Rate My Professor Kathryn Besio

Kathryn Besio is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, where she also coordinates the Liberal Studies program and previously facilitated the Gender and Women’s Studies program. She earned a Master of Arts in Geography in 1996 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Geography in 2001 from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her dissertation, titled “Spatial Stories of Researchers and Travelers in a Balti Village, Pakistan: Jangli Geographies of Gender and Transculturation,” examined transcultural dynamics. Besio joined the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo in 2005, advancing to full professor and department chair. Her academic interests center on human geography, with expertise in feminist geographies, qualitative research methods, research ethics, home gardens, and local foods. Early research addressed gender and women’s studies topics in Pakistan, geographies of Himalayan children, women and children in Karakoram mountain villages, and travel appropriation in Nepal.

Besio teaches courses including Geography and Contemporary Society, Cultural Geography, Food and Societies, Gender, Place and Environment, Literature of the Environment: Climate Change Fiction, and Qualitative Research Methods in Geography. She mentors graduate students in the Tropical Conservation Biology and Environmental Science program, guiding qualitative analyses of local food systems and home gardens. Her scholarly contributions include peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on feminist geography, geographic methods, weight and culture, and place-based Hawaiʻi regional cuisine. Notable publications are “Autoethnography” in Geography Compass (2009), “The value of autoethnography for field research in transcultural settings” in The Professional Geographer (2004), and co-authored “Auto-Methods in Feminist Geography” in GeoHumanities (2019) with Pamela Moss, which explores autobiographical writing and autoethnography in feminist research. Besio has presented at the 2024 Association of American Geographers conference on Rachel Workman MacRobert and delivered talks in New Zealand on Hawaiʻi regional cuisine, eating habits, agritourism, and diasporic diners. She is currently developing a book-length manuscript on explorer Fanny Bullock Workman and her daughter Rachel Workman MacRobert.