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The Geography Department at the University of Colorado Boulder cultivates an intellectual community that lasts well beyond graduation. For , now an assistant professor at the University of Utah, CU geography continues to shape her work through ongoing collaborations with alumni who share commitments to critical thinking and engaged scholarship. Across her research and teaching, these relationships exemplify how CU trains geographers as thinkers attuned to power, possibility, and a spirit of epistemic generosity (Chadwick 2024).��

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In Autumn 2025, Jessica delivered the keynote lecture for the National Council for Geographic Education and the American Association of Geographers, Great Plains/Rocky Mountain region division. In it, she reflected on the reciprocal relationship between research and teaching, and advocated for cultivating curiosity, critical thinking, and care as central pedagogical commitments. In the audience was fellow CU alum , who is editing The Oxford Handbook of Geography for Educators. Their encounter sparked a shared commitment to student-centered pedagogy. Jessica is now adapting her keynote into the opening chapter of the human geography section of Dr. Theobald’s book. The chapter situates human geography as a tool for understanding global transformations and challenges through lived experience, kinesthetic methods, and a pedagogical practice of curiosity, attention, and ethical engagement. Aspects of this work build on Jessica’s CU-based doctoral research in “The World from a Bicycle: Cycling as Kinesthetic Methodology” (Progress in Human Geography), which theorizeskinesthetic methodologies.

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CU geography is especially evident in Jessica’s global China research. With longtime collaborator and CU alum Meredith DeBoom (PhD Geography, 2018), she wrote an anchor article and Dialogues in Human Geography. “” traces how “Global China” has been constructed, mobilized, and debated across various scholarly and political contexts. The journal’s anchor-response format also generated intellectual exchange within the CU community itself, including a formal response (read: a spirited provocation!) from faculty member and mentor Tim Oakes (this and other responses can be found ). Meredith and Jessica continue to scheme on questions of resource politics, “green” transitions, and Global China.

Jessica also put her head together with recent CU graduate and railway aficionado David Fernando Bachrach (PhD Geography, 2026) to compare their research on railway corridors in Laos and Indonesia. In an article, they theorize the process of “corridorization” and how large-scale railway projects transform space into governable and investable corridors, producing new forms of enclosure and uneven development. Their work reflects a shared intellectual lineage grounded in CU’s training in political ecology and political geography, as well as their longstanding conversations that began during David’s very first year of his PhD.

Finally, as her research has expanded to focus on critical minerals and energy transitions, so have collaborations in these areas. In a commentary in Nature Energy��co-authored with CU alums and , they advance the concept of just-shoring, arguing that emerging strategies such as onshoring, friendshoring, and reshoring, while aimed at securing supply chains, risk reproducing environmental harms and social inequalities associated with fossil fuel extraction. Instead, the authors call for frameworks that center community rights, accountability, and co-governance across the entire mineral life cycle (a longer article on the just-shoring frameworks is under review). By reframing supply chain security through questions of justice rather than geography, they ask who benefits, who bears the risks, and how much extraction is necessary.��

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From CU to the present, an ethos of connection and collaboration has threaded together Jessica’s research and teaching. She endeavors to grow similar spirits of rigor, intellectual openness, and curiosity among her graduate and undergraduate students within her at the University of Utah. Together, they engage questions that span agricultural labor, Global China, mining in Utah, and green infrastructure in Asia with an eye toward uneven power relations and how they are lived. Jessica’s commitments to students and research are reflected in her 2026 receipt of the Margaret FitzSimmons Early Career Award from the Cultural and Political Ecology group of the American Association of Geographers. Drawing inspiration from FitzSimmons’ legacy as a devoted mentor and inspiring educator, Jessica approaches teaching as central to scholarly life and hopes to bring these ideas and much of what her students teach her to life in Dr. Theobald’s book.

For more or to connect, visit .

References

Bennett, Mia, Jessica DiCarlo, and Sarah Elwood. 2025. . Progress in Human Geography.��

Chadwick, Rachelle. 2024. The question of feminist critique. Feminist Theory, 25(3), 376-395.

DiCarlo, Jessica, Raphael Deberdt, Nicole Smith, Scott Odell, Aaron Malone, Lydia Jennings. . Nature Energy.��

DiCarlo, Jessica and Meredith DeBoom. 2025.��. Dialogues in Human Geography.��

DiCarlo, Jessica and David Fernando Bachrach. 2025. . Antipode.

Oakes, Tim. (2025). . Dialogues in Human Geography.