Kathryn Besio, Professor of Geography and Environmental Sciences
Professor Besio’s areas of expertise are in human geography with a focus on feminist geographies and qualitative research methods. She also investigates research ethics, home gardens, and local foods.
Posted July 1, 2024.
Kathryn J. Besio is a professor of geography and environmental sciences at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. She is chair of the geography and environmental sciences department and coordinator of the liberal studies program. She is a former facilitator (2015) of the university’s gender and women’s studies program.
Professor Besio’s areas of expertise and research are in human geography with a focus on feminist geographies and qualitative research methods. She also investigates research ethics, home gardens, and local foods.
Besio received her master of arts in geography (1996) and doctor of philosophy in geography (2001) from UH Mānoa. Her dissertation was on “Spatial Stories of Researchers and Travelers in a Balti Village, Pakistan: Jangli Geographies of Gender and Transculturation.” She arrived at UH Hilo in 2005.
Besio specializes and has made significant contributions to her field in the area of qualitative research methodologies, specifically feminist auto-methodologies. She has published multiple peer-reviewed papers and several book chapters covering feminist geography, geographic methods, weight gain and culture, placed-based Hawaiʻi regional cuisine, and other topics.
Much of her research in the early 2000s covered geography and gender/women’s studies topics in Pakistan and transcultural settings. Before that, much of her focus was on Himalayan children and their geographies, women and children in a Karakoram mountain village, travel and appropriation in Nepal, and similar South Asian studies.
Feminist auto-methodologies
In 2019 Besio co-authored, with Pamela Moss of the University of Victoria, a paper titled, “Auto-Methods in Feminist Geography,” (GeoHumanities, 5(2), 313–325). In their investigation, the authors explore scholars’ use — particularly feminists’ use — of autobiographical writing and autoethnography in their research.
“In writing their lives, researchers entangle themselves into their work in many different ways,” the authors say in the summary of the work. “We write about auto-methods, those long-standing feminist research approaches that treat researchers’ own stories and experiences as data.”
The authors point out their contributions to the topic “both unsettle conventional assumptions about auto-methods and show how feminists are pushing the boundaries of what counts as auto-methods in research.”
“We frame our reading of these contributions by problematizing three key concepts: experience, memory, and data. Our goal here is not to provide a blanket rationale for the use of any self-expression; rather, our goal is to show that there still are radical possibilities for generating analytical insights by using one’s own experience as data.”
Mentoring graduate students in qualitative analysis
Besio works closely with students in the tropical conservation biology and environmental science graduate program, advising and mentoring them through multiple local projects that draw on the professor’s expertise in qualitative analysis.
“I’ve been working with TCBES MS students and graduates, as both an advisor and informally as a mentor,” says Besio.
Besio has also done research about local food systems and home gardens, which guides much of her graduate student supervision. She has traveled to New Zealand and elsewhere to give talks on Hawaiʻi regional cuisine, eating habits, agritourism, and “diasporic diners.”
Manuscript underway
Besio is currently (2024) working on a manuscript about the lives of Fanny Bullock Workman — an American geographer, cartographer, explorer, travel writer, and mountaineer — and her daughter, Rachel Workman MacRobert.
The research will become a book-length manuscript.
Prof. Besio gave a talk in April 2024 at the Association of American Geographers conference in Honolulu, titled, “A ‘fairy godmother,’ family, feminism, and philanthropy: Rachel Workman MacRobert and the colonial ties that bind.”
By Susan Enright, a public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of Keaohou and UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.
