Dr. Jamie Peck has been named a University Killam Professor for his exceptional leadership in both teaching and research as a highly celebrated political-economic geographer. After 17 years at the University of British Columbia, supervising countless graduate students, publishing seminal works, and participating in a wide array of mentorship activities, Dr. Peck’s legacy as a passionate educator and dedicated scholar is widely known.
Dr. Peck’s international reputation as a thought leader in the field of economic geography has garnered him numerous accolades including being named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of the British Academy and the recipient of the 2023 Vautrin Lud Prize, widely considered the “Nobel of Geography”.
Dr. Peck’s body of work is extensive and ever evolving, encompassing a broad range of topics including neoliberalization in its various forms and its reinventions, capitalist transformations in China, and more recently the role of ideas in the field of economic geography and how they can be mapped and understood.
“The essence of an economic geographer’s approach is to pluralize the idea of ‘economies’. This translates into a charge to identify, document, and explore the diversity of economic life—extending to all its alternatives, permutations and possibilities. That means your object of analysis is never still. It is always moving, always transforming,” reflects Dr. Peck.
Earning his PhD from the University of Manchester in 1988, Dr. Peck’s determination to take on neoliberalization began at an early age. As a primary school student in the early 1970s, Peck recalls how Margaret Thatcher, then Secretary of State for Education axed the free school milk program as an austerity measure. He likes to think that that taunt, “Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher” began on the school playgrounds, setting him on what would become a lifelong course as a critic of Thatcherism and neoliberalism. More than a critique though, this speaks to the inescapably political nature of economics.
“Economic geographers are against the idea that the economy works like a machine. Economies are social and political spaces, so they are always shaped by people and shaped in places. And there are always alternative ways of doing things, different ways of organizing economic life, and those can be found in real time, in other places around the world”
“Economic geographers are against the idea that the economy works like a machine. Economies are social and political spaces, so they are always shaped by people and shaped in places. And there are always alternative ways of doing things, different ways of organizing economic life, and those can be found in real time, in other places around the world,” explains Dr. Peck
The open-mindedness and intellectual pluralism of the discipline is one of the things that both attracts new scholars to the field and keep seasoned academics like Dr. Peck continually engaged.
“The questions economic geographers look at are too big for any one person to cover all on their own. So it’s wonderful to be able to work alongside graduate students who are tackling diverse questions and developing new approaches to them. There is a real sense that our graduate students have got distinctive things to say in literature,” says Peck.
Peck’s current work has him collaborating with fellow UBC Geography faculty Trevor Barnes, Peter Hudson and Jessica Wong on a project which explores the economic geography of ideas. What role do ideas play in shaping economic life, understandings of crisis, and visions of the future? How can we understand the movement of ideas over time and between places? These questions will be explored in a conference convened at UBC in June.
Of this honour bestowed by UBC, Dr. Peck says, “It’s a wonderful recognition because it comes from my peers, students and colleagues. And it’s also associated with the Killam program, to which I have had connections ever since I arrived at UBC and which supports research innovation right across the University. It feels like things have come full circle”.
We offer our heartful congratulations to Dr. Peck on this much deserved recognition for his outstanding educational and academic achievements.
- Read the VPRI announcement here
- Learn more about Dr. Jamie Peck’s research and teaching here