WRITER BIOS

Glen David Kuecker is a Professor of History at DePauw University. He received his Ph.D. in Latin American and global comparative history from Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He holds a B.A. from St. Olaf College. Glen’s original specialization is in Mexican history, and his work as a historian focuses on how the port city of Tampico made the transition from a small town to a modern city during the late 19th century. He has published essays on the place of yellow fever epidemics in Tampico’s urban development, as well as the historical memory of a catastrophic oil well fire in 1908. More recently, his scholarship focuses on how people in Latin America have organized in resistance to neoliberal economic reforms. Glen co-edited Latin American Social Movements in the Twenty-first Century: Resistance, Power, and Democracy, which won a Choice outstanding title of the year award. He has published on grassroots resistance to mining in Ecuador, and has a theoretical essay that explores today's Latin American social movements and one that considers the meanings of solidarity work. Glen’s recent work examines how we are going to weather the perfect storm of 21st century crises. This project involves research collaboration with the Globalism Research Centre at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, where together they examine the relationship between community and resilience amid the global crises. Most recently, Glen is exploring the place of cities within the perfect storm, which has led to a focus on understanding eco cities, especially New Songdo City in South Korea. In addition to teaching traditional courses in Latin American history, Glen has offered on about globalization, migration, social movements, 21st century urbanization, and ecocities. He serves on the international advisory board of the Globalism Research Centre, the Mexico Solidarity Network’s advisory board, and Earham College’s Border Studies. He is founder and manager of an international human rights observation team in Ecuador, which has been active since 2006. He served a three- year term as coordinator of DePauw University’s Conflict Studies program, and a one-year coordinator position for the university’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. Ranking supreme above all, Glen is a die-hard Chicago White Sox fan. He may be contacted at gkuecker@depauw.edu. 

ROBERT SHIREY has forty plus years in International and logistics management, with extensive business travel to South East Asia, and currently works as an independent scholar in globalization studies. His orientation is that of a generalist (as to not miss the grandeur of the forrest). While not a linguist, his special interest is in the terms of the debate, heavily influenced by Foucault's writings on discursive practice but also American social critic, Kenneth Burke, whose writings, while somewhat dated, are prescient on the ways in which terminologies shape our thinking. When in business, he had a prevailing optimism about the impact of global trade on world development. Now Shirey thinks that he was probably part of the problem. His researches have led Shirey to a darker place, with a fuller knowledge now of the impacts of globalization on the peoples and biosphere of this planet. As a parent, and grandfather, these concerns are more than academic.  For Shirey, seeing the confluence of problems we face going into the new age of urbanism, brings home the seriousness of our studies and the importance of a critical view of any programs said to solve these problems in terms of sustainability and social justice. The world we seem to be heading for is one of greater exclusion, growing inequality, and injustice, not the type of world he wants for the families of this planet.

KARTIK AMARNATH is a student in the Design and Urban Ecologies Masters program at Parsons The New School for Design. He is a 2013 graduate of DePauw University where he received a B.A. in Biology and minors in Anthropology and Philosophy. Kartik has contributed to an epidemiological study conducted by the CDC on the living and working conditions of migrant farm workers in South Georgia, as well as participatory research in urban geography and environmental justice in Atlanta under the National Science Foundation's REU program. Kartik's interest in cities started after taking Dr. Kuecker's 2010 Winter Term course "Epistemologies of Catastrophe", covering the many dimensions of the perfect storm humanity will endure in the coming decades, of which unprecedented urbanization is a focal component. He was a member of DePauw's Honor Scholar program, culminating in his honors thesis titled "The Metropolitan Myth: Catastrophic Language, Ecologies of Violence, and the Storm of Progress in a South Asian City". This thesis was based on research conducted in Chennai's slum resettlement housing project known as Kannagi Nagar - one of the world's largest of its kind, and was sponsored by DePauw's Frank W. Howes Grant. Kartik was a part of the New Songdo Research Project along with Daniel and Dr. Kuecker (see Daniel's bio for more details). During the 2013-2014 academic year, Kartik studied gentrification and development in the neighborhood of Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur on a Fulbright Grant. Much of Brickfields, KL's oldest neighborhood, has recently been gutted to make way for an "eco-city within the city" known as the Kuala Lumpur Sentral Business District. Born to a Malaysian descended from indentured Indian plantation workers, Brickfields is also the working class neighborhood where his mother grew up. He is conversational in six languages (thanks to the streets of Brickfields) and plays an Indian percussion instrument known as the tabla, from which he draws more inspiration on thinking about cities than one might assume. You can reach him at amark490@newschool.edu.

Daniel Welsh is a 2013 graduate of DePauw University, where he received a B.A. in anthropology and Spanish with a focus in Latin American and Caribbean studies. In the spring semester of his junior year, Daniel studied indigenous social movements and globalization in Peru with the School for International Training. There he spent a month conducting ethnographic research on rural-urban migration, local effects of global climate change, and social modes of resilience in a highland farming community, which later culminated in his senior thesis in anthropology. In addition to this project, Daniel spent a month on Peru's southern coast carrying out field research, with funding from DePauw's Roland Naylor Award for Anthropological Archaeology, for the Paracas Archaeological Project in a national desert reserve, which consisted of slow excavation of stratified deposits containing pre-Incan nomadic occupations from 1600 B.C. to A.D. 300. In his final year at DePauw, Daniel conducted collaborative research with Dr. Kuecker and Kartik on "smart"/ubiquitous cities, ecological urbanism, and sustainability, employing critical theory for a case study on South Korea's New Songdo City. Upon graduation, he spent nearly a year working as an international human rights observer with the Intag Solidarity Network and the Ecumenical Commission for Human Rights in Intag, Ecuador, a region plagued by ongoing large-scale copper mining conflicts. Now back in the States, Daniel continues to publicize the anti-mining struggle in Intag, as well as develop new strategies of international solidarity and resistance from afar. His current interests are in community organizing, solidarity activism, human rights, Latin American social movements, and anarchism in an urban context (urbanarchism). Oh, and he makes music. He can be contacted at danjwelsh@gmail.com.