Keynote & Distinguished Speakers

The AAG is pleased to announce that Jeffrey Sachs, Robert Groves, Salil Shetty, Nicholas Kristof, and Frances Fox Piven will participate in the 2012 AAG Annual Meeting in New York. Geographers and related scholars attending the conference will have many unique opportunities to interact with these renowned scholars and administrators from both inside and outside of geography.

Below are a few highlights of the planned sessions and events for February 24-28, 2012. Times and dates for some of these sessions are still being confirmed. Additional details will be published here and in future editions of the AAG Newsletter, and AAG SmartBrief.

Nicholas Kristof’s columns appear weekly in The New York Times. He has twice won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism as a reporter on human rights abuses. His father, Ladis Kristof, was a 50-year member of the AAG who specialized in political geography and geopolitics. At the 2012 AAG Annual Meeting, Nicholas Kristof will be joined by Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International, in a panel discussion on geographies of Social Justice, Media, and Human Rights, to be held at 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, February 28. This panel is a key component of the AAG’s focus on social justice at the 2012 Annual Meeting. A reception will be held immediately after this event, with the AAG Awards Luncheon to follow.

Robert M. Groves, Director of the U.S. Census Bureau, will speak on the topic of geography’s contributions to the 2010 Census and the discipline’s future role in light of the Bureau’s efforts to reorganize. The time and date of this plenary session have yet to be determined.

Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and a Special Advisor to the United Nations, will participate in a conversation on Wall Street as part of the AAG’s special track of sessions on international finance and economics. Details of all special session tracks will be listed in the conference program and online at www.aag.org.