Working toward positive change, despite it all

Colorful tiles form a mosaic of a sun; Credit: Emily Jackson, Unsplash
Credit: Emily Jackson, Unsplash

Photo of Patricia Ehrkamp

For many geographers, the past few weeks have brought major shifts in policies that adversely affect our work across higher education, non-profit organizations, Federal agencies, and research institutions. Data sources, including the US Census, are changing. While “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders,” various organizations are working to preserve and make the data available. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is in the midst of controversy, with severe ramifications for critical humanitarian work across the globe and the (potential) loss of jobs for thousands of workers. These sweeping changes to Federal agencies mean serious challenges for scientific research, and for higher education. Data on the impact of NIH funding in your own state is available here. Broad swaths of geographic scholarship are affected as funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) limit indirect cost payments, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) is establishing new guidance with regard to what type of research remains fundable and under what conditions.

In these frenzied times, I have heard from AAG members who feel angry, anxious, and often helpless. Early career researchers on my own campus and elsewhere, in particular, worry that they may not be able to realize their futures and careers as they imagined. In the midst of recent confusion around a Federal payment freeze, post-docs and graduate students who receive salaries or stipends directly from the US government experienced payment delays that caused hardships. Feelings of fear and anxiety in this era of growing uncertainty are understandable, and I want to assure you that you are not alone. AAG stands by our earlier commitments to academic freedom and our support for all geographers across the breadth of geographic inquiry. We value our colleagues whose broad range of backgrounds, experiences, and skills enrich our discipline and society more broadly. I have spoken to many geographers in recent days, and they are here to help, to offer conversations and advice. So, I encourage you to talk to your colleagues, get guidance from supervisors and leadership in your institutions, and to discuss your plans with your advisors and mentors. These may be conversations about short-term decisions regarding field work, conference travel, and visits to archives, or longer-term career planning. If you have concerns that seem beyond your institution’s or workplace’s ability for guidance, please reach out to us at helloworld@aag.org.

In these times, I find it useful to remember that anxiety, fear, and helplessness may be exactly what the current administration intends to create as it seeks to quash opposition with its firehose approach to overwhelm, exhaust, and even traumatize people. As we are processing the onslaught of information and attacks on democratic institutions, it is important to remind ourselves that we are still only in the early stages of these frenzied changes. I have found that staying informed about these intentions and developments helps reduce some of the surprise and shock. More changes are to come, many of which have been foreshadowed in the Project 2025 document, which this BBC article usefully puts into perspective (the article also links to the full report). Several organizations such as the Council on Governmental Relations, the Council of Nonprofits, and the American Council on Education have been compiling relevant information on executive orders or offer podcasts that address the ongoing assault on research, education, rights, and democracy. This is not an exhaustive list. But I find that accessing information from reputable organizations—rather than trying to keep up with every notification and update from social media and news sites—allows me to step back and process information on my own terms.

In recent days, several lawsuits have gotten under way that challenge the legality of executive orders and administrative actions, including the attacks on DEI work and -workers. These legal cases will take time. In the meantime, AAG is working with the coalition of the American Council of Learned Societies to assess and address the shifting legal and funding landscapes, and to consider how and when to organize responses that will require broader support than any single organization can provide. AAG’s JEDI committee is collecting resources and information materials to support our members. We are proceeding with care and caution because we do not want to inadvertently put AAG members at risk.

As an immigration scholar, I know that the onslaught of Executive Orders which target vulnerable people feels both cruel and somewhat familiar; the first Trump administration targeted immigrants and pursued well over 1,000 changes to existing immigration policies, including revoking legal statuses and restricting various visas. The Migration Policy Institute has compiled a helpful list of the current administration’s actions taken so far in the realm of immigration. Legal guidance for dealing with immigration enforcement agencies is available from multiple sources, including the ACLU. I mention this information, in particular, as sanctuary policies of cities and university campuses are under threat. And so are international students, faculty, and staff on our campuses whose political viewpoints may become grounds for revoking their visas and deporting them—in yet other ways of undermining academic freedom.

In the midst of this intentionally inflicted chaos and confusion, I urge you to take a deep breath and to take care of yourself. If you’re able to, please support those in more vulnerable positions. Letting policymakers know what you think about legislative changes remains an important avenue for action. If you are in the U.S. and so inclined, you may call your elected representatives in Washington DC to ensure your voice is being heard. Please make sure to call their local/state offices in addition to their offices on Capitol Hill, which can be reached at (202) 224-3121.

Taking care also means taking breaks from the news, engaging in self-care, and doing work and organizing that is possible and meaningful to you. Self-care will not dismantle the systems of oppression that traumatize and create new vulnerabilities. But self-care is and needs to be part of preserving our ability to stay focused on what matters, including our work as geographers. There is still the need to educate, to study the consequences of climate change, wildfires, flooding, and intensified hurricanes as well as affordable housing and challenges to democracy, to understand geopolitics, and to work toward food security and climate justice—to mention but a few of the urgent questions that geographers collectively address. Very little, if anything, is gained if trauma manifests as anger and aggression toward others. So, please do what is necessary to take care of your health and well-being, whether that’s taking breaks from screens, going for a walk or to the gym, meditating, being with friends and family, reading a novel, or watching a movie. And please make sure to seek out counseling if self-care strategies are not enough.

