2018 Workshop

Gary Fields

Gary Fields is associate professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on geographical landscapes as representations of power and seeks to address a fundamental question: How do territorial landscapes communicate the power of dominant groups to reorganize patterns of material life, politics, and culture in particular places, and how does landscape itself become an instrument of force in this process of transformation? Fields’s most recent book, Enclosure (University of California Press, 2017), compares the fragmented and partitioned landscape in Palestine to the landscapes of dispossession during the early modern enclosures in England and the Anglo-American colonial frontier. His previous book, Territories of Profit (Stanford University Press, 2004), reveals how the capitalist business firm uses force to reshape the economic and physical landscape in order to exploit the innovative potential of communications revolutions and make profit differently.