Geographer | Social Scientist | Writer

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Julie Urbanik is the owner of Geonarrative Services, LLC.  She is a qualitatively trained social scientist and geographer interested in how place shapes the ethical relations between humans and between humans and nonhuman animals.  In all her work, she strives to be a facilitator of curiosity and respect in order to promote reflexive understanding.

        

​She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from Clark University and a Master's degree in Gender Studies from the University of Arizona.  She is an award-winning educator and has held appointments in a variety of university environmental studies and geography programs. 

 

She has worked with criminal defense teams as an expert social geographer on the mitigation side since 2016; and has worked on federal, state, capital, non-capital, military, and Miller cases.  In this capacity, she has pioneered the development of mitigation geonarratives that help link a client’s life experiences with larger social forces and her exhibits include body maps, body map videos, memory walk videos, life context overviews, and overview/summaries of specific case-based topics. 

 

As a scholar in her specialty area of animal geographies, she has published the award-winning Placing Animals: An Introduction to the Geography of Human-Animal Relations, co-edited the first one-volume encyclopedia for the field of Human-Animal Studies, Humans and Animals: A Geography of Coexistence, and co-edited a special issue of Society & Animals on wildlife conservation.  

 

Her interests are wide-ranging and her collaborative projects have focused on creative geography and film-making.  She enjoys cultivating her sense of wonder by collecting the moments of life in photographs, reading voraciously, exploring in natural and urban environments, treasure hunting in antique stores, and caring for the wildlife in her yard.  She lives in the Kansas City area with her husband and three ridiculously spoiled cats.