Our Annual Meeting in Detroit next month will bring ample opportunities for conversations, collaborations, and community building with other geographers. The preliminary program lists several sessions that center on the changing spaces of and challenges to higher education. There are workshops on research methods for students, as well as mentoring sessions that highlight career opportunities across non-profit, government, and industry sectors for early career geographers. Yet other sets of sessions specifically address questions of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I am confident that these sessions, along with those focused on geographic research, will generate ideas of how our work can continue within the new legal and political frameworks. AAG’s JEDI committee has also organized a number of listening sessions that will make space for discussions of concerns.

I look forward to the conversations that will emerge as we get together and exchange our experiences and insights, develop further strategies for teaching, share the results of our research, and imagine together how we can continue to do the important work that geographers have been doing and need to continue to do. AAG remains committed to being a home for all geographers and to working toward positive change, to doing it together, even—and especially—in these challenging times.


Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at P.Ehrkamp@uky.edu to enable a constructive discussion.

    Share

A New Year, and Mixed Feelings

A small candle burnsin the midst of a dark background Credit: Dagmara Dombrovska, Unsplash
Credit: Dagmara Dombrovska, Unsplash

Photo of Patricia Ehrkamp

As the December solstice approaches and the days promise to get longer for those of us in the northern hemisphere, we often consider this a hopeful time in which to look forward to what comes next. Given how challenging 2024 has been for higher education and for geography in various parts of the world, I do so with mixed feelings. News of potential program and department closures—in the U.S. and in Australia—and reductions in funding for social sciences and humanities research (most recently to New Zealand’s Marsden Fund) combine with uncertainty for higher education more broadly as the next administration of the U.S. appears poised to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, which administers Federal financial aid for students—among other plans that may impact higher education and research. Attacks on academic freedom and civil society continue. On many occasions, the AAG has written letters in support of individual scholars and departments or advocated for continued funding for scholarly research across the full spectrum of physical and social sciences and the humanities.

But nonprofits and professional associations such as AAG are themselves encountering strong headwinds. Conservative think tanks argue for policies that would effectively reduce funding for organizations like ours, which would make advocacy on behalf of geography and geographers more difficult. Agendas that weaken the work of scientific and professional associations—whose major goals are education and support for knowledge production and exchange—add to legislative efforts aimed at undermining civil society institutions more broadly. Just last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 9495 with 219 to 184 votes, largely along partisan lines, albeit with the support of 15 Democratic representatives. The bill (which has yet to pass in the U.S. Senate and get signed into law) seeks to imbue the Treasury department as part of the country’s executive branch with the discretionary power to declare an association as ‘terrorist’ and no longer eligible for nonprofit status—without requiring a proper inquiry first. This discretion, as the reactions of a large number of non-profit organizations show, is highly problematic because it stands to undermine advocacy and weaken civil society and democracy. And even if non-profit organizations are able to fight such designations, these fights will come at a high cost.

Strengthening the Foundation for Geography

In the context of such challenges, it feels at times daunting to work toward better futures. But that’s what AAG has been doing this year. Over the past several months, with sound advice from the Finance Committee, AAG Council has devised plans to rebuild financial reserves that were depleted in the Covid-19 pandemic. These plans put us in a better position for supporting geographers and geography programs into the future. We are also beginning work on our next long-term plan, which will outline our priorities for the coming 10 years and lay the foundation for our strategic planning process. And we have strengthened our connections to other geographic associations across the globe. This includes renewing our memorandum of understanding with The Geographical Society of China on the occasion of its 115th anniversary in 2024 and renewing our commitments to reciprocal membership with RGS-IBG (while ironing out some bureaucratic wrinkles in such reciprocity along the way.) Our international collaborations on education and knowledge exchange remain critically important because, as geographers well know, the challenges facing the world, including climate change, do not stop at national borders.

Looking beyond the AAG, there are encouraging developments to note as well. For the first time in years, public trust in scientists, which plummeted during the Covid-19 pandemic (in the U.S.), has improved. A new report released by the Pew Research Center in November 2024 indicates the first increase in public trust in scientists since 2020, which is particularly encouraging given continued attacks on science and higher education. The report shows that partisan differences in the public’s perception of scientists remain. But importantly, the majority of the U.S. public views scientists as intelligent and as “focused on solving real-world problems.” A recent panel hosted on the AAAS YouTube channel delves deeper into the report as different experts discuss their take on the data.

A new report released by the Pew Research Center in November 2024 indicates the first increase in public trust in scientists since 2020”

The Pew Research Center’s report identifies communication as one arena where there is room for improvement for scientists. This point shows the timeliness of efforts by AAG to Elevate the Discipline. Public and engaged scholarship is another way of addressing such perceived shortcomings in communicating knowledge beyond scientific venues. In a recent essay in its “Innovation in Action” hub, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) highlights a successful, faculty-led initiative at the University of California, Santa Cruz, to change promotion and tenure guidelines for such scholarship. One lesson from this piece is that “Disciplines, and disciplinary associations, can provide leadership and support by publishing their own guidelines.” Incidentally, the AAG’s Task Force on Public and Engaged Scholarship, led by Past President Rebecca Lave, just concluded its work and, among other products, produced new guidelines for institutions on how to value and evaluate such work. These will be available on the AAG website soon.

