Going far beyond maps, as one might presume, “Geography is the study of human-environment interactions,” explains Soren Larsen, Assistant Professor of Geography at MU. The discipline as a whole covers activity ranging from physical geography (e.g., wind erosion and weather patterns), techniques (e.g., modeling air pollution with GIS, or Geographic Information Systems, to understand the interactions between humans and the environment), and something called human geography, a subfield that focuses on the political, economic, cultural, urban, and regional elements of human-environment interactions. Human geographers cast their eyes on “the impact of the environment on human behavior,” as well as “the impact of human activity on the environment.” Within human geography Larsen specializes in cultural geography. While traditionally that may have entailed mapping the distribution of various cultural traits to track changes over space and time, cultural geography today is much more process-focused, drawing heavily upon the methodologies and theories of anthropology, psychology, sociology, and philosophy.

“Geography is the study of human-environment interactions,” Larsen says of his discipline. It covers activity ranging from physical geography (e.g., wind erosion, weather patterns), techniques (e.g., modeling air pollution with GIS to understand the interactions between human and environment), and human geography. Human geographers focus on the political, economic, cultural, urban, and regional elements of human-environment interactions, looking at “the impact of the environment on human behavior,” as well as the “impact of human activity on the environment.” Within this subfield Larsen specializes in cultural geography, seeking to understand traditional land-use practices, naming practices, and sense of place.

At first, when asked about collaborative research, Larsen joked that cultural geographers “usually fly solo,” because the projects are so time- and field-intensive. Yet Larsen has been involved in a number of collaborations. He worked closely with the Cheslatta people in British Columbia on various projects. At the Colorado field school he shares ideas with a cultural geographer, a GIS specialist, and a physical geographer. And he also collaborates with Matt Foulkes, a population geographer from MU’s Geography department, and Ann Bettencourt, a social psychologist from the Psychology department. Larsen has recently begun collaborating with Jason Dittmer, a geography colleague at Georgia Southern University, to compare the U.S.-based Captain America books with those of Captain Canuck, its Canadian parallel. Using content analysis, they have found these comics shed light on matters of nationalism, national identity, and cultural values, as well as responses to cultural change.

Larsen, who started out as an undergraduate English major, found himself writing about place, a sense of place, and the identities associated with it. Seeking to understand cross-cultural variations in terms of a sense of place led him to the discipline of anthropology, and it was through ethnographic research that Larsen finally reached geography. His past research projects have involved sharecroppers in the Tennessee River Valley, who were relocated by the TVA dams, as well as with the Cheslatta, “a small Indian band in British Columbia, Canada, that had been relocated from its traditional lands in 1952 in order to make way for a hydroelectric project that was being constructed by the aluminum company of Canada.” In each case, Larsen sought to understand traditional land use practices, naming practices, and what places mean to people of different cultures.