Awardees

Regional Divisions Announce 2022 Outstanding Student Papers During their Fall Meetings

The AAG is proud to announce the Fall 2021 student winners of the AAG Council Award for Outstanding Undergraduate and Graduate Student Papers at a Regional Meeting. The AAG Council Award for Outstanding Undergraduate and Graduate Student Papers at a Regional Meeting is designed to encourage student participation at AAG Regional Division conferences and support their attendance at AAG Annual Meetings. One graduate student and one undergraduate student in each AAG Regional Division receives this yearly award based on a paper submitted to their respective regional conference. The awardees receive $1,000 in funding for use towards their registration and travel costs to attend the AAG Annual Meeting. The board members from each region determine student award winners. 

The winners from each region will be presenting their papers in two dedicated paper sessions at the upcoming 2022 AAG Annual Meeting.

Association of Pacific Coast Geographers/Pacific Coast – APCG

Zihui Lei, Graduate Student Paper, CSU Northridge; Paper Title – “Afro-Latinx Communities in Southern California: Using Cartographies to Understand Social and Environmental Justice”
Cameron Calverley, Undergraduate Student Paper, University of San Diego; Paper Title – “Drought Impacts and Water Management in Semi-Arid Regions: Analyzing Cape Town, South Africa’s ‘Day Zero’”

East Lakes Division of the AAG – ELDAAG

Scott Fitzgerald, Graduate Student Paper, Western Michigan University; Paper Title – “Coastal Geomorphic Change Due to Shoreline Protections – A Study on Lake Michigan’s Eastern Shoreline”

Sean Whelan, Undergraduate Student Paper, The Ohio State University; Paper Title – “Establishing a Climatology of Significant Tornadoes within the Southern United States”

Great Plains/Rocky Mountain Division of the AAG – GPRM

Katie Grote, Graduate Student Paper, University of Kansas; Paper Title – “Controlling the Narrative: Critiquing the Geopolitical Agendas of U.S. Environmental Impact Assessments and Exclusion of Indigenous Communities”

Mid-Atlantic Division of the AAG – MAD

Qian Liu, Graduate Student Paper, George Mason University; Paper Title – “Cross-track Infrared Sounder Cloud Fraction Retrieval Using a Deep Neural Network”

Middle States Division of the AAG – MSDAAG

Logan Gerber-Chavez, Graduate Student Paper, University of Delaware; Paper Title – “How do we plan for compound hazards? Current state emergency plans conceptualizing modern disaster”

Eliza Leal, Undergraduate Student Paper, Colgate University; Paper Title – “Road to Reclaimation: The Impact of PGIS Efforts in the Amazon”

New England – St. Lawrence Valley – NESTVAL

Aaron Adams, Graduate Student Paper, University of Connecticut; Paper Title – “Relation between mobility, extreme weather events, and health: A case study of COVID-19 outbreaks”

Faith M. Kim, Undergraduate Student Paper, Southern Connecticut State University; Paper Title – “Racing to the polls: The voter demographics of New Haven, CT”

Southwest Division of the AAG – SWAAG

Katherine Lester, Graduate Student Paper, University of North Texas; Paper Title – “From Rurual Penalty to Suburban Resilience: Untangling the geography of suicide mortality, urbanization, and race/ethnicity”
Paul Seminara, Undergraduate Student Paper, University of Central Arkansas; Paper Title – “Identifying the Effects of Climatic and Socioeconomic Variables on the Spread of COVID-19 in Arkansas”

West Lakes Division of the AAG -WLDAAG

Austin Holland, Graduate Student Paper, University of Iowa; Paper Title – “An exploratory analysis of land cover and application of conservation easements in the US Midwest”
Jennifer Nguyen, Undergraduate Student Paper, DePaul University; Paper Title – “Chronic Illness & Energy Negotiation: Revisiting Cultural Ecology in Exploring New Avenues for Geographies of Disability”

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AAG Announces Some 2022 AAG Award Recipients

The American Association of Geographers congratulates the individuals and entities named to receive an AAG Award. The awardees represent outstanding contributions to and accomplishments in the geographic field. Formal recognition of the awardees will occur at the 2022 AAG Annual Meeting in New York City during the AAG Awards Gala on Monday, February 28, 2022.