Inspiration comes from yet other sources: In a strong rejection of what they term “the siege mentality in higher education,” Heather Hewitt and Stacy M. Hartman detail examples of innovation across undergraduate and graduate curricula in the social sciences and humanities on campuses across the U.S. While not mincing words in their criticism of how universities have been “breaking trust with many constituencies, including students, local communities, and the broader public,” their article emphasizes the dedication of scholar-educators to teaching, and to preparing students for meaningful careers. In advocating for what they consider “humanities vocationalism” for example, Hewitt and Hartman outline alternatives to simplistic notions of workforce preparation (a term that often headlines conservative reform demands for higher education). Their discussions also include interdisciplinary initiatives and innovation in Ph.D. programs that seek to better support Ph.D. students who are envisioning ‘alt-ac careers,’ that is, non-faculty careers in academia or outside of the academy. There is much food for thought here for geographers to think carefully about how we prepare our Ph.D. students, and how we can better serve them given the fact of a declining academic workforce and a wealth of career opportunities outside of the academy. These are important questions for geographers to take up, including at our annual meetings.

As I finalize this column, preparations for our 2025 Annual Meeting in Detroit are well underway. In keeping with AAG’s commitment to building stronger ties to the cities and regions that host our meetings, returning-generation farmer and scholar-educator shakara tyler kicked off our series of webinars with a discussion of Building Black Food Sovereignty in Detroit. This first webinar will be followed by Robert Nelson offering insights into the foodways of Arab Americans and Arab Canadians in the Detroit region on January 22, 2025. On February 13, 2025, Michelle Martinez will discuss environmental justice, climate change, and energy. We have several more webinars planned in the coming months. All of our planned webinars feature scholars or activists with longstanding ties to the city and region. Beyond introducing AAG members in more depth to the host city for our 2025 Annual Meeting, it is my hope that these webinars will serve our members after the conference, for example in their teaching and in outreach that explains why geography matters.

I began this column with mixed feelings in light of the challenges and uncertainty this year has brought. But in the end, one sentiment prevails: profound gratitude. Gratitude for the immense dedication that AAG staff has shown this year despite dealing with difficult cuts and personnel restructuring. Gratitude for the numerous colleagues who have volunteered their time, energy, and wonderful insight as they serve on AAG Council, our numerous standing committees and task forces, and the boards of our specialty and affinity groups. Gratitude, as well, for all the outstanding scholarship, service, and teaching that we are able to honor with our awards. All of this collective work does indeed defy a siege mentality and is deeply encouraging. Thank you.


Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at P.Ehrkamp@uky.edu to enable a constructive discussion.

    Share

Mentoring and the AAG Mentoring Task Force

Diverse group of hands lined up on a table, Credit: Clay Banks, Unsplash
Credit: Clay Banks, Unsplash

Photo of Patricia Ehrkamp

Serving as president of AAG has afforded me the privilege of participating in several of the AAG’s regional division conferences in the fall. These conferences often showcase students’ research, whether as papers or posters, and it is a delight to see all the innovative work that students do around the country. The quality of this research and its presentation also show the tremendous mentoring by faculty at a variety of institutions who support students and encourage them to participate in conferences and present their work. Mentoring is a critically important part of our work as we educate the next generations of geographers and prepare them for a variety of careers.

Research shows that effective mentoring has positive outcomes for faculty careers and for careers outside the academy (Fain and Zachary 2020). Mentoring helps early career scholar-educators and aspiring geography practitioners better prepare for and navigate academic and non-academic job markets, and aids in the transition from graduate school to professional careers. Mentoring enhances professional development and provides networking opportunities for early-career professionals, supports early-career geographers throughout the promotion and tenure process, and is particularly important for those in temporary/precarious positions who often lack institutional support structures. Ongoing political assaults on academic freedom and DEI work on many college and university campuses have only increased the need to better support marginalized faculty.

Mentoring is a critically important part of our work as we educate the next generations of geographers and prepare them for a variety of careers.”

But mentoring does not just benefit mentees. Scholars working on mentoring and consultants for industry and academy, such as Dr. Stacy Blake-Beard, consider ‘mentoring as transformational’ and as ‘mutually empowering’ for mentors and mentees. There are thus benefits for mentors, especially if these mentors appropriately recognize and address mentoring needs across social difference. This is one of the important lessons of research on mentoring: not all mentoring is equal, nor does mentoring necessarily achieve its goals, especially when goals and expectations for mentoring relationships are unclear.

Recognizing that many departments are stretched thin, and that plenty of geographers work as ‘stand-alone’ geographers in their department or even college, the AAG Mentoring Task Force has focused on examining how AAG can expand its mentoring efforts to better address our members’ needs. Since fall 2023, members of this Task Force have been collecting, reading, and discussing scholarship and literature on mentoring strategies. We have been hosting a series of listening sessions at the Honolulu Annual Meeting, as well as at different regional meetings, including the 2023 West Lakes and SEDAAG regional division conferences and at the joint REP/MAD conference in Washington DC. These listening sessions yielded a broad array of insights that will inform our recommendations.

