Dr. William Moseley

(upbeat music) - Welcome to Conversation with the Geographer. I'm Mike DeVivo, Professor of Geography at Grand Rapids Community College. And today, we're very fortunate to have William Mosley, Distinguished Professor of Geography at McAllister College. Bill, thank you so much for joining us today. - It's great to be here. Thanks for inviting. As I discuss with others who are interviewed for this series, I ask about what really sparked your interest in Geography. If you can reflect perhaps on your childhood, youth, and school studies, undergraduate studies, graduate studies, would you care to offer us some insight concerning how you got from a long time ago to now with regard to Geography? - Sure, so like a lot of young people who grew up in the United States, I think I had minimal exposure to the full breadth of Geography primary and secondary school. It was basically filling in maps and labeling where things were. And for a long time, all I thought Geography was, this sort of simplistic notion that many Americans have, I do remember our household subscribe to National Geographic magazine. And I think that got me interested in other parts of the world. I did have a grandmother that had traveled a fair amount and I think her travels made me curious about what it was like outside the United States. And actually my dad as well, I think was very interested in cities and how cities were laid out in the characteristics of different neighborhoods and sort of navigating through space. So I very distinctly remember going to national parks and my dad buying topographic maps and we'd plan on a hike and you were thinking about elevation differences and if you weren't aware of that on the topographic map beforehand, you certainly knew about it after you hiked up the trail. But I actually did not take my first geography class until I was a PhD student. And I think, which is not that rare, which is not that rare. I think geography is a history of being sort of an open discipline and there are lots of people who come into the discipline sideways. So my undergraduate degree was in history. I have two master's degrees, ones in public policy and the other is in natural resources management. But I think it was a combination of studying abroad in France as an undergraduate, having lived with a family that had spent a lot of time in Morocco. They got me interested in Africa and I joined the Peace Corps after I got out of undergrad, which led to this sort of interest in agriculture. And when I was writing my master's thesis, it was on indigenous soils management, but unbeknownst to me, it was really sort of cultural, political ecology. It was really after my master's degree, I was working for Save the Children in UK, which is a British nonprofit. And we were working on a big mapping project in southern Africa. And a lot of the people I was working with were trained in geography. And they started explaining to me that this is like more than maps, right? It's about trying to understand people's relationship with their environment. And they started giving me different things to read, peers, Blakey's political economy of soil, erosion, Michael Watts's work on Northern Nigeria. And I was just like, wow, this is a whole new area. And then kind of after a 10 year first career in development, largely in Africa, I decided to get my PhD. And that's when I finally sort of getting more formally introduced to geography. - And so you decided to go to the University of Georgia for your PhD and from Georgia, you engage or at Georgia, you engage in some pretty interesting dissertation research in Mali, would you care to comment on that? - Yeah, so my dissertation was broadly about sort of human environment interactions and people sort of management of soils. In the late 1990s, when I started my dissertation work, there was this widely accepted discourse that poor people were more likely to degrade the environment than wealthy people. And that didn't really job with my experience having worked in development. So when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, I spent two and a half years in Southern Mali and I was working on agriculture, promoting sort of vegetable gardening, but cotton was the big cash crop. And cotton is very detrimental to the soil and it's wealthier farmers that tend to grow the cotton. And so my dissertation really looked at sort of a stratified sample of households from sort of poor intermediate and rich, the wealthier households were growing more cotton. And in fact, what I found is that contrary to the conventional wisdom, what the wealthier farmers were doing because of their cotton farming practices, that was destroying the soil resources in particular, was leading to a problem known as soil acidification, which depresses yields. And it's a result of sort of sustained use of inorganic fertilizers without using enough organic matter. And so that's, I think my history of working in development and working in Africa had sort of led to that question that I was thinking a lot about when I was reading the literature as a sort of young PhD student in geography. - And if you care to just elaborate a little bit on what one of your recommendations was concerning transitioning perhaps to organic cultivation of cotton. Did you care to comment on that? - Yeah, so I mean, I think even broader than that, most farmers, including American farmers, would benefit from growing a broader diversity of crops because with the vagaries of weather, if one doesn't do well, you have something else as sort of a backup crop and, ecologically, it's more sustainable as well. I think the history of cotton in West Africa is really, really interesting. It, you know, in the pre-colonial period, it's a women's crop. They're growing it in small gardens, it's intercrop with other things, and they're growing it for the local textile industry. Most small communities had weavers in them that were making textiles. That all gets sort of destroyed by the French, who