Bowman Expeditions Reprised

This past June of 2013, the Lawrence Journal-World announced that University of Kansas geography Professors Jerry Dobson and Peter Herlihy had secured funds for a new round of “Bowman Expeditions”. The $1.8 million grant (with the possibility of growing to $3 million total), delivered straight from the pockets of the US Department of Defense (DOD), will purportedly study land ownership and property regimes among indigenous communities throughout Central America.

Dobson’s previous work has not gone without criticism and the pretext of the new expeditions are equally problematic. In this special focus, two of Dobson’s foremost critics, Joe Bryan and Joel Wainwright, examine the reprise of the Bowman Expeditions and their implications for the field of Geography.

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