During the 2024 Annual Meeting, AAG staff sat down for an interview with Reece Jones, professor and chair of the Department of Geography and Environment in University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s College of Social Sciences. The Department of Geography and Environment (GEO) is a vibrant academic community that focuses on global change and its local impacts on humans and the environment. Faculty and students pursue work that is inherently interdisciplinary, making various connections through other departments and units on campus. Many of GEO’s student and faculty research centers around Asia and the Pacific.

From political geographers to GIS specialists and environmental scientists, the breadth of faculty and course work offers undergraduates the chance to gain a holistic understanding of the discipline and do the necessary fieldwork or research to pursue career opportunities. GEO also offers world-class coursework and applied geographic research under two advanced degrees, a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy. Students of all levels engage in research on topics ranging from agriculture and food, climate change, and environmental conservation to geopolitics, geospatial sciences and data analytics, and tourism.  The department also offers a popular new certificate in GIS for undergraduate students in any program.

GEO partners with departments across the university to offer an accelerated, interdisciplinary online degree in Social Sciences of Oceans, with applications for resource management, city planning, community organizing, environmental consulting, and policy analysis. Similarly, a flexible Graduate Ocean Policy Certificate is available for students or working professionals through the department to broaden their understanding of the legal, political, economic, and social forces that affect ocean development activities.

Collaboration and Community

UH-Mānoa strives to create a community-minded environment: “We try to do our best to have kind of a collaborative relationship between graduate students and faculty so that they feel like they’re colleagues in a way [and] part of this kind of endeavor to do their research and carry out their projects.”

Jones offers the example of GEO professor Camilo Mora, whose graduate seminar is far from a typical semester seminar experience. Students collaboratively brainstorm a major question they want to answer at the beginning of the semester, then do the research and analysis together that results in a joint publication with Dr. Mora. “Major publications have come out of that class,” Jones states. “Camilo has done a really good job of bringing students into this research project and work together with them to produce very significant articles.”

Program faculty incorporate professional development skills directly into coursework. Incoming graduate students participate in a mentoring program to prepare for developing and maintaining crucial professional development skills in hopes of answering questions such as “How do you go to a conference? How do you present a paper at a conference? How do you publish a journal article? How does the academic job market work? How do you get a non-academic job?”

Care for the Land

The University of Hawai‘i has a focus on being a Native Hawaiian (Kānaka Maoli) place of learning, “bringing in Native Hawaiian thought, indigenous thought and experiences into the way that we do things,” says Jones. GEO faculty work to integrate Native Hawaiian thought and knowledge into teaching, even if that’s not central to their research focus.

In Hawai‘i, Native Hawaiian concepts are important to the way that people see the world. One often integrated into education programs is “Mālama ʻĀina,” or to care for and honor the land. “For Native Hawaiians, the land is an ancestor. That way of seeing the world is to recognize the relationship between people and the environment, and not to think of them as separate, but rather as integrated and dependent upon each other,” Jones states. “And geography as a discipline, that’s exactly what it aspires to do.”

Taken together, the educational experiences made possible by GEO at UH-Mānoa have prepared graduates for careers in academia, government service, NGOs, and the private sector in Hawaiʻi and worldwide. GEO has provided alumni with the skills to shape new (and traditional) ways of caring for the earth and human societies. For example, several graduates are now faculty in the Hawai‘inuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge, the only college of Indigenous knowledge in a Research I institution in the United States.