agencies at federal and state levels, and what it means on the ground if an area is classified as “wasteland.” One publication came out of this work:
May/June 2003. “Intra-governmental communication and the applications of GIS to improve wastelands in India.” Arid Lands Newsletter 53, at http://ag.arizona.edu/OALS/ALN/aln53/aln53toc.html .
However, I did not follow up with further visits in India because during that trip, I had a flash of inspiration that took me on a different direction entirely. This was the idea of “scarcity-generating institutions.” The argument is that our insatiability for ever more, the ground on which the capitalist economy stands, which is responsible for the rampant environmental destruction due to overconsumption, as well as for extreme social inequity (because greed prevents sharing), is actively created by a variety of social institutions which I consequently called “scarcity-generating institutions.” I have since written a book on this topic, which is not yet published but provisionally entitled:
“The End of Scarcity: Profit or Abundance? A Political Economy for Freedom, Equity, and Sustainability.”
I have presented a summary of the thesis of the book, as well as my views on what research is needed on the topic, in a forthcoming article, accepted for publication by the International Journal of Green Economics:
“Research Agenda for a Green Economics of Abundance.”
A new study which I initiated in the spring of 2007 while on sabbatical relates to this work on scarcity and abundance. I am interested in studying organizations which promote the goals of abundance as I had defined it in my book, i.e., the condition that people feel that they have enough, that they don’t race after ever more in a frenzied lifestyle, and that environmental resources are preserved for everybody’s enjoyment. The stated goals of a network of cities called Cittàslow overlap with these concerns to a very large extent, so I decided to visit some of these cities in order to see to what extent they are successful in promoting their goals. The cities I visited are located in Italy, where the movement started, as well as in Germany and the United Kingdom, two of the first countries outside of Italy to which the movement spread. I am currently in the process of analyzing the copious interview data which I collected on my four-month trip to these cities. The websites of the Italian (and worldwide), German and English Cittàslow organizations can be accessed through the following links:
http://www.cittaslow.net/ (This site unfortunately does not always work; if the link takes you to “consumer.net,” try again some other time.)
http://www.cittaslow.info/index.php