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Eric Sarmiento

eric sarmiento

Associate Professor
Ph.D., Geography, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, 2015
Office:  ELA 362
Phone: 512.245.3440
Email:  ers89@txstate.edu
Vita      HB2504 information
Research Interests: Urban development, cultural geography, political ecology, economic geography, social theory, critical geographies of race and ethnicity

 

 


Biography

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography. I hold a PhD and MA from the Department of Geography at Rutgers University, and MA in Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Environment from the University of Oklahoma. In 2015-16, I held a postdoctoral research position in the School of Geography and the Environment at University of Oxford, where I worked on the MaRIUS Project, an interdisciplinary study of drought and water scarcity in the United Kingdom. I am a founding member of the Community Economies Institute, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to fostering thought and practice that helps communities thrive together. I am currently an Early Career Research Fellow at the NAS Gulf Research Program.

Research

I am a critical human geographer with expertise in urban geography, cultural geography, and political ecology. I use a range of qualitative methods to examine the dynamic relationships between environmental politics, economy, and culture in the context of urban governance and change, particularly as experienced by local communities. My research focuses on how urban change is understood and represented differently by individuals and groups occupying divergent socio-economic and cultural positions within cities in the US and the United Kingdom. These studies investigate varied intersections of urban and environmental governance: food systems, drought, flooding, segregation, and gentrification. Each of these cases highlights how dominant narratives of development and environmental change obscure longstanding inequities that constrain life chances and negatively impact the health and well-being of less privileged urbanites, who in turn often possess invaluable but over-looked insights about urban environmental, social, and economic transitions. I am particularly interested in advancing research methods that facilitate the co-production of knowledge with impacted publics.


Articles and book chapters

Le Noc, M., and Sarmiento, E. 2021. “We were turned into Jews’: Space, subjectivation, and resistance in occupied Paris.” Social & Cultural Geography (forthcoming).

Ashford-Hanserd, S., Sarmiento, E., Myles, C., Rayburn, S., Roundtree, A., Hayton, M., Ybarra, E., Benitez, S., Clifford, T., Pierce, C., Williams, D., and Maleki, S. 2020. “African American Experiences in the Historic Dunbar Neighborhood in San Marcos, Texas: A Case Study of Counter-Life Stories.” Social Science 9, 177.

Sarmiento, E. and Gabriel, N. 2020.  “Becoming-genealogical: Power and Diverse Economies.” Rethinking Marxism 32:3 (368-389).

Sarmiento, E. 2020. “Making sense of ‘local food,’ urban revitalization, and gentrification in Oklahoma City.” In Sbicca, J., Kato, Y., and Alkon, A. (eds.), A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City. New York: New York University Press.

Sarmiento, E. 2020. “Raw Power: For a microbiopolitical ecology of fermentation.” In Myles, C. (ed.), Fermented Landscapes: Lively processes of socio-environmental transformation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Sarmiento, E. 2020. “Field methods for assemblage analysis: tracing relations between difference and dominance.” In Dombroski, K. and Gibson, K. (eds.), Handbook of Diverse Economies. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Gabriel, N. and Sarmiento, E. 2020. “On power and the uses of genealogy for building community economies.” In Dombroski, K. and Gibson, K. (eds.), Handbook of Diverse Economies. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Sarmiento, E., Landstrom, C., and Whatmore, S. 2019. “Biopolitics, discipline, and hydrocitizenship: Drought management and water governance in England.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 44:2 (361-375).

Sarmiento, E. 2017. “The affirming affects of entrepreneurial redevelopment: Architecture, sport, and local food in Oklahoma City.” Environment and Planning A 50:2 (327-349).

Sarmiento, E. 2017. “Synergies in alternative food network research: Diverse economies, embodiment, and more-than-human food geographies.” Agriculture and Human Values 34:2 (485-497).

Sarmiento, E.2015. “Umwelt, food, and the limits of control.” Emotion, Space, and Society 14 (74-83).


Courses taught at Texas State

GEO 7352 Social Theory, Space, and Geography (graduate seminar)
GEO 7341 Urban Environment (graduate seminar)
GEO 7393C Managing Urbanization (graduate seminar)
GEO 5323/3323 Location Analysis (graduate/undergraduate seminar)
GEO 4393E Race, Class, and the American City (undergraduate)
GEO 3310 Urban Geography (undergraduate)
GEO 1309 Introduction to Cultural Geography


Graduate students

Mandy Truman (Doctoral, incoming 2021).
Caleb Gasparek (MAG, Sustainability Studies).
Stephanie Hoffman (MAG, in progress).
John Lyman (MAG, in progress).
Brittiny Moore (MAG, December 2020). “Fugitive Black spaces in environmental education: Black feminism, Blues Geographies, and relationality.”
Emily Runnels (MS, in progress).
Kaleigh Shuler (MS, in progress).
Mandy Truman (MS, in progress).
Chad Williams, (MS, August 2020). “Student Housing Cooperatives and the University Neighborhood Overlay in Austin, Texas.”
Michelle Zelenka, (MAG, in progress).