2022 Susan Hardwick Excellence in Mentoring Award

The AAG bestows an annual award recognizing an individual geographer, group, or department, who demonstrates extraordinary leadership in building supportive academic and professional environments and in guiding the academic or professional growth of their students and junior colleagues. The late Susan Hardwick was the inaugural Excellence in Mentoring awardee. The Award was renamed in her honor and memory, soon after her passing.

Photo of David Lopez-CarrDavid Lopez-Carr, University of California Santa Barbara

Dr. David Lopez-Carr has demonstrated outstanding leadership in creating effective, structured mentorship avenues. Specifically, his post-doc to tenure-track mentorship program is a shining example of how to undo structural inequalities.

Under his leadership as Chair of the UC Faculty Senate Affirmative Action, Diversity, and Equity Committee, the UC system increased the funding for the UC diversity post-doc program and launched a diversity faculty mentor program. The increased funding for the UC diversity post-doc has led to several additional post-doc positions each year. These post-docs are guaranteed a tenure track position at a UC campus and so through Lopez-Carr’s leadership, several new minority faculty are hired at UC campuses annually than would otherwise have been the case.

Lopez-Carr is a role model for promoting high standards for transparency and ethical integrity. He shares with his advisees a list of expectations of him and what he expects from them, uses this to start a discussion, and adapts his mentoring accordingly. He humbly recognizes no one person can serve all the roles of an advisor and encourages students and young faculty to seek support from faculty, professionals, family, and friends.

In addition, Lopez-Carr has published extensively with students and advisees, has excellent student allocation, and most of his students are female or from underrepresented groups and many are also first-generation university students. His students and mentees have incredible records of success. They have received over 70 total awards under Lopez-Carr’s guidance, including several Fulbright Fellowships, NSF Graduate Fellowships, NSF Dissertation Improvement Awards, and NASA Earth System Science Fellowships.

His approach and work could be replicated in other departments and institutions and demonstrates clear, intentional efforts to diversify the field.

For all these reasons, the AAG is pleased to recognize David Lopez-Carr with the 2022 Susan Hardwick Excellence in Mentoring Award.

2022 Diversity and Inclusion Award

The Diversity and Inclusion Award (previously Enhancing Diversity Award) honors those geographers who have pioneered efforts toward, or actively participate in efforts towards encouraging a more diverse discipline.

Photo collage: from left to right: Beverley Mullings, Kate Parizeau and Linda PeakeBeverley Mullings, Queen’s University; Kate Parizeau, University of Guelph; and Linda Peake, York University

Beverley Mullings, Kate Parizeau, and Linda Peake are Canadian-based academic geographers whose collaborative work has increased the visibility of the mental health crisis within AAG and the North American academy.

The AAG Diversity & Inclusion Committee was impressed by their translation of informal, kitchen-table conversations with graduate students into highly organized efforts that foreground this pressing topic in scholarly journals and professional meetings. This translation process began with the trio’s first academic talk on mental health in academia at the 2013 Feminist Geography Workshop at the University of Guelph. Since then, they have published widely on this topic in a variety of geographic journals and organized sessions at annual and regional meetings in the US and Canada.

Moreover, their efforts have resulted in the formation of the AAG Mental Health Task Force (2015-18) and an AAG Affinity Group on Mental Health in the Academy (2019). The committee recognizes the longstanding and continuing work of Dr. Mullings, Dr. Parizeau and Dr. Peake as contributing to ideals of justice, equity, and inclusion within geography.

The AAG is therefore pleased to recognize them with its 2022 Diversity & Inclusion Award.

Photo of Austin MardonAustin Mardon, John Dossetor Health Ethics Centre

Austin Mardon is an adjunct assistant professor at John Dossetor Health Ethics Centre whose research and service advocates for individuals living with chronic mental disorders. Despite his diagnosis with schizophrenia during graduate school, he completed his PhD in geography and embarked on a multidisciplinary career that has spanned physical geography, planetary science, mental health, political history, and theology. He is a prolific researcher whose record includes over 70 books on these wide-ranging topics as well as journal articles featured in Nature and Science.

Aside from Dr. Mardon’s impactful scholarship, the AAG Diversity & Inclusion Committee was struck by the extent of his advocacy and mentorship. Speaking from a community member’s perspective, Dr. Mardon has provided sustained leadership to regional chapters of the Schizophrenia Society, the Premier’s Council on the Status of Persons with Disabilities, and the Alberta Mental Health Self-Help Network. More recently, Dr. Mardon has worked nationally to implement “Sharpen the Quill,” a program promoting student writing and literacy around COVID-19’s varied societal impacts. Carrying the flag of geography, Dr. Mardon’s sustained work by, for, and with the mental health and disability communities is a model for justice, diversity, and inclusion worthy of recognition.

