Visiting Lecturer
Urban political economy, critical infrastructures, informal markets and labor geographies, mixed methods, qualitative methods, development and governance, waste policies


Curriculum Vitae

Jay Bowman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota.  Jay is visiting Macalester to teach courses on the Middle East, Gender and Development, and Human Geography of Global Affairs.

Jay is currently working on his dissertation titled, The Politics of Waste: Decentralization, Labor and Homegrown Neoliberalism, which examines the restructuring of the waste system in Amman, Jordan.  Through conditional loans from international lending institutions, the Greater Amman Municipality is currently creating a privately-structured company to overtake the municipal waste infrastructure.  However, as the company’s shares will be entirely owned by the city itself, this form of pseudo-privatization does not fit perfectly into the model of urban neoliberalism preferred by global lenders.  The fate of labor within this system – both government employees and informal waste workers – remains unclear.  Full-bore privatization has meant dispossession and loss of livelihoods in many places throughout the world; but the retention of governmental ownership may give workers novel avenues for self-preservation.

Courses

    • GEOG 111: Human Geography of Global Issues
    • GEOG 294: Life and Geography of the Middle East: From Colonialism to the Arab Spring
    • GEOG 394: Gender, Development and Public Policy

Links for Geography course syllabi can be found on our Course Syllabi page.