High Points: The Historical Geography of Cannabis | Triple G Colloquium

Fri, October 22, 2021 3:00 PM - Fri, October 22, 2021 4:00 PM at Virtual

Join us on Friday, October 22, 2021, at 4:00 PM for another session of the 2021-22 Triple G Colloquium series as we welcome Dr. Barney Warf who will present “High Points: The Historical Geography of Cannabis.”

Cannabis, including hemp and its psychoactive counterpart, has a long but largely overlooked historical geography. Situating the topic within varied perspectives such as world-systems theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, and the moral economy of drugs, Dr. Warf will chart its diffusion over several millennia, noting the contingent and uneven ways in which it was enveloped within varying social and political circumstances. He will explore the plant’s early uses in East and South Asia, its shift to the Middle East, and resultant popularity in the Arab world and Africa. The discussion will also review the expansion of cannabis under colonialism, including deliberate cultivation by Portuguese and British authorities in the New World as part of the construction of a pacified labor force, and will offer an overview of cannabis’s contested history in the United States, in which a series of early 20th-century moral panics led to its demonization; later, the drug enjoyed gradual liberalization.

Dr. Warf is a professor of Geography with the Department of Geography & Atmospheric Science at the University of Kansas. Dr. Warf is a human geographer with wide-ranging interests. He has consciously sought to position himself within the discipline at the intersections of traditional economic geography and contemporary social theory.

Please register in advance at https://tinyurl.com/GGG-Oct21.