Rate My Professor Kathryn Besio

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.