Prof. Dr. Gordon Winder

Gordon Winder is professor of economic geography and sustainability research, and deputy director of the Department of Geography at LMU Munich. Born in New Zealand, he gained his PhD at the University of Toronto, and worked at the University of Auckland before moving to LMU Munich in 2008. He is an honorary research fellow at the University of Auckland’s School of Environment and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Geography.

While Winder’s research interests span historical experiences of industrialization, urbanization, environmental transformation, and globalization, he is developing his economic geography research around the themes of resources and sustainability, with a special focus on bio-economies in forest, agriculture, and fisheries industries, and innovation for sustainability. The formation of new markets is often touted as a solution to chronic environmental problems and in this context it is timely to research the relationships between resources, governance, innovation, markets, and environments, with sustainability as a driving concern. His research is being advanced through the following activities.

Within the Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Culture, Science and Art Research Group Fit for Change he is responsible, along with doctoral student Amra Bobar, for a project investigating innovation for sustainability in Bavaria's wood use system. Entitled Wood Future or Forest Track it aims to assess the opportunities, barriers, and compromises in changing the use of wood as a contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and to assess the effectiveness of Bavaria's efforts to innovate for cascade use and the substitution of wood for other materials.

His forthcoming volume Trading Environments (Routledge 2016), co-edited with Prof. Dr. Andreas Dix (Bamberg), calls for and showcases interdisciplinary engagement in environmental and business history, and historical and economic geography on issues of environmental transformation. This work builds upon his earlier research on webs of enterprise in historical contexts but stresses engagements with “second nature.”

Winder’s interest in fisheries industries and management has been developed through a recent conference In the Wake of ITQs (Geography and Sustainability Series, Geography, LMU Munich, July 2013) which was supported by the RCC. It focused on how to assess QMS and ITQ regimes in fisheries, and will culminate in a book In the Wake of Rationalization that has been accepted for publication by Springer's MARE Series. A special session Geography and the Blue Economy, organized with Prof. Dr. Richard Le Heron (Auckland), at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Geographers in June 2015 furthers this interest by directing attention to the European Commission’s policies for developing the EU’s recently declared Blue Economy.

Environmental learning and recovery from disasters are further themes in his research. Winder is currently exploring these issues, working with doctoral students in Geography and at the RCC. His research on geographies of the news and news agencies is well known, and a central focus of this research is the ways that narratives of distant disaster have changed in North American newspapers over the course of the twentieth century. But in the twenty-first century, how communities are recovering from disasters and what they are learning about their dynamic and risky environments are vital issues.

Selected Publications:

• Trading Environments: Frontiers, Commercial Knowledge and Environmental Transformation, 1750-1990. New York: Routledge, in the Environment and Society Series (editors Heike Egner and Bernhard Glaeser), in press (2016). (ed. with Andreas Dix). (http://www.tandf.net/books/details/9781138933446/)
• The American Reaper: Harvesting Networks and Technology, 1830-1910. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing (2012).
• "Northland: Sustainable Development, Regional Geography and Learning in the Field, " New Zealand Geographer 66(2) (2010): 97-104 (with Nick Lewis).
• "Fish and Boats: Fisheries Management Issues in Northland." New Zealand Geographer 66, no. 2 (2010): 152-68 (with E. Rees).
• "Grassland Revolutions: Disaggregating a National Story." New Zealand Geographer 65 (2009): 187-200.
• "Telecommunications Technology and News of Disaster: Earthquake Reporting in The Los Angeles Times, 1917-1939." In Global Communication Electric: Business, News and Politics in the World of Telegraphy, ed. Michaela Hampf and Simone Müller-Pohl. Frankfurt and New York: Campus (2013): 275-301.
• "Mediating Foreign Disasters: The Los Angeles Times and International Relief, 1891-1914." In Historical Disasters in Context: Science, Religion, and Politics, ed. Andrea Janku, Gerit Schenk, and Franz Mauelshagen. New York: Routledge, 2012.
• "The Los Angeles Times Reports Japanese Earthquakes, 1923-1995." In American Environments: Climate–Cultures–Catastrophe, ed. Christof Mauch and Sylvia Mayer, 133-158. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011.
• "Geographical Imaginaries in The New York Times’ Reports of the Assassinations of Mr. Gandhi 1948 and Mrs. Gandhi 1984." Journal of Historical Geography 45, July (2014): 106-115 (with Michael Schmitt).
• "London's Global Reach? Reuters News and Network 1865, 1881, and 1914." Journal of World History 21, no. 2 (2010): 271-96.
• "Imagining Geography and Citizenship in the Networked Newspaper: La Nación Reports the Assassination at Sarajevo, 1914." Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 35, no. 1 (2010): 140-66.

Full publications list available here.

Last updated: November 2011