To Joni Seager, the globe is more a tabula rasa than a sphere of information.

Its meaning is found, she believes, in the lives of the women who populate it, and her research has become an ongoing revelation of that meaning. Seager, a University Scholar for 2002-2003, will deliver a lecture on her recent work on Feb. 26 at 3:45 p.m. in Memorial Lounge, Waterman.

Seager, professor of geography, is one of the world’s foremost scholars of feminist geography, a rapidly expanding field of research that explores the shape and shift of women’s lives across continents and cultures.

In 1997, she and colleague Ann Olson published a groundbreaking book, The State of Women in the World Atlas; the third edition, published by Penguin, is due out in April.

In that revision, Seager draws on a vast amount of new global data to explore the key issues facing women today.

They include equality, motherhood, feminism, beauty, culture, work, the global economy, changing households, domestic violence, time budgets, children, lesbian rights, women in government and more Seager focuses on women, but not to the exclusion of men and children.

She believes that as women’s lives go, so goes their society.

“Wherever you find women who are deprived of basic human rights, you are not going to have great social structures,” she says.

She also investigates issues related to environment, human rights, population and the global political economy.

“These topics are intertwined,” she says.

“I find that it is the synergy among these separate interests that drives most of my research and teaching…”

Seager also is a member of the Committee on Women, Population and Environment, a coalition of scholars and activists who developed policy platforms for the Cairo conference on population and the Beijing conference on women.

Seager’s newest book is Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World, with Mona Domosh.

The Atlas, which also was published in Germany, Norway, Italy, Sweden and France, received the American Library Association’s Outstanding Reference Book of the Year award.

-Press Release