About

Lorraine Dowler is an Associate Professor of Geography and Women's Studies at Penn State. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from Syracuse University, an MLA in Landscape Architecture from SUNY - Environmental Science and Forestry, and a B.S. in Marketing and Business Administration from Manhattan College. Her research is situated at the intersection of several theoretical frameworks that challenge common understandings of militarization. She is examining the role of militarization through two distinct projects. The first is a book project titled Women Under Fire, which evaluates the discounting of women’s bodies as substandard to those of men, thereby disallowing women the benefits of absolute citizenship. In this work, Dowler demonstrates how the discounting of women’s contributions to the U.S. space program, military, and municipal fire-fighting has excluded women from nationalist portrayals of heroism and democratic rewards, linking these issues to global forces such as the Cold War and the War on Terror. Her second project originated during her research stay in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1991, focusing on gender and nationalism. This research investigates whether meaningful peace can be maintained if communities preserve conflict in their symbolic landscape and explores how the changing identity of tourists might serve as a positive force for social change.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• History
• Sociology
• Database
• Law
• Gender studies
• Media studies
• Genealogy
• Criminology
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• World Wide Web

Selected publications

• Methodology

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2026-01-13

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Anticolonial Irish History: A round-table

  Journal of Historical Geography · 2024 · 2 citations

  • Computer Science
  • History
  • Genealogy

  McVeigh and Rolston's Ireland, Colonialism and the Unfinished Revolution puts colonialism at the heart of Ireland's social and economic history, but also as essential to understanding modern Irish politics. The subjugation of Catholics in Northern Ireland was a consequence of the failure to end British control over the island and a perpetuation of ethnic rule characteristic of other white dominions. The incomplete reckoning with colonialism has shaped the Irish engagement with global capitalism including its abandonment of its anticolonial allies with its embrace of the European Union. These historical and political issues are debated in this roundtable in which one of the co-authors of the book responds to interventions probing the work's treatment of capitalism, empire, gender, and anticolonial solidarities.

  PublisherDOI

• Feminist Geopolitical Futures

  2024-01-01 · 5 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Diverse teams can improve engineering outcomes − but recent affirmative action decision may hinder efforts to create diverse teams

  2023-08-15

  preprint1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Placing peace

  Routledge eBooks · 2023 · 1 citations

  • Political Science
  • Political Science

  This chapter outlines how we think about “pedagogies of peace” as spatial-pedagogical practices that challenge dominant notions of scale, distance, and difference. We identify ways spatial-pedagogical practices contribute toward “positive peace,” or the development of institutions and actions that address the structural causes of violence. We ground our discussion of pedagogies of peace in vignettes drawn from our teaching and research. In turn, we reflect on how the communities we work with, and issues we work on, challenge hegemonic models of pedagogy and the perceived distance they instantiate between learner and topic. We pursue pedagogies of peace that can create the conditions for our students to recognize how their everyday lives are interwoven with others across space, scale, and difference. Further, we describe how notions of positive peace in the classroom are responsive to the pressing and intertwined issues of militarization and environmental crisis and their uneven impacts across contexts.

  PublisherDOI

• Review forum

  Political Geography · 2023-11-03

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• Comfort feminism and the cruelty of a ‘post-racial’ monarchy in Britain

  Gender Place & Culture · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies

  This paper explores the entanglements of love and cruelty in the publicity of the 2018 wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex. We suggest that the wedding failed to inch closer toward a ‘post-racialized’ society. Rather, the wedding and public (but superficial) embracing of Markle promoted a ‘comfort feminism’ which obscured the mundane white supremacy and sexism of modern Britain. The paper concludes with a brief afterward which discusses the legacy of the royal wedding in the context of the social, political, and cultural challenges wrought by the intersections of the global pandemic and structural racism.

  PublisherDOI

• Praxis in the City

  2020-06-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Public Privates: Feminist Geographies of Mediated Spaces

  The AAG Review of Books · 2019-04-03 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Marcia R. England. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. xxi and 189 pp., bibliography, index. $50.00 cloth (ISBN 978-1-4962-0580-3), $30.00 paper (ISBN 978-1-4962-0672-5), $30.00 electr...

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Landscapes of impunity and the deaths of Americans LaVena Johnson and Sandra Bland

  Gender Place & Culture · 2019-04-16 · 11 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  On July 19th, 2005, American Army Private First Class LaVena Johnson died in Balad, Iraq, just 8 days shy of her 20th birthday. On July 13th, 2015, almost 10 years later, 28-year-old Sandra Bland’s life came to an abrupt end in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas. Both women’s deaths were ruled suicides, and both women’s families and friends reject these judgments. Instead, they insinuate foul play by the state, which directly governed the militarized spaces within which the women both died. At first glance, these women appear to have had very different life trajectories, one a United States soldier and the other a Black Lives Matter activist. However, in both of their cases, the ruling of the suspicious deaths as suicides illustrates the state’s attempt to render their deaths banal, and thereby diminish the state’s own culpability. In understanding the unremitting acts of violence, on women’s bodies, especially women of color, this paper focuses on how a Black feminist praxis extends feminist notions of an ethics of care.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jenna Christian

  Bucknell University

  8 shared

• Joanne Sharp

  5 shared

• Dana Cuomo

  Lafayette College

  5 shared

• Josephine Carubia

  4 shared

• Duarte B. Morais

  4 shared

• Bonj Szczygiel

  3 shared

• Careen Yarnal

  Pennsylvania State University

  3 shared

• A. Marie Ranjbar

  University of Colorado System

  3 shared