Gerard Toal's career award lecture published in current issue
of Political Geography

Last year Gerard Toal, professor and director of Virginia Tech’s Government and International Affairs (GIA) program in the National Capital Region, was honored with a career award in the field of geography by the Political Geography Specialty Group and Elsevier, publisher of the journal, Political Geography. This recognition included an invitation to lecture at the Association of American Geographers annual meeting. A modified and expanded version of Toal's lecture has been published in the current issue of Political Geography.

“Placing blame: Making sense of Beslan” focuses on the horrific terrorist attack at School Number 1 in Beslan in September 2004, which took the lives of 334 people (180 of whom were schoolchildren), the reason for the attack, and those who were responsible.

“Beslan is not an event with a singular meaning or geography. It was neither an act of ‘international terrorism’ nor an act that was purely local or regional,” Toal said. “It is a deeply emotive event, one whose contested meaning reveals much about the complexity of the North Caucasus and about power and identity in contemporary Russia.”

Toal’s research on Beslan was supported by a grant from the Human and Social Dynamics Initiative of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and was conducted with colleagues Dr. John O’Loughlin, Institute of Behavioral Science and Department of Geography, University of Colorado, Boulder, and Dr. Vladimir Kolossov, Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. The three have collaborated on research projects on Russian geopolitical culture since 2001.

To read “Placing blame: Making sense of Beslan,” go here.

Posted April 30, 2009