sort of flood the market with imported cheap textiles to destroy that local textile industry. And they introduce new varieties of cotton that require a lot of inputs. Cotton per volume requires more chemical inputs than any other crop in the world. And they frame it as a man's crop. That's just a cash crop that men grow. So it distorts power within households 'cause now men are making a lot more money. It's not sustainable. And so I think, you know, organic cotton is a way to become less dependent on all these expensive inputs. It's a way to manage risk because whenever you're borrowing money to pay for inputs, you open yourself up to new risks. But then also, I just think households to diversify what they're growing, not be overly focused on any one crop. - Well, that a variety of different crops certainly is one type of insurance, I guess, when you carry in a gray area in household, you know? So you're quite the Africanist. And there aren't a large number of geographers in the US that are devoting their studies to Africa, not like Latin America or even Europe. You've done quite a bit of research in Sub-Saharan Africa. And you've really gone to many places conducting fieldwork. Some of your fieldwork took place in South Africa, associated with land claims, for example, and some of it even with regard to vineyards. Would you care to augment on some of the striking points of your research in South Africa? - Sure, yeah, so there's four main African countries where I've done most of my research. Molly and Burkina Faso and West Africa, South Africa and Botswana and Southern Africa. And so, you know, I think a lot of young faculty after I'd published out my dissertation work on sort of soils in cotton and Southern Molly, I was really encouraged to find a new research project. And teaching at a liberal arts college were encouraged to sort of do research with our own students. And not only did McAllister have a study away program in South Africa, but I felt like it might be an easier place to take students. And so I led a study away program there for a couple of years. And I got interested in land reform. So sort of from 1994 moving forward, post apartheid South Africa, there's this concerted attempt to sort of redistribute land in favor of historically disadvantaged groups, people of color basically. And so I got an NSF grant in the mid-2000s and we studied that process. We found that there were a lot of challenges with it. I think one is that sort of contrary to the popular wisdom when you think of the African National Congress and its sort of allegiance to Marxist thinking, when South Africa gets black majority rule, that tradition is sort of hijacked by the business community and they really push a more neoliberal model. And so there's this market-based approach to land reform that really emphasized commercial agriculture. And so here you're talking about taking disadvantaged farmers and getting them to embrace this big commercial model and not only were they getting sort of not the best land, this was less productive land, but also it's really challenging to run a big commercial farm operation. So they struggled, the link with the wine industry is that some of these land reform farms were engaged in viticulture. They were growing wine grapes and producing sort of fair trade wine, worker-owned vines. And so that was sort of a side project which had its own benefits 'cause South Africa produces a really excellent wine. And it got me into a fair amount of public scholarship as well because I was trying to expose people to sort of fair trade wine from the Global South and thinking about sort of worker-owned vineyards. Very quickly, my research in Botswana has been about both sort of urban and rural food insecurity and in particular looking at a women's gardening initiative and how that could improve women's food security. Botswana is a really funky country. It's a middle-income country. It's considered to be a success story. Adi Samatar, who's a well-known Geographer at University of Minnesota has written about this and has to do with diamond exports and a well-run diamond export industry. But despite all those advantages, agriculture really took a backstage and in particular crop farming that women were more involved in. And I think that had severe food security implications, especially for rural people and women. And so I was looking at that as an alternative. And then more recently, since 2016, I started working in Burkina Faso, which is a neighboring country to Mali. The Southwestern part of the country has a similar cultural complex and speaks a local language, Jula, that I speak. I started working there because it got to, there were insecurity issues in Mali. And there I was studying the new green revolution for Africa. This attempt to sort of bring the green revolution, improve seeds, pesticides, fertilizers to African farmers, to focus on African crops. There I was studying a rice project. And in fact, what we find is that there are no nutritional benefits for the participating women farmers. And so it was a approach which had been flawed in the '60s and '70s in Latin America and Asia. And I think there are some similar challenges with this initiative in the African context. - That's fascinating. You've really, you've really trekked across different countries that are, many Americans think of Africa as this homogeneous entity. And you have really covered different landscapes, both physically and culturally that are rather striking. You mentioned that you brought students to Africa on study abroad trips. What did you find challenging about bringing students to South Africa? - Yeah, so I've actually brought students to South Africa and Botswana on some other programs. And I brought them to Burkina Faso involved with my NSF funded research there. You know, the dynamics are slightly different in each place. I think South Africa, like the United States, is a settler colony. And there's a history of sort of racial divisions. And I think that can