Dr. Jamey Essex

•  Professor, 2010-now
• Assistant Professor, 2005-2010
• Ph.D., Geography, Syracuse University, 2005
• M.A., Geography, Syracuse University, 2001
• B.A., Geography and History, University of Kentucky, 1999

Research interests: Political geography and geopolitics; globalization and development; agriculture and food; international political economy

My primary research interest is official development assistance, specifically those state institutions that handle donor countries’ aid and development policies. I am interested in two aspects of these institutions and their activities: first, how they frame and intervene in processes such as agricultural development, national security, and governance; and second, their own internal structures and external relations, and how these have changed over time as ideas about development, security, and foreign policy have changed. I currently hold an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for a project titled Development, diplomacy, and expertise: Placing state bureaucratic labour in the CIDA-DFAIT merger. In this research I am examining the 2013 amalgamation of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) to form a new single department, now called Global Affairs Canada (GAC). I am pursuing several themes that have emerged from the ongoing merger of these two formerly independent state institutions: the organization and agency of expert labor within the state bureaucracy; the construction of a new institutional culture in the merged department; the role of gender in the production and use of policy expertise; the geographic complexity of a national state institution with global reach; and the way the Canadian merger compares with similar moves in other donor states.

My past research has focused on similar themes, looking at, among other things, the geopolitics of food security, ideas about aid effectiveness, and the evolution of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). I have a more general interest in the geographies of state power and bureaucratic expertise, and am planning a project on the work of Oliver Baker, a geographer who was instrumental as an agricultural expert in the US Department of Agriculture before and during the New Deal, a founder of the University of Maryland Department of Geography, and a president of the Association of American Geographers. Finally, I am involved in a research cluster at the University of Windsor with colleagues in Creative Arts, History, and Political Science focused on the spatial history of the Windsor-Detroit border region.

• POLS 2300   Space, Place, and Scale: Foundations of Human Geography
• POLS 2490   Political Economy of Agriculture and Food
• POLS 3350   Political Geography
• POLS 3560   Theories of International Political Economy
• POLS 4400   Remaking North America: Geographic Perspectives on US-Canada Politics
• POLS 4650   Seminar in Globalization
• POLS 8000   Scope and Approaches to Political Science
• POLS 8910   Special Topics: Spatial History of the Windsor-Detroit Bordelands

Books

• Essex, Jamey. Development, Security, and Aid: Geopolitics and Geoeconomics at the US Agency for International Development. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013.

Articles, chapters, and other contributions

•  Essex, Jamey and Joshua Bowman. (2020) “Striped pants and Birkenstocks: Work culture, gender, and clothing at Global Affairs Canada.” International Feminist Journal of Politics. doi: 10.1080/14616742.2020.1724814.
•  Essex, Jamey, Lauren Stokes, and Ilkin Yusibov. (2019) “Geographies of diplomatic labor: Institutional culture, state work, and Canada’s foreign service.” Political Geography, 72: 10-19. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.03.005
• Essex, Jamey and Logan Carmichael. “Restructuring development expertise and labour in the CIDA-DFAIT merger.” The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien, 61(2), 266-278, 2017. doi: 10.1111/cag.12328.
• Essex, Jamey. “Aid.” In N. Castree, M. Goodchlild, A. Kobayashi, W. Liu, D. Marston, and D. Richardson (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology. Hoboken, NJ and Washington, DC: Wiley-Blackwell and the American Association of Geographers, 2017. doi: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0458.
• Essex, Jamey. “International development institutions and the challenges of urbanization: The case of Jakarta.” Development in Practice, 26(3), 346-359, 2016. doi: 10.1080/09614524.2016.1150966.
• Essex, Jamey. “The neoliberalization of agriculture: Regimes, resistance, and resilience.” In S. Springer, K. Birch, and J. MacLeavy (eds.), The Handbook of Neoliberalism. New York: Routledge, 514-525, 2016.
• Essex, Jamey. “From the global food crisis to the age of austerity: The anxious geopolitics of global food security.” Geopolitics, 19(2), 266-290, 2014. doi: 10.1080/14650045.2014.896795.
• Le Billon, Philippe, Melanie Sommerville, and Jamey. Essex. “Introduction: Global Food Crisis.” Geopolitics, 19(2), 235-238, 2014. doi: 10.1080/14650045.2014.920231.
• Sommerville, Melanie, Jamey Essex, and Philippe Le Billon. “The ‘global food crisis’ and the geopolitics of global food security.” Geopolitics, 19(2), 239-265, 2014. doi: 10.1080/14650045.2013.811641.
• Essex, Jamey. “Idle hands are the devil’s tools: The geopolitics and geoeconomics of hunger.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(1), 191-207, 2012. doi: 10.1080.00045608.2011.595966.
• Essex, Jamey. “The politics of effectiveness in Canada’s international development assistance.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d’études du développement, 33(3), 338-355, 2012. doi: 10.1080/02255189.2012.713856.