Judith Carney

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Dr. Judith Carney has served as a member of the geography department since the fall of 1989, advancing to tenure in 1993 as the first female associate professor in the department since 1956. She is a cultural geographer with research interests in human-environmental relations in third world countries, with focus on West Africa, Mexico, Central America and Brazil. Her work concentrates on environmental and agricultural issues, specifically those relating to socioeconomic self-sufficiency, hunger and famine, the rural poor and environmental sustainability.

On the undergraduate level, Carney teaches both lower and upper division courses as well as a seminar. On the graduate level, Carney has designed and led a wide variety of seminars; her courses are often cross-listed with interdepartmental programs such as development studies, women’s studies, American Indian studies, African studies and Latin American studies on both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

According to her teaching assistants, Carney’s teaching only seems to get better with time: “I’ve had the pleasure of having served as her teaching assistant on three separate occasions. What amazed me was not her unsurpassed effectiveness as a teacher… but that she would set a higher standard of teaching excellence each time.”

In her classroom, Carney emphasizes the value of diversity, her interest not in dividing students, but in building a unity based on mutual respect. She received a University grant in 1995 for multicultural studies, a reflection of her strong commitment to teaching about ethnicity and gender in her courses.

Carney combines a passion for issues of ecological and cultural diversity with an approach to teaching that seeks to facilitate students’ to move beyond overly simplified analyses of these issues to effectively address underlying problems. She combines a clearly defined theoretical framework with a wealth of empirical information that is often drawn from her own fieldwork to create a well-organized, inspirational and highly instructive lecture. She helps instill a sense of critical skepticism in her students while, at the same time, effectively combating cynicism.

It is Carney’s ability to inculcate a sense of hope combined with her effectiveness in humanizing the course material that helps abridge the sense of distance that students often feel in studying the world around them. Carney helps to make UCLA a special and rewarding experience for her students and, as such, reflects well on the University as a whole.