Dr. Kevin Gould's research explores environmental and economic policy-making in the Americas. He is particularly interested in policies authorized by technical knowledge. Building on political ecology and economic geography literatures, Dr. Gould's work investigates the politics of market-assisted land reform, post-disaster reconstruction, and Cold War infrastructure development. Through his research, he seeks to challenge the often violent transnational processes and epistemologies that connect Canada, the United States and Guatemala. Dr. Gould has also facilitated course-based critical geography research on the university itself. Dr. Gould received his Ph.D. in Human Geography from the University of British Columbia (2009) and spent one year as a research fellow at Dartmouth College.
I am willing to supervise theses in the fields of political ecology and critical geography. Students interested in working on the political ecology of post-disaster reconstruction, broadly defined, are encouraged to apply as are students who would like to carry out field work or archival research in Latin America. I would also welcome graduate students who wish to study the critical geographies of the university and/or student movements.
Professional affiliations
Association of American Geographers
Canadian Association of Geographers
Latin American Studies Association
Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
The Latin American Studies Network of Montreal
Gould, K. A. 2021. Contradictions of transnational anti-colonial struggle: the post-WWII Guatemala-Israel alliance. Latin American Studies Association. Annual conference. Vancouver, British Columbia.
Gould, K. A. 2019. Peace created the space for this: a Guatemalannational land policy made by experts. Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Toronto, Ontario.
Gould,K. A. 2017. Extra-legal properties of Guatemalan land markets. International conference: Geographies of Markets. Karl Polanyi Instituteof Political Economy at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec
Gould, K. A. 2015. Whitening infrastructures: race and nation in Cold War Guatemala. Intersections Seminar Series, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto.
Gould, K. A. 2015. Emplaced histories of calculable land: the (un)making of a geodetic grid in northern Guatemala. Annual Conference of the Association of American Geographers, Chicago.
Gould, K. A. 2015. Entangled (post)colonialisms: military-led development in 1960s Guatemala. 7th International conference of critical geography, Ramallah, Palestine.
Courses taught
Geography 210: Geography of global change
Geography 220: Space, place and identity
Geography 290: Environment and society
Geography 300: Environment: cultural and historical perspectives
Geography 400: Political ecology
Geography 407: Indigenous people and the Environment
Geography 418: Postcolonial geography
Geography 605: Graduate methodology seminar: Geography Worlds
Current Graduate Student Supervision
Adrián O. N. Íñiguez (MSc): Post-disaster struggles for housing: the case of the 2010 earthquake in Chile
Jamila Ewais (PhD): Chemical geographies: transnational governance via agricultural policies in the Middle East and North Africa
Harold Bellanger* (PhD): Integrating climate services and food policy: geographies of agricultural development in Guatemala
* co-advisor with Dr. Nicole Gombay
Masters students (graduated)
Noah Cannon (2020) Performing indigenous well-being: historical and political geographies of Canada's community well-being index
Kayleigh McSwain (2017) Whiteness and the politics of local food movement in Halifax, N.S.
Gwen Muir (2015) Temporary labor recruitment in Guatemala for Quebec agroindustry
Barbara Bottini-Havrillay (2015) Politics of road-building in Cold War Guatemala
Michelle Braiden (2014) Discourse and dispossession in the Chaco War, Bolivia
William Zullo (2014) Spaces of transgender youth in Montreal*
Julie Montigney (2013) Spaces of queer youth in Montreal*
* co-advised with Dr. Julie Podmore
Honors students
Devon McKellar (2019) The frontier and the wasteland: settler colonial cognitive spaces in Montreal's sudouest.
Daniel Belvas (2019) The privatization of public space in Montreal's privatization of public space in Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles
Montserrat Hernandez (2015) The path to sustainability: implementation of ecotechniques in a rural Mexican community
Noah Cannon(2014) The well-being index and Canadian First Nations
Angharad Wylie (2013) Alternative economies in Halifax, Novo Scotia
Alex Matak (2012) Neoliberalism within: Concordia’s student movement
Julia de Montigny (2011) What spaces exist for queer youth? On institutional discourses and regulatory imaginations
Alexander Pinheiro (2010) The Montreal BIOBUS Project: Simple, Pure, Green?