Economic Geography

We have an ongoing responsibility to transfer knowledge
of research methods to our students, and assure that their
development will expand the importance of economic
geographic understanding in the community of scholars
I have been fortunate to be associated with a department that has a strong
economic geographic tradition. In this respect, it has been important to me to
pass down to my students the passion to be involved with this field, and to work
with them in a research environment. At Washington we have an active program
of undergraduate research, including hiring undergraduate students to be
involved with faculty research. We have also been very fortunate in having
wonderful graduate students, who have pushed their professors into collaborative
relationships. I’ve mentioned several students in this chapter, and would like to end
by illustrating this argument through one such association, with Peter B. Nelson,
who is now on the faculty of Middlebury College in Vermont.
Peter Nelson came to Washington for graduate studies from the wonderful
undergraduate program in geography at Dartmouth. He and I ended up work-
ing on a field-based project in a set of rapidly growing communities in the rural
West, and after our days of interviewing, we often sat in our motel room in the
evening writing up our day’s experiences on our laptops (with some drinks). We
had a framework for these rural interviews, after we studied our results we found
that there were a number of features of the interviews that we had done that
were not what we expected. We talked about this as he developed his disserta-
tion research proposal, and worked together in putting together a paper that
captured some of these unexpected findings (Beyers and Nelson 2000). The
point here is that I was not dominating this faculty-student relationship – it was
naturally collaborative. And after Pete finished his degree, we have had continued
collaboration. This is crucial for economic geographers, in some measure due to
the variety of modes of research that we engage in.