1 - 2 p.m. PST
“Geography is everywhere” (Cosgrove, 1989), but despite the valuable insights that geography offers to research and every-day problems, the general population widely misunderstand the discipline, and its importance is often overlooked. Through the story of her academic journey studying racial, ethnic and national identity in Dr. Sanchez-Rivera reflects on how known-research problems and theories could benefit from the geographic perspective and its refreshing approaches.
Dr. Ana Sánchez-Rivera is a Human Geographer with a Cognitive and Social Psychology background. Her undergraduate research at the University of Puerto Rico was based on discriminatory attitudes against Dominicans living in Puerto Rico. She completed her MA in Multicultural Geography at SUNY Binghamton. Her thesis expanded on how Whitening’s patterns changed by places in the Island and the importance of these when identifying xenophobic attitudes against Dominicans. She recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, Geography Department. Her work contributed to Identity Process Theory and its position about people-place relationships. Her study focused explicitly on how places created by the government and, the narratives told about them, influence racial, ethnic and national identity in Puerto Rico. Dr. Sanchez-Rivera currently works as Survey Statistician for the Racial Statistics Branch, at the US Census Bureau, Population Division.