The Mentoring Task Force also facilitated an in-person panel session at the last Annual Meeting in Honolulu on “How to Survive Your First Year as a Faculty Member.” Skillfully chaired by Jack Swab, the session featured four panelists (Clare Beer, Shamayeta Bhattacharya, Bill Limpisathian, and Fikriyah Winata) who shared their experiences, insights, and recommendations as first-year faculty members. Conversations with the audience following the panel’s initial discussion revealed the challenges of job searches as well as great advice on how to overcome them, and to thrive in a new position. I was impressed, as well, by more senior scholars who said they attended the session in order to learn what challenges face current early-career geographers in order to better mentor their own students. To me, this is an example of the two-way street that is mentoring: those of us at more advanced career stages have a lot to learn from those who are just starting out their own. (Look for a second iteration of “How to survive your first year as a faculty member” at our next Annual Meeting in Detroit!)

Our listening sessions taught us that different but important needs for mentoring emerge at different times in one’s professional life. The Mentoring Task Force is keenly aware of the spatial unevenness of mentoring resources available across a variety of institutions and career stages. R-1 institutions often provide their faculty and graduate students with access to commercially available mentoring programs through institutional memberships, while smaller colleges and less well-funded institutions are not able to provide such access. It is also easier in larger departments or colleges to find mentors willing to step up while the service and teaching loads at community colleges and smaller, regional campuses of public institutions are already taxing. For these reasons, a major goal of the AAG Mentoring Task Force is to explore how the AAG can develop and support more diverse mentoring structures, provide guidance to departments and colleges on best practices for mentoring.

While the Mentoring Task Force continues its work, the most recently revised and updated AAG Statement on Professional Ethics (Section IV in particular) reflects more attention to mentoring. It includes expanded recommendations for graduate student mentoring in departments and clarifies that preparation for job searches as part of graduate advising commitments. The statement also links to a guide on ‘How to Advise Graduate Students’ from the University of Michigan, which may serve as a possible model to adapt for a variety of institutions.

Existing mentoring initiatives at AAG have long included the AAG Leadership Workshop for department chairs and other (or aspiring) administrators, as well as the Geography Faculty Development Alliance which offers an annual summer workshop for early-career geographers. Beginning in Honolulu in 2024, the AAG began hosting a Student Day at its Annual Meeting, adding to its daily offerings for students with a full day of sessions dedicated to, among others, methods and professional development workshops, career panels, and offering networking opportunities over lunch. The AAG’s next Student Day will take place on March 26, 2025 in Detroit. And I am sure a number of you have seen AAG’s most recent work within its Research Partnerships initiative, calling on members to submit their ideas on new mentoring efforts to AAG, with the opportunity to collaborate on grant proposals to fund these activities. That effort, the Targeted Mentoring Networks request for partnerships, has attracted numerous ideas and will likely see the submission of two grant proposals this fall.

There are other helpful tools available to begin facilitating mentoring. My own department has encouraged using Individual Development Plans (IDPs) for graduate advising. IDPs originate from the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and enable post-doctoral scholars to better articulate and successfully pursue their career goals. My department has amended these plans to accommodate graduate student career goals and planning, whether they intend to pursue academic or non-academic careers. As multi-year planning tools, IDPs are helpful because they encompass a broader timespan than the more common annual progress reviews and check-ins and I encourage you to check out this resource.

As the Mentoring Task Force continues its work, we would love to hear from AAG members about your experiences, needs, and insights. Please also feel free to let us know of excellent examples of mentoring policies and workshops at helloworld@aag.org!

Finally, here are the members of our Mentoring Task Force:

  • Mark Barnes
  • Clare Beer
  • Guillermo Ramos Douglass-Jaimes
  • Lorraine Dowler
  • Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux
  • Patricia Ehrkamp
  • Caroline Faria
  • Matt Gerike
  • Aretina Hamilton
  • Frank Magilligan
  • Marcus Seepersad
  • Sara Smith
  • Selima Sultana
  • Jack Swab
  • Marissa Wald
  • Antoinette WinklerPrins
  • Gary Langham (ex officio)

References:

Fain, Lisa Z. and Lois J. Zachary, 2020, Bridging Differences for Better Mentoring: Lean Forward, Learn, and Leverage, Berrett-Kohler Publishers

Audrey J. Murrell and Stacy Blake-Beard (eds.), 2017. Mentoring Diverse Leaders: Creating Change for People, Processes, and Paradigms.


Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at P.Ehrkamp@uky.edu to enable a constructive discussion.

    Share

Getting to Know Our AAG

Patricia Erhkamp introduces facts about AAG, its headquarters and council in a special video

Photo of Patricia Ehrkamp

Like many of you, my initial encounter with the AAG was through attending an Annual Meeting. Others first learn about the AAG through one of our nine regional division meetings or the set of journals that AAG publishes. It is often only after being a member for a while that we pay more attention to what the AAG is and does on a regular basis, and how it is run. This is why I want to use this column to talk a bit about governance, introduce you to the AAG’s wonderful staff, and to the association’s new headquarters in Washington, DC.

My recent visit to the AAG’s headquarters for the September AAG Council meeting reminded me how important it is for members to know what we do. AAG is governed by the AAG Council, whose members are elected to serve three-year terms. There are six national councilors and nine regional councilors, and membership on the board is staggered to make sure that not everyone rotates off at the same time. One student councilor and one international councilor round out the board. The AAG’s Executive Director, Gary Langham, serves ex officio as a non-voting member of the Council, and AAG Council activities are supported by AAG staff.

On the occasion of AAG Council’s first in-person meeting of the 2024/25 academic year I thought I’d take you behind the scenes to let you see who your elected council members are. These include, of course, our Executive Committee, which consists of Vice President Bill Moseley, immediate Past President Rebecca Lave, secretary Dydia DeLyser, treasurer Antoinette WinklerPrins and myself as president. The Executive Committee reviews and refines agendas, suggests policy, and oversees the work of standing committees and task forces.