be quite challenging for students to encounter in another cultural context. Even though, I mean, physically and climatically, it's a really comfortable place to live with lots of great infrastructure. And we were based at the University of Cape Town, which is an amazing university with lovely location. - Lots of resources. I think Botswana is, they've made huge investments in education. The University of Botswana is a large public university, 25,000 students in a country that only has two and a half million people. There's a lot of first generation students there. And my students were living in the dorms with them. And, you know, that there wasn't some of the sort of racial dynamic that you got in South Africa, but there were other sorts of challenges. And, you know, I think, we talk about and study away, you know, when you first get to a country, a student is really excited to be there. And then they go through this middle phase where there are lots of cross-cultural challenges and they get depressed and they want to go home and they're just sort of gripping about all these differences. And then if you're lucky, they come out the other end with sort of a more nuanced understanding of the view of, you know, how the world works. And so, you know, I remember taking students to a village there, we spent a week there and they were American students were. I think they're really challenged by the slower pace of life and, you know, coming to realize that they come from this workaholic culture where they have to be sort of doing things all the time. And, you know, coming to appreciate the value of human interaction. And then my research students in Burkina Faso, it was a smaller group of students, culturally the most different, not as wealthy as these other places. Interestingly, because we were working mainly with women farmers, all the American students that I brought were women, but there are, you know, certain gender norms and women face certain cultural challenges in that context that men don't face. And so sort of having to talk through that with them. - Well, it's due to the, you have students that have entered one of the more highly regarded private liberal arts colleges in the country. And geography really doesn't have a strong presence in liberal arts colleges. Would you care to comment about what life is like for an academic geographer in a place that's not a regional public university or an R1 institution or even an R2 institution, but one of these handful of private liberal arts colleges and one that is very well regarded in the academy. - Yeah, so I think there's an interesting history to McAllister. So it's, we're actually celebrating our sesquist centennial this year, our 150th anniversary. Early in the 20th century, McAllister embraced internationalism and started flying the United Nations flag on campus. The woman who founded our department, Hildegard Bender Johnson was a refugee from Germany. She fled the country with the rise of Nazism spent a few years in England where she met her husband and then moved to Minnesota when her husband got a job at the U. And she came over to McAllister and walked into the president's office and said, you claim to embrace internationalism and it's shameful that you're doing that and you don't have a geography department, which is a signature part of sort of international education. This is a big discipline internationally, even if it's small in the United States. I never met Hildegard, but apparently she was a force of nature and a very compelling figure. And so she convinced the president then to establish a geography program in 1946. So she herself was a formidable scholar. She nearly became president of the A.G. had she not been forced out by the good old boys' network at the time. - Indeed. She's written great works on the survey system in the United States. - Exactly. And actually she did a lot of scholarship in Africa as well. So I think because of this international tradition and the international students who come here who are more likely to have had geography and they're sort of K-12 education than Americans, geography has always had a place at McAllister. I think we have benefited in recent years from the rise of advanced placement human geography. We have a lot of students who are more likely to encounter it in secondary school now and they have a positive experience and they come here. And so we've done some tracking of this and something like 30 to 40% of our majors now had gotten some exposure to geography often through AP human geography. So I think that's been important. We have also recently been recategorized as a STEM discipline, which has huge implications for international students 'cause it has visa implications. 'Cause in the past I had to have these sort of painful discussions with students like my hearts with geography, I wanna do geography, but for visa requirements I have to do biology or computer science. And so that's less of a barrier than it used to have been. And so even to this day I think most students come into the discipline sideways at Mac. They're interested in health issues or environmental issues or Latin America or Africa. They take one of our intermediate level courses, thematic courses and they're like, wow, this is so cool. I never knew it about it before and then they declare a major. So we're consistently like the fifth or sixth largest major at the college and we've done really well in this institutional context. I am very aware of the fact that my colleagues at other colleges and universities have, don't benefit from the same sort of situation. But I tend to lean optimistic and I'm hopeful for the future of geography in the United States. - And here is a case where the rich tradition that McAllister has really facilitated opportunities in many ways and I suspect you have selected faculty very astutely that are able to attract students to continue on in the discipline and faculty that conduct research and do interesting things. - Yeah, I do think, so