About

I am an associate professor of geography and film studies at Western Oregon University.  A Weird Fish is about pop culture – film, television, comics – academia, geography, and politics, and whatever else I find interesting at a given moment.

The title of the blog comes from a passage in Jon Anderson’s Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces (Routledge, 2010):

Context is therefore vital to take notice of and understand, yet in everyday life it is something we often ignore – we are so used to it that it becomes ordinary, obvious, and even natural. Cresswell (2000: 263) describes this through using the South East Asian phrase ‘the fish don’t talk about the water’; in normal life we are often like fish in that we don’t talk about our geographical context. Geographers, however, are weird fish, we seek to sensitise ourselves to the ‘water’ (emphasis mine; Cresswell 2000 is “Falling down: resistance as diagnostic”, in Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination and Resistance, Sharp et al eds., Routledge).

In addition to blogging here, I am also on Twitter and have a blog on tumblr dedicated to small city graffiti & street art. I write about comics, film, and television for PopMatters. In 2012, I finished a documentary about the community of comics creators in Portland, Oregon, USA.

People and dogs commonly mentioned include: Anne-Marie, my wife and a librarian at Oregon State University, our fifteen year-old daughter, simply “A” here, and our Brittanies, Dinah and Coco.

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