“Londonderry experienced incredible growth and change while I was growing up,” Carr said. “The population grew from approximately 5,000 in 1973 to 22,000 in 1991, and the change in the area was astounding.” His interest in the changes was to form his career, prompting him to complete two Ph.D.s and accept a faculty post in the USC Department of Geography.

“As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, I wanted to figure out what had happened to my town,” Carr explained. “I began with interviewing key players in the planning process, and linked those interviews to the cultural landscape of the area, to develop a theory of what had happened to the town. Through my contacts in town government, my work became part of the process by which Londonderry shifted from a town meeting form of government to a city council. I was 22, and it was the first time I was able to impact policy.” And he was hooked.

Carr studied anthropology at Syracuse Universit. A Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities helped fuel his master’s degree research at Syracuse, which led into Ph.D. research in anthropology and archaeology focused on the study of local sociocultural change, and a substantial four-year National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Then elective work in a human geography course changed his career.

“I took a human geography seminar in my fourth semester at Syracuse and realized that this was what I’d been interested in all along,” Carr said. “The subject of human geography runs from questions of location to questions of nature and society. It includes the human dimensions of environmental change, of environmental security. Finally, I’d found a language for what I wanted to do.”

Among other interests, Carr was researching a remote area of Ghana, West Africa. Now one of his ongoing projects, The Dominase Project is aimed at understanding the ways in which residents of various villages in Ghana’s Central Region adapt to economic and environmental change.

“The area I study is in coastal Ghana, an area that is at the rural margins of globalization. They have no electricity, no running water, no written documentation from the past. And with life expectancy at 59 for Ghanaians, there aren’t many people who can tell me what was happening in the area 40 years ago,” Carr said. “I try to understand how the people in this area deal with dramatic changes. I shifted my anthropological work into developing a methodology for gathering information by conducting oral histories, ethnographic interview data, excavation data, and what little documentation is available.”

He continued to immerse himself in his Ghana research at the University of Kentucky while he pursued a second Ph.D., this one in geography.

“For my geography dissertation, I applied my methodology to look at the how particular Ghanaian residents have been looking at and dealing with environmental and economic change for the past 40 years.”

Carr and his wife spent the next two years in Madrid, Spain: Carr was learning Spanish and teaching at St. Louis University’s Madrid campus, his wife was teaching English as a Second Language there.

Now at USC, Carr is teaching World Regional Geography, Introduction to Human Geography, and graduate seminar courses engaging the history and philosophy of geography and the intersections of nature, development and globalization. He hopes to involve graduate students in his Ghana research soon. His concern for the issue of local change, now reaching out to include the human impacts of economic and environmental change, have led to his recent involvement with internationally-recognized global environmental assessments.

He marvels at his USC placement.

“Our department has hired three human geographers within the past year, and several faculty are internationally known, and several are associated with organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences,” he said. “I’m in a very respected department, a very collegial department, and I’m very lucky as a junior faculty member to have that.”

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