Today we welcome Mehmet Eroğlu, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences at Michigan State University. Mehmet is a human geographer with a research focus on power struggles in the production of landscapes, particularly in relation to workers and working-class communities. His work seeks to understand how, to what extent, and under what structural constraints and opportunities workers exercise their agency in shaping their own geographies. While his broader research interests center on the intersections of labor, place, and power rather than specific regional contexts, his current research examines the struggles of informal coal miners in Turkey.

Mehmet discussed the work of David Harvey, a British-American academic best known for Marxist analyses that focus on urban geography as well as the economy more broadly. Harvey is a Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and the Director of Research at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and the author of numerous books. He has been teaching Karl Marx’s Capital for over 50 years. Harvey was born on October 31, 1935, and on this episode we celebrate his 90th birthday. 

If you would like to learn more about David Harvey’s research, Mehmet suggests reading Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography.

Our sponsor for this episode is the MSU onGEO Professional GIS Certificate Program. If you are looking to revamp your current career, earn continuing-education credits, or simply learn new and marketable geospatial skills, visit ongeo.msu.edu today to learn how to earn a professional certificate in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) or Geospatial Data Analytics & Visualization.