Welcome Julie Urbanik

The board and fellows of PAN Works are delighted to welcome Julie Urbanik, PhD as a fellow focused on the normative elements of animal geography.

Julie is a qualitatively trained geographer interested in how place shapes the ethical relations between humans and animals in all their combinations. To this end, she works as a scholar in the field of animal geographies and consults as an expert witness social geographer in criminal defense mitigation. In all her work, she strives to be a facilitator of curiosity and respect in order to promote reflexive understanding.

She holds a doctorate in geography from Clark University and a master’s degree in gender studies from the University of Arizona. She spent a decade as an award-winning author and educator in higher education geography and environmental studies programs. She has been consulting for criminal defense mitigation since 2016, and has worked on federal, state, capital (death penalty), and non-capital cases. In this capacity, she has pioneered the development of mitigation geonarratives that help link a client’s life experiences with larger social forces.

As a scholar in her specialty area of animal geographies, she has been instrumental in formalizing the disciplinary subfield by co-founding the Animal Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers, publishing the award-winning Placing Animals: An Introduction to the Geography of Human-Animal Relations (Rowman & Littlefield 2012), co-editing the first one-volume encyclopedia for the field of human-animal studies, Humans and Animals: A Geography of Coexistence (ABC-CLIO 2017), and co-editing a special issue of Society & Animals on wildlife conservation (2018). She succeeded Bill Lynn as the Managing Editor for the Political Animals section of Society & Animals.

As a think tank dedicated to the wellbeing of animals, the idea for PAN Works has deep roots in animal geography, and the board has made a long-term commitment to supporting the field. As a consequence, Julie is team lead for a new “Placing Animals” project. She will also participate in some of our other projects, such as Multispecies Justice.

Personally, I am delighted that we are standing up an explicitly geographic project in PAN Works, and we are fortunate to be working with Julie.

For more about our work, please visit us at PAN Works.

Bill Lynn is the founder and president of PAN Works and a fellow at the Marsh Institute of Clark University.