AAG Council meets four times a year. The September meeting is the first of two in-person meetings; the second of these meetings takes place in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the AAG. We do meet virtually two more times during the year because our tasks can no longer be accomplished in just two annual meetings. For a recent perspective on AAG governance and Council meetings, see this article by past President Emily Yeh.

It was exciting for Council to meet for the first time in the AAG’s new headquarters at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue. The AAG’s move to this recently renovated building is part of our commitment to reducing GHG emissions. In addition to downsizing significantly from over 7,200 square feet to a space that is 3,900 square feet, the building is accessible and also LEED Gold certified, in contrast to the Meridian Place which was built in 1890 and in need of updates. Between divesting all of our assets from fossil fuel industries and moving into the new headquarters, AAG is committed to continue reducing emissions from our operations. Staff continue to contribute to these goals by using public transportation and through hybrid work arrangements. While we still have a ways to go and must work on further reducing our climate impacts, this progress is no small feat.

AAG’s Emily Frisan captured some of the highlights of the September Council meeting in a brief video I hope you’ll watch. If you are ever in DC, we invite you to drop by to visit the headquarters of your AAG.


Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at P.Ehrkamp@uky.edu to enable a constructive discussion.

    Share

A Global Gathering Place

Colorful comment bubble shapes containing a word in different languages

Photo of Patricia Ehrkamp

As I am finalizing this column, the 35th International Geographical Congress (IGC) draws to a close in Dublin, Ireland. Organized by the International Geographical Union (IGU) and the Geographical Society of Ireland (GSI), the Congress met under the theme “Celebrating a World of Difference” and brought together over 3,000 delegates. It was a delight to see so many geographers from around the world engaging in the exchange of knowledge, collaborating across borders and language barriers, and building new networks and friendships along the way. A number of plenaries highlighted the expertise of ‘Voices from the Global South,’ for example two sessions on climate change. These sessions also made clear that so many current and pressing issues in the world—such as climate change, food security, and geopolitics—do not stop at national borders and cannot be understood in isolation.

This wonderful global and collaborative spirit stands in stark contrast to expressions of nationalism, boundary-making, and xenophobia that characterize the presidential election campaign in the United States. Nationalism, populism, and anti-immigrant rhetoric are on full display—with at least on one side of the political spectrum going as far as calling for mass deportations. These are, of course, well-known tropes of electoral politics, and they have been part and parcel of U.S. immigration policy for decades. But I will never get used to the ways that such anti-immigrant rhetoric and hostility unnecessarily instill discomfort or even fear in those of us who hail from parts of the world outside the U.S. Geographic research has long addressed these topics, including, for example, making rising ethnonationalism the theme of the 2022 presidential plenary.

Beyond our scholarship on these issues, however, I watch the election campaign and TV ads with deep concern for how this rhetoric affects the numerous international students in our undergraduate and graduate programs, and I wonder how our international colleagues feel about them. Many of our AAG members are immigrant faculty members and practitioners, as well as international students, and research shows that racism, discrimination, and anti-immigrant politics create stress and anxiety and adversely affect the health and mental health of immigrants and minoritized populations.

So, I want to take this opportunity to emphasize that the AAG’s broader commitments to inclusivity comprise a deep commitment to internationalism in education, research, and geographic practice, and that the broader production and exchange of knowledge and insights across national borders benefit all of us. As AAG Past President Eric Sheppard noted in 2013, efforts to change our name to American Association of Geographers were prompted by the realization that “the AAG has become far more than a community of American geographers. Many of our members, even among those working in the United States, are not (only) American citizens. Many more attend our annual meetings from outside the United States as our national meetings have become the gathering place for geographers from across the world.”

These trends continue. Although our membership declined during and in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, our international membership (as geographers with an address outside of the United States) has remained at about 25 percent. The 2022 Membership Report shows that the AAG had 9,347 members at the end of 2022, which included 2,554 international members that represented over 100 countries.

There is other encouraging news: Following three years of canceled or virtual conferences between 2020 and 2022, in the past two years, our annual meetings have again become global gathering places for geographers. In Denver (2023), 26.5% of our attendees came from outside the United States, representing 82 countries. Honolulu similarly attracted international attendees from 78 countries, accounting for 30.6% of our overall attendees. Hawai’i’s (relative) geographic proximity to Asia aided in bringing more colleagues from that region to this most recent conference, and I am so grateful that our organization was able to afford opportunities for 64 Indigenous students and scholars from the Pacific Ocean basin region to attend this Annual Meeting free of charge as part of our commitments to enhancing global inclusivity.

In many other ways, our lives have been globally connected, which is also what we teach in our introductory geography classes. One way of fostering such connections is through education abroad. Study abroad participation has become an important aspect of how universities and colleges are ranked, and they advertise such opportunities as they seek to recruit talented undergraduate students. Lauded as ‘high impact’ learning experiences for undergraduate students, 94 percent of United States colleges and universities offer and encourage students to participate in study abroad opportunities according to the spring 2024 Institute of International Education Snapshot. For our students, studying abroad offers exciting and important opportunities of gaining a deeper understanding of the world, through first-person experiences with different cultures, knowledges, and approaches. Of course, faculty exchanges—for example through Fulbright programs—do similarly important work.

