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Kevin A. Gould, PhD

Thesis supervisor Accepting inquiries
  • Associate Professor , Geography, Planning and Environment

Thesis supervision details

Supervised programs: Geography, Urban and Environmental Studies (MSc) | Geography, Urban and Environmental Studies (PhD)

Research areas: Political ecology, historical and economic geographies of the Americas and particularly Guatemala, social theory, entanglements of development and militarization, politics of expertise, post-disaster reconstruction

Contact information

Email:

kevin.gould@concordia.ca

Biography

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 and individualized 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

Selected publications

  1. Lizarralde, G., Sara Latorre, Myriam Paredes, Manuel Pérez, BenjaminHerazo, Neidy Clavijo, Claudio Araneda, Elsa Monsalve, Nicolás Ordoñez, RobertoBurdiles, Lisa Bornstein, Gould, K. A., Ricardo Dueñez, Adriana López-Valencia, OswaldoLópez-Bernal, Andrés Olivera-Ranero & Gabriela Gonzales.  2025.  Why do(some) people in informal settlements in Latin America grow food today and whatis their struggle? Local Environment.

  2. Lizarralde, Gonzalo, Steffen Lajoie, Gould, K. A., ClaudioAraneda, Ilian Cruz-Panesso, Julia Helena Diaz, Elsa Monsalve, Burdiles, R.,Herazo, B., Páez, H. and Valladares, A., 2025.  "Beyond fear: The role of emotions in disasterrisk reduction in the face of climate change." Emotion, Space andSociety 54.

  3. Lizarralde, G., Herazo, B., Smith, D., Bornstein, L.,Gould, K. A., Monsalve, E., Ordoñez, N., López, A., López, O., Burdiles, R., Araneda,C. and Olivera, A. 2024. "Artefacts of disaster risk reduction:conceptualizing bottom-up initiatives of climate action in informalsettlements", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 33 No. 5, pp.455-479

  4. Gould, K. A. 2023.  The rule of technocrats?: Historical conditions for a land grab in northern Guatemala.  Routledge Handbook of Global Landand Resource Grabbing. Eds. Andreas Neef et al. Philadelphia, PA:Routledge University Press. (open access).

  5. Lizarralde, G., Bornstein, L., Robertson, M., Gould, K. A., Herazo, B., Petter, A. M., & Bouchereau, K. (2021). Does climate change cause disasters? How citizens, academics, and leaders explain climate-related risk and disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean.

  6.  International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 58, 102173.Lizarralde, G., Holmes Páez, A. O., Lopez, O., Bornstein, L. Gould, K. A.,  Herazo, B., and Muñoz, L. 2020. We said, they said: the politics of conceptual frameworks in disasters and climate change in Colombia and Latin America.  Disaster Prevention and Management: An International Journal.
  7. Gould, K. A. 2018. The old militarized humanitarianism: contradictions of counterinsurgent infrastructure in Cold War Guatemala.  Critical Military Studies, 4(2): 140-160.
  8. Gould, K. A., M. Magdalena Garcia, and Jacob AC Remes. 2016.  "Beyond natural-disasters-are-not-natural": the work of state and nature after the 2010 earthquake in Chile." Journal of Political Ecology 23: 94-114.
  9. Gould, K. A. 2014 Everyday expertise: land regularization and the conditions for land grabs in Petén, Guatemala. Environment Planning A, 46(10): 2353-2368.
  10. Gould, K. A. and Estrada, I. A. 2014. Framing disappearance: H.I.J.O.S., public art and the making of historical memory of the Guatemalan civil war. Special Issue on Enforced Disappearance. ACME: International Journal of Critical Geography, 13(1): 100-134.
  11. Dempsey, J., Gould, K. A., Sundberg, J. 2011. Changing land tenure, defining subjects: neoliberalism and property regimes on Native reserves. In Re-Thinking the Great White North: race, nature and the historical geographies of whiteness in Canada. Eds. A. Baldwin, A. Kobayashi, and L. Cameron. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
  12. Gould, K. A. 2010. Anxiety, epistemology, and policy research "behind enemy lines." Geoforum. 41: 15-18.

Selected conference presentations

Gould, K.A. and Rantisi, N. 2025. Panel presentation on Teaching Palestine in an Age of Genocide: reflections from Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.  Association of American Geographers AnnualConference.  Detroit, Michigan. 

Herazo,B., Lizaralde, G., Bornstein, L. Gould, K. A. 2023.  The difficulty of enhancing climate actionand disaster risk reduction in informal settlements: The role of bottom-upinitiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean. I-Rec: International Network Conference. Sendai, Japan.

Gould, K. A. 2022.  Doc James Papaw: (not) knowing an Africanhealer in 18th century colonial Virginia.  Association of American Geographers. AnnualConference.  New York City (onlineparticipation).

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 Guatemalan national 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.

 

 

Teaching

Courses taught

GEOG 210: Geography of global change
GEOG 220: Space, place and identity
GEOG 290: Environment and society
GEOG 300: Environment: cultural and historical perspectives
GEOG 400: Political ecology
GEOG 407: Indigenous people and the Environment
GEOG 418: Postcolonial geography
GEOG 498: Geographies of Justice
HENV 605: Graduate methodology seminar: Geography Worlds

Current Graduate Student Supervision

Jamila Ewais (PhD): Tobacco, Territory, and Refusal: Farming and food sovereignty in Jenin, 2020-2025. 

Marianne Couture Cossette (PhD): The ‘fire multiple’: enacting and managing fire in times of crisis

Camilo Perdomo (PhD): Conditions of possibility of climate adaptation in the Global North and South.

Catherine Rokakis (Msc): Housing Precarity After the 2024 Jasper Wildfire Complex: Vulnerability in a Park Tourism Economy

Eli Kaufman (MSc): Concessions to colonialism: governing Palestine through resource concessions under the British Mandate

Masters students (graduated)

Adrián O. N. Íñiguez (MSc): Post-disaster struggles for housing: the case of the 2010 earthquake in Chile

Harold Bellanger (PhD): Integrating climate services and food policy: geographies of agricultural development in Guatemala (Co-Advisor) 

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 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?

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