John Rose

BA (Hons) (UBC), MA (UBC), PhD (UBC)
JR
Richmond Office: R2215
Richmond Campus: 604-599-2658

I have been an instructor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at KPU since 2002.  I am at KPU because I love teaching, and that is what I feel this institution is about: student-focused undergraduate education.  I study and teach Geography because I have diverse interests—in politics, history, economics, architecture, sociology, and the natural environment—and Geography affords me a disciplinary home in which to explore these interests, and the connections among them, with particular attention to spatial processes and outcomes.

I have always been fascinated by the landscapes around me, and I became interested in the field of human geography during the course of my undergraduate education at the University of British Columbia.  I was especially engaged by urban geography, and of critical social theory as applied to geographic inquiry, under the tutelage of Dr. David Ley and Dr. Derek Gregory.  There, at UBC, I completed my BA, MA, and PhD degrees.  My graduate research at UBC focused, in succession, on two topics: i) immigrant reception by established residents, in the context of the ‘monster house’ debate in metro Vancouver and theories about the place of racism in resident responses, and ii) the political participation of recent immigrants in Richmond and Surrey, BC, in the context of theories around ethnicity, political participation, and transnational citizenship.  These interests in the residential landscape, immigration, and politics—and the mixed quantitative and qualitative methodologies I used to explore them—continue to inform my teaching and research here at KPU.

Recent Research:

 

 

Courses taught

  • GEOG 1101 Human Geography
  • GEOG 2250 The City
  • GEOG 3130 Society and Urban Space
  • GEOG 3220 Urban Politics and Planning

Areas of Interest

I teach a regular slate of introductory human geography courses each year, and I treasure these opportunities to introduce students to an often unfamiliar field of study, and to get them as passionate about geographic inquiry as I am.  I also teach a second year course on urban geography, focused on the historical development of urbanization, with emphasis on North American cities, and third year courses in social and political geography/urban planning.  In past years, I have also taught our qualitative methods course, and courses on the regional geography of British Columbia and Canada.   

My service duties to the department and university have included, among other activities, the development and revision of several course outlines in human, political, social, and urban geography, and revisions to the Bachelor of Arts Minor degree in Geography in 2012.  I was also the program developer at the lead of our department’s collaborative efforts on the Bachelor of Arts Major in Applied Geography, introduced in 2015.  During the 2000s I served for several years as the department’s representative on the Social Sciences Curriculum Committee.  I was Chair of our department from 2009-2015, and Chair of the Social Sciences Faculty Council from 2008-2011.  I continue in various, though less formal ways, to contribute to our department’s development.

I was awarded an Education Leave by KPU from September 2016 to September 2017, for the purposes of pursuing a research project on housing supply and affordability that examined major metropolitan centers in Canada, the United States, and Australia.  Upon returning to full-time teaching in September 2017, I have been engaged in the popular and academic dissemination of the results of my research.

Scholarly Work