As we continue to build global consciousness and understanding, the AAG remains committed to being a gathering place for all geographers.”

The number of international students coming to the United States has been growing, and international faculty are contributing much to growing diversity in the U.S. academy and in our home departments. But there are challenges as well. In addition to the hostile political climate I already mentioned, international faculty and students may also struggle with visa issues, have to overcome language hurdles, and may find themselves encountering microaggressions and unspoken barriers. In response to some of these challenges, AAG has been supporting the Golden Compass initiative that seeks to foster equity and inclusion for international women faculty in geography and geospatial science. This initiative, which originally focused on mentoring a relatively small group of scholars, has now received significant funding from the National Science Foundation under the new project name Geospatial sciences Alliance for International women faculty Advancement (GAIA) to scale up and shift focus toward data collection, training, and technical assistance that will help institutions transform their approach to supporting international women scholars. Led by Dr. Jieun Lee of the University of Northern Colorado, this partnership is a collaboration among UNC, AAG, the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science, and the College of Staten Island.

Universities in the U.S. keep recruiting international students—in part because tuition dollars matter in the neoliberalized world of higher education. But international students bring so much more: they enrich our classrooms and learning in geography programs with their experiences and insights! In our seminars and research endeavors, international students’ ideas contribute to fostering a global consciousness and understanding, and they bring significant regional expertise and insights that are critically important as geographers tackle difficult research problems in different parts of the world. So, we should celebrate that student applications from abroad for the 2024 academic year continue to grow, and that our programs attract international students. And while we’re at it, maybe we can also check in with our international colleagues and students locally to make sure that they feel supported in the current, challenging political climate. After all, a global geographic consciousness also includes our home places.

It is wonderful to see so many international members of the AAG, and to know that so many colleagues from around the world continue to find their way to our conferences. My hope is that our next Annual Meeting in Detroit, a city on the U.S. border with Canada with a long history of immigration, will not only attract similar numbers of international attendees, but will also spark conversations about immigration, borders and difference, and continue to foster intellectual engagement across borders that enriches our geographic knowledge and our lives as geographers. As we continue to build global consciousness and understanding, the AAG remains committed to being a gathering place for all geographers.


Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at P.Ehrkamp@uky.edu to enable a constructive discussion.

    Share

Returning to Detroit: In solidarity and with care

A photo of several papers and books about Detroit arranged on a desktop. Credit: Patricia Ehrkamp
A photo of several papers and books about Detroit arranged on a desktop. Credit: Patricia Ehrkamp

Photo of Patricia Ehrkamp

After a 40-year hiatus, our Annual Meeting will be returning to Detroit, Michigan next March. The stack of Detroit-themed books and articles on my desk has been growing, and I am thrilled that the AAG will meet in this city again. Our long absence prompted me to briefly look back: We last met in Detroit in 1985 during the AAG presidency of Risa Palm, with 2,377 people in attendance. This may seem low given the size of more recent annual meetings, but the number of attendees amounted to roughly 44 percent of the AAG membership at the time. We were a much smaller organization then! As AAG Past President Risa Palm reminded me, the 1985 meeting was overshadowed by the University of Michigan’s decision to close their geography department only a little while earlier, which brought home the “institutional precarity of our discipline” (Huntley and Rosenblum, 2020: 367)—an ongoing concern for geography.

Like many deindustrialized cities in the U.S., Detroit has seen tremendous change since 1985, with shifts in its economic base, disinvestment, and serious population decline. In 2013, Detroit became the largest city in the US to ever declare bankruptcy. Since then, as you may know from U.S. media coverage, Detroit’s fate has changed. A recent example is the Ford corporation’s purchase and renovation of Detroit’s Michigan Central Station, which re-opened in June 2024. US media celebrate Detroit’s recent renaissance, including its renewed population growth after a decade of losses. More critical voices doubt, however, that all these new investments in the city, many of which come from outside, will benefit Detroiters. These are important concerns because “Detroit is continually rendered as a no-man’s-land and new frontier waiting to be claimed, tamed, and resettled” as Linda Campbell, Andrew Newman, Sara Safransky and Tim Stallman (2020: 11) write in A People’s Atlas of Detroit.

Our return to Detroit is in no small measure due to the advocacy of the Black Geographies Specialty Group (BGSG). As I learned during our preparations for the meeting in Detroit, BGSG urged former Executive Director Doug Richardson to hold another Annual Meeting there. “It is in the spirit of solidarity, academic intrigue, and social justice that we encourage you to select Detroit, Michigan as the host city for a future AAG Conference,” BGSG wrote in a letter[1] following the Boston AAG meeting in 2017. The letter emphasized that this majority Black city with its long history of activism and community organizing had long inspired important geographic research on race, ethnicity, and anti-Black racism–among others, the work of AAG Fellow and 2019 AAG Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Joe T. Darden.

