
Kristin Sziarto
- Director, L&S Curriculum and Governance
- Associate Professor, Geography
- Affiliated Professor, Urban Studies
Education
- PhD, Geography, University of Minnesota, 2007
- MA, Geography, University of Georgia, 2001
- BA, Theater, Williams College, 1988
Office Hours
In Spring 2025 my drop-in office hours are Wednesdays, 2:30 - 3:30 pm, in 468 Bolton Hall.
Courses Taught
- Geog 110 - The World: Peoples and Regions
- Geog 309 - Nationalities and Nations of the World
- Geog 381 - The Power, Peril, and Promise of Maps (Honors seminar)
- Geog 405/705: Cartography
- Geog 905 - Seminar in Biopolitics
- Geog 905 - Theorizing spaces of hegemony and resistance
Research Interests
Kristin Sziarto is interested in the relationships among social movements, collective identities, the state, and the spaces of the city. She pays particular attention to how social movements develop as alliances – that is, how people with very different interests, identities, dispositions, personal trajectories of learning, and institutional allegiances negotiate their differences to work together to build social movements, and how those movements may also fragment. Within geography she studies these issues in terms of the spatialities of social movements and resistance, through several projects:
- Research on biopolitics and race in Milwaukee investigates discourses circulating among the City’s infant mortality reduction program, nonprofits’ campaigns against teen pregnancy, and legislation on paid sick leave, and how local organizing around health policy has to challenge hegemonic ideas of health, illness, and caregiving.
- Past work on religion-labor alliances, and current project on community organizing, examines the spatialities of these forms of activism.
- In the Muslim Milwaukee Project, with Anna Mansson McGinty (Geography and Women’s and Gender Studies) and Caroline Seymour-Jorn (French, Italian, and Comparative Literature), she does on collaborative research with local Muslim groups.
- She also studies teaching and learning at the university level, to understand how students’ critical thinking about place and belonging develop in relation to regional and national identities, study abroad experiences, and classroom activities with different kinds of maps.