2016 AAG Enhancing Diversity Award: Lawrence Estaville

The AAG is pleased to bestow an annual award honoring geographers who have pioneered efforts toward, or actively participated in efforts toward, encouraging a more diverse discipline over the course of several years.

Dr. Lawrence Estaville has been selected for this Award in recognition of his career-long dedication to championing greater inclusion of a wide range of minorities at various institutions and in the discipline of Geography.

He has served as a mentor and professionally active and creative leader, including developing a Geography Department at Clemson University, an MA Program at UC Fresno, and developing a lecture series focused on women and minorities in the 1980s and 1990s, not a common practice in those years. At the AAG, Estaville led the establishment of the AAG Ethnic Geography Specialty Group and participated in the AAG’s inaugural Diversity Task Force, as well as co-authoring their final report. In addition, he has served on the Board of the Race, Ethnicity, Place Conferences, raising funds and contributing to their growing success.

Estaville’s career includes service to a range of diverse and underrepresented minorities, from teaching geography to dyslexic students early in his career, to hiring eight minority women into tenure track positions at Texas State University, to mentoring numerous minority scholars of great talent, to publishing seminal works that address diversity in pedagogy and planning for university administrators and faculty.

It is with great pleasure that we therefore recommend Dr. Lawrence A. Estaville as the 2016 AAG Enhancing Diversity Awardee.