Detroit, of course, holds a special place in the geographic imaginations of urban, radical and critical geographers because of the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI), which was co-founded and co-directed by community organizer Gwendolyn Warren and geographer William (Bill) Bunge (1928-2013). DGEI operated from 1968-1972 with the goal to put geography to work in the interest of racial justice through community-based mapping and facilitating access to college education for Black Detroit youths. This work was possible with funding from the AAG. The re-release of Bunge’s book Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution in 2011 garnered renewed interest in the DGEI and Bunge’s work. Six sessions at the Annual Meeting in Boston in 2017 commemorated his contributions to radical geography, urban geography, and the quantitative revolution. At the 2014 AAG meeting in Tampa, two sessions focused on activist geographies and the legacies of the DGEI, including Gwendolyn Warren’s reflections in conversation with Cindi Katz (see also Warren, Katz and Heynen, 2019). This conversation challenged some of the myths in our discipline with regard to the DGEI that too often only focus on Bunge without fully understanding Warren’s role or acknowledging the important contributions of community research by “the Black people of Detroit.”

Given these complex histories, I hope that we will return to Detroit in solidarity and with care. This means “to take seriously the ways in which our work is “for others” and to build connection and responsibility as key values in our research approaches,” as AAG Past President Vicky Lawson wrote in 2007. It also means that we take seriously the city’s history and geography, and that we honor its residents’ experiences and visions for Detroit’s present and future. Recent work by geographers and others has taken on questions such as anti-eviction struggles (Quizar, 2024), property, displacement, and repair (Safransky, 2023), Indigenous and Black dispossession (Mays, 2022), and brought together community members, activists, and scholars to map and tell more nuanced stories of Detroit (Campbell, Newman, Safransky, and Stallman, 2020).

Returning to Detroit in solidarity and with care offers us an opportunity to pause and reflect on some of the historical erasures, silences, and exclusions in geography and in our professional organization, while also recognizing how much our discipline and the AAG have changed over time as we keep broadening the tent of geography. These changes are significant! I wrote about AAG’s commitment to advocacy, justice, equity, diversity, and inclusivity in my last column. But consider this: 40 years ago, there was no Black Geographies Specialty Group that could have advocated for a meeting in Detroit. Today, BGSG is a highly dynamic feature with a strong voice in the AAG and usually offers a curated track at our annual conference.

Holding a meeting in Detroit again—a city that has generated so much geographic interest and research—and returning there in solidarity and with care encourages us to make space for conversations about the future of geography, to collectively envision new geographic knowledges and practices, and—to borrow from Katherine McKittrick (2006: xv)—create more “humanly workable geographies.”  To me, this is what the meeting theme–Making Spaces of Possibility–is all about. As we have been planning the meeting, solidarity and care have already provided inspiration for several special sessions that will center research on Detroit and the wider region, and honor some of the contributions to geographic knowledge that have gone unacknowledged for too long. I hope that our annual meeting in the city of Detroit will be guided by “collective care—care for land, for relationships, and for people’s well-being” (Quizar, 2024: 802).

Our planning and preparations for the Annual Meeting is putting into practice solidarity and care through AAG’s commitment to a place-based approach to Annual Meetings. This includes putting together a series of webinars on Detroit and its surrounding areas, and creating opportunities for collaboration, volunteering, and learning in and from the city and region where we meet. Registration is open. I hope to see many of you there!

[1] The letter also listed the following supporters: Drs. Joe Darden & Alan Arbogast, Michigan State University Department of Geography, the Eastern Michigan University Department of Geography and Geology, the Geographies of Food and Agriculture Specialty Group, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, Journal of Social & Cultural Geography and Feminist Liberating Our Collective Knowledge (FLOCK), UNC — Chapel Hill.

References

Campbell, L., Newman, A., Safransky, S., Stallmann, T. (eds.) (2020). A People’s Atlas of Detroit. Wayne State University Press.

Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (1971). Available at https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/dgei_fieldnotes-iii_b.pdf.

Huntley, E. R., & Rosenblum, M. (2020). The Omega affair: Discontinuing the University of Michigan Department of Geography (1975–1982). Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(2), 364-384. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1760780#d1e244

Lawson, V. (2007). Geographies of Care and Responsibility. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2007.00520.x

Mays, K. T. (2022). City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit. University of Pennsylvania Press.

McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic Grounds. Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press.

Quizar, J. (2024). A Logic of Care and Black Grassroots Claims to Home in Detroit. Antipode, 56(3), 801-820.

Safransky, S. (2023). The City after Property: Abandonment and Repair in Postindustrial Detroit. Duke University Press.

Warren, G. C., Katz, C., & Heynen, N. (2019). Myths, Cults, Memories, and Revisions in Radical Geographic History: Revisiting the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute. Spatial Histories of Radical Geography: North America and Beyond, eds. T.J. Barnes and E. Sheppard, Wiley: 59-85.


Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at P.Ehrkamp@uky.edu to enable a constructive discussion.

    Share

Academic Freedom, Advocacy, and the Importance of Our Professional Association

Image showing silhouettes of graduates wearing caps and gowns with a sunset in the background

Photo of Patricia Ehrkamp

Many of us look forward to summer, as it tends to bring some time to rest and reflect. Alas, this summer I find it more difficult to put my mind at ease as hardly a day goes by without news of another challenge facing higher education. At the end of June, Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed House Bill 2735, which landed on her desk after passing the Arizona State Senate following much debate in and outside the legislature. The bill, purportedly drafted in response to a financial crisis at the University of Arizona, intends to concentrate decision-making power over educational matters in university regents and presidents. While House Bill 2735 has not been signed into law, challenges to faculty participation in shared governance and to academic freedom more broadly abound. Some of these challenges originate from within universities. Take, for example, the University of Kentucky, my home institution. Following a longer campaign by the university’s president, our university senate, which had curricular oversight and decision-making power with regard to educational policy, is being replaced with a faculty senate that only has advisory capacity. Similar to the intent of Arizona’s House Bill 2735, this shift consolidates educational policy decision-making power with the university president and the Board of Trustees.