McAllister frames itself as a research intensive liberal arts college. And so to get tenure at a place like this you have to be a good teacher, but that alone will not suffice. So all of our faculty and I have amazing colleagues are not only strong teachers, but active researchers and they involve students here in their research. And so I think in many ways, if you come to a place like Mac, it's certainly by your third or fourth year it's almost like a graduate school experience. Your smaller classes, you get to know your professor really well, you become engaged in research. And you know, most of our students will go on to graduate school and many will go on to graduate school in geography. And so I feel like making that pipeline work well is good for geography in the United States. We need bright young people who are entering the discipline. - Oh, absolutely. We can always use bright young people in our discipline. And speaking of our discipline and cultivating these students really to move on and go on to graduate school, I assume you see a number of them at geography conferences, the AAG or the West Lakes conference or combined East Lakes and West Lakes conferences. You've played a role in the AAG and the American Association of Geographers. Why don't you provide a few words concerning what you've done and what you hope to do? - Sure, so to answer your initial question, yes, I see tons of students at the AAG, tons of former students, and that's wonderful. And we have a party every year. So there's a great community there. So I've been involved with the AAG in different ways. I'm very active in two or three specialty groups. I've been chair of the Political Ecology Specialty Group. I'm also very active with the African Geography Specialty Group. It has its own journal, the African Geographical Review. I was both the editor and the associate editor for that journal and I continued to serve on the editorial board. There's sort of an amazing story behind that journal. Its roots are at Macarera University. - Right, Uganda. And it, you know, with Ediamine and this sort of dark period and Uganda's history have really suffered and it was brought to the United States by some African geographers. And it was literally a garage operation for a number of years. And, you know, we managed to shift from one to now five issues per year. It's, you know, it has a wide circulation and it's, I think it's just a great venue for highlighting the geographical scholarship of people who work in Africa and who are based on the African continent. I have also served on the AEG Council. I was an intern, one of the national counselors and so, you know, that group gets together twice a year to sort of, you know, debate issues that are germane to the association. And then I continue to serve on the Healthy Departments Committee. There are, you know, some of our colleagues are challenging institutional situations and that committee is really there to serve and help them. And if it makes sense, you know, write letters to people at different universities sort of articulating to the value of geography. - Well, we certainly, go ahead. - Yeah, those are just some examples of different ways, yeah. - Well, we certainly need to spread the word, I think, throughout higher education, as our presence is not as large as I believe it should be, or as we would like, because we still have so many higher education leaders in the U.S. that have no inkling of what geography is all about, but seems you don't have that problem at all at McAllister, which is great. - No, we're very blessed that way. We're very fortunate. - You know, we have about a minute to go here, Bill. And I'm gonna ask you to think about your career, your students and your colleagues. And I'll ask you to reflect on that for a moment and provide perhaps some insight, some words of advice for undergraduate students, graduate students and even colleagues in the field. Would you care to do that? - So, I always tell my students that there are certain tell, tell signs. If you're interested in landscapes, if you're someone, if you're flying on an airplane, and you really like to sit next to the window and look out and see that landscape and try to think about what's going on there, maybe you're a geographer. And for me, I came to geography a little later in life. It was as a second career. It helped me think through a lot of challenges that I was seeing in development. In particular, the focus on scale and thinking about things at multiple scales because what I experienced is that while bottom up participatory development was wonderful, there were limits to that if the government or international institutions thought otherwise. But also, I increasingly realized that if the policy-making apparatus was disconnected, that was a problem too. And, you know, so that for me was important. I think geography, spanning the social and the biophysical sciences and geographies sort of focus on field work. We're not on armchair science. We just don't download data. And so if that appeals to people as a student, I think geography is for you. And for my faculty colleagues, I continue to be an optimist. We need good people in geography. It's a bigger discipline internationally, but it's a smaller discipline in the United States. But I think the fact that we're thinking about across all these different sort of barriers between disciplines where various sort of interdisciplinary or nature, we're thinking about big human environment questions that, you know, we are useful to the world. And the policy-making sphere is impoverished without sort of geographical input. And I guess the last thing I would say is, you know, don't be content to sort of sit on the sidelines. We need people to publicly engage now more than ever. - Absolutely. It's been a great pleasure. And this-- - Thank you. - You're so welcome. I'm really glad you were able to make it today. And this concludes today's episode of Conversation with a Geographer. Thank you. (upbeat music)