My work is situated in the field of historical geography and focuses on conflicts over land, and how landscapes are representations of power. Through comparative case studies, my work reveals how dominant groups in different historical and geographical environments remake landscapes as a pathway to economic, political and social domination. At the core of my research is a commitment to theoretically-driven, actor-centered accounts of power and territorial transformation. My work seeks to build a theory of power and the process of development by fusing geography, history, and political economy while maintaining a commitment to a scholarship of activism and critical engagement with the world.
You can download a PDF of my Curriculum Vitae here: Curriculum Vitae of Dr. Gary Fields (PDF)
Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror" (University of California Press, 2017) compares the fragmented and partitioned landscape in Palestine to the landscapes of dispossession during the early modern enclosures in England and the Anglo-American colonial frontier. I argue that the seizure of Palestinian landed property by the state of Israel reflects an enduring territorial practice of enclosing land in which groups with territorial ambitions use power to gain control of land owned and used by other groups already anchored to the landscape. Inspired by a longstanding discourse about property rights and entitlement to “empty” land, such groups seeking territory re-imagine the landscapes they covet as empty, and justify their takeover of these landscapes by referring to themselves as improvers of empty land.
Read a review of Enclosure in the New York Review of Books.
Read a review of Enclosure in the American Association of Geography Review of Books
Territories of Profit (Stanford University Press, 2004) reveals how the capitalist business firm uses force to reshape the economic and physical landscape in order to exploit the innovative potential of communications revolutions and make profit differently. Capitalist development, I argue in comparing Swift Meatpacking in the 19th century and Dell Computer more recently, is a territorial project, the outcome of corporate power to rearrange elements on the landscape, and reorganize the behavior of other actors in the economic environment in an effort to create new routes to profit-making.
Read Reviews in:
Selected Articles/Book Chapters
- "Lockdown: Gaza Through a Camera Lens and Historical Mirror," Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol 49, no. 3 (Spring, 2020), pp. 41-69.
- "Imaginative Cartographies: Mappings of Dispossession in Historical Perspective." Conspiracy and Consent in International Perspective: Historical and Cultural Representations. Michael A. Bellesiles, Larry Portis, and Joseph Zitomersky, eds. Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee (2017), pp. 279-301. Download PDF Part 1. Download PDF Part 2.
- "“Excavating Palestine: Documenting Occupation Landscapes in the Village of Jayyous.” The Arab World Geographer.. Vol. 19, no. 3-4 (2016).'This is our Land': Collective Violence, Property Law, and Imagining the Geography of Palestine." Journal of Cultural Geography. Vol. 29, no. 3 (2012).
- "Enclosure Landscapes: Historical Reflections on the Palestinian Geography."Historical Geography, Vol. 39, no. 1 (2011).
- Review of Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine by Irus Braverman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2009) in International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 43, no. 3 (2011), pp. 548-551.
- "Landscaping Palestine: Reflections of Enclosure in an Historical Mirror."International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 42, no. 1 (2010): 62-83.
- "Enclosure: Palestinian Landscape in a Not-too-Distant Mirror.” Journal of Historical Sociology. Vol. 23, no 2 (2010). pp. 216-250.
- "Ex-Communicated: Historical Reflections of Enclosure Landscapes in Palestine.” Radical History Review , no. 108 (Fall, 2010), pp. 139-153.
- Imagining Geography: Property Rights, Land Improvement and State Terror in Palestine. Terror and Its Representations. Larry Portis, ed. Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee, (2008) pp. 233-252.
- Landscapes of Power: British Enclosure and the Palestinian Geography,” The Arab World Geographer, Vol. 10, no. 3-4 (2007): 189-211.
- "Innovation, Time and Territory: Space and the Business Organization of Dell Computer." Economic Geography, Vol, 86, no. 2 (2006) 119-146.
- “Communications, Innovation, and Territory: The Production Network of G.F. Swift and the Creation of a National Marketplace.” Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 29, no. 4 (Fall, 2003), pp. 599-617.
- “Social Capital and Capital Gains in Silicon Valley” [With Stephen S. Cohen] California Management Review, Vol. 41, no. 2 (1999), pp. 108-129.
- “City Systems, Urban History and Economic Modernity: Urbanization and the Transition from Agrarian to Industrial Society,” Berkeley Planning Journal, Vol. 13 (1999), pp. 102-128.
- “The Ascendancy and Calamity of the Centrally-Planned Economy,” International Review of Sociology, Vol. 7, (1997), pp. 243-66.
- “The Road From Gdansk: How Poland’s Solidarity Found Haven in the Marketplace,” Monthly Review, Vol. 43, no. 3 (1991), pp. 95-121.