Other challenges to academic freedom and even the right to free speech have followed on the heels of on-campus, often pro-Palestinian, protests and encampments in the late spring and early summer. Across the United States, colleges and universities have responded to such protests with increasing amounts of policing—arresting, suspending, and expelling students and faculty. These crackdowns infringe on the First Amendment right to protest, and they are indicative of growing restrictions to campuses as sites of open dialogue. Together with wider ranging, often sudden shifts in university policies and newly implemented rules that go into effect without notice, police force and the threat of violence toward protesters seem intent on discouraging public debate by intimidating students and faculty.

More broadly, legislatures in numerous states of the U.S. have targeted educational freedom through a number of bills that variably seek to ban particular theoretical frameworks that explain social injustice (such as critical race theory), AP Black Studies courses, or mention of inequalities, as well as DEI initiatives that seek to redress existing inequities in colleges and universities. In 2023 alone, some 45 anti-DEI bills were introduced across the country; more are underway. These legislative initiatives, as many of you know, have gone far in their attempts to undermine efforts at remedying some of the historical injustices and exclusions in higher education.

Safeguarding and Strengthening Geography for the Future

Against the backdrop of these challenges, which often appear alongside broader budgetary and demographic shifts, I felt fortunate to spend some time with department and program leaders in geography and cognate disciplines to discuss external pressures on our discipline, our departments, and workplaces at this year’s AAG Department Leadership workshop. Two days of virtual meetings that I co-organized and co-hosted with past AAG presidents Ken Foote and Rebecca Lave, and the AAG’s chief strategy officer Risha RaQuelle, made space for thinking carefully through the question of what makes a department healthy and why department health matters, a conversation that originated 20 years ago. The workshop provided ample opportunities to discuss the challenges and pressures that face higher education and geography, and to explore with expert session leaders, as well, the opportunities that such shifts in higher education and on college campuses may bring. Some of our sessions explicitly addressed the need to make the case for geography to university administrators and to our students and their parents. These latter sessions generated thoughtful discussions on what geographic inquiry and knowledge offer students in terms of career readiness skills and career paths. We discussed how to communicate (including to university administrators) geography’s integrative nature and our discipline’s ability to tackle big questions such as climate change.

And while state legislatures or some university administrators may think differently, we also talked about the importance of improving shared governance within departments in order to create better workplaces for one another and to better serve our students. Our conversations about building, expanding, and maintaining a Culture of Care in geographers’ everyday workspaces also addressed the legislative challenges to equity, inclusivity, and diversity that may require a new vocabulary and different strategies for us to continue our work toward more just geographies.

Sharing the leadership workshop space with such talented and dedicated department and program leaders not only leaves me impressed and confident in the future of geography, but also reminds me why our professional organization has such a critical and necessary role to play! For many geographers, our first introduction to the AAG comes via participating in the annual meeting or in the regional division conferences, and these remain important cornerstones of the AAG’s work to facilitate geographic knowledge production. But the AAG does much more than that on behalf of geographers. Apart from professional development and mentoring initiatives such as the annual AAG leadership workshop and the GFDA early career development workshop, the AAG supports and enriches the lives of geographers in academic and non-academic careers through its Specialty and Affinity Groups, and AAG’s new initiative to encourage Research Partnerships (the first RFP focuses on Targeted Mentoring Networks). I also encourage you to check out the educational materials on the AAG’s wetbsite and YouTube channel, such as these readings in Black Geographies and racial justice and in Queer and Trans Geographies.

As our professional organization, the AAG also plays an important role in providing guidance, leadership, and advocacy for scholar-educators and non-academic geography practitioners alike. I have been impressed with the growing efforts to integrate our collective commitments to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) across the AAG’s activities to create a more equitable and more inclusive discipline of geography. The Healthy Departments Committee’s activities in support of programs facing external pressures are invaluable, and so is committee chair and AAG Past President David Kaplan’s advice for departments to be proactive. Similarly, the Elevate the Discipline initiative provides guidance and media training for geographers to engage in public scholarship that communicates geographic insights to the wider public, a worthwhile endeavor that dovetails well with immediate past president Rebecca Lave’s focus on public and engaged scholarship.

In the current moment, I especially appreciate the AAG’s leadership in climate action, support for scientific inquiry, public scholarship, inclusion, and more broadly its advocacy in support of academic and educational freedom. My own scholarly work grapples with questions of rights, care, and justice, and the attacks on shared governance, academic freedom, and civic rights feel like significant challenges to democracy itself. So, I am grateful that the AAG is one of 40 professional organizations to sign on to the American Historical Association’s Statement on 2024 Campus Protests that affirms the right to a diversity of opinions and calls on university administrators to refrain from using force to suppress protests.

As our scientific and professional organization, the AAG’s advocacy on behalf of geography is critical and I am grateful for it. But the work to keep improving our discipline and our work as geographers falls on all of us. So, I want to close with the gentle reminder that in order to create more equitable worlds of geography and for geographers, all of us are called upon “to uphold equity, human rights, and educational freedom.”


Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at P.Ehrkamp@uky.edu to enable a constructive discussion.

    Share