The AAG is therefore pleased to recognize him with its 2022 Diversity & Inclusion Award.

2022 AAG Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography

The AAG Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography is given annually to an individual geographer or team of geographers that has demonstrated originality, creativity and significant intellectual breakthroughs in geography. The award includes a prize of $1,000.

Photo of Kathryn YusoffKathryn Yusoff, Queen Mary University London

Professor Kathryn Yusoff is a self-described professor of “inhuman geography” in the School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London, after previous Lectureships at Lancaster University and the University of Exeter.
Yusoff is widely published in prominent journals of Geography as well as interdisciplinary journals of the humanities. Her research addresses political aesthetics, social theory, and questions of ‘Geologic Life’ within the proposed geologic epoch of the Anthropocene. Her 2019 book, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (University of Minnesota Press) examines the relationship between geology and subjectivity and seeks to recenter the question of race in the context of the Anthropocene.

Dr. Yusoff’s research draws from contemporary feminist philosophy, critical human geography as well as the earth sciences. She is particularly interested in the opportunities that the Anthropocene presents for rethinking the interactions between the earth sciences and human geography in the “geo-social formations” of Anthropogenic change.

Dr. Yusoff has been actively engaged in the arts as a Curator of “POLAR: the Art & Science of Climate Change,” a multi-disciplinary project about the curation and production of climate change knowledge in the polar regions; and “Weather Permitting,” a collaborative creative research group that investigates weather and climate change at the intersection of arts and sciences. She’s also made an appearance as “Time Traveller” in a film/installation by the Otolith Group, entitled INFINITY MINUS INFINITY, which draws on and is inspired by her theorization of the racial formation of geology.

For all these reasons, the AAG is pleased to recognize Professor Kathryn Yusoff as the recipient of the 2022 AAG Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography.

2022 AAG 2022 Harold M. Rose Award for Anti-Racism Research and Practice

The Rose Award was created to honor Harold M. Rose, who was a pioneer in conducting research on the condition faced by African Americans. The award honors geographers who have a demonstrated record of this type of research and active contributions to society, and is awarded to individuals who have served to advance the discipline through their research, and who have also had an impact on anti-racist practice.

Photo of Caroline FariaCaroline Faria, The University of Texas at Austin

The AAG Harold M. Rose Award recognizes anti-racist scholarship and practice, drawing attention to the connections between research, social justice, and social change.

Dr. Caroline Faria stands out for her sustained engagement with debates in feminist geographies, Black geographies, and postcolonial geographies, which she has deeply entwined with her mentorship praxis and decolonial vision. Dr. Faria’s research program addresses a wide range of themes that attend to belonging in East Africa, feminist political ecologies, and embodied spatial knowledges. She makes key interventions in human geography through intersectional analyses of racial, gendered, and colonial power. Her research is paired with an ongoing commitment to unsettle normative methodologies by unveiling how power underpins knowledge production. In addition to her formidable single-authored work, she has co-authored with undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty, demonstrating her dedication to cooperative scholarship and mentorship. This latter practice, mentorship through research collaboration and writing, is enhanced by her leadership in national and international organizing and leadership. The Feminist Geography Collective, which she formed in 2016, is an amazingly supportive research hub that provides a space for young women geographers and geographers of color to share ideas, develop research and teaching skills, present papers, produce alternative digital maps, and engage in activist scholarship. Further, Dr. Faria contributes extensively to diversity and racial justice initiatives at the university level, leading efforts to hire and support Black geographers at her home institution, the University of Texas at Austin. Her commitment to diversity and inclusion is also demonstrated by her community-building and formal mentoring work within the AAG and the International Geographical Union. The same commitment is demonstrated in her teaching and pedagogical practice, which have been recognized by three major awards at UT-Austin.

Harold M. Rose’s work is a reminder that scholars must go beyond theoretical understandings of racism to make a difference in actual communities. Dr. Faria’s stunning and seamless combination of research, mentorship, teaching, and community building carries the torch of Rose’s work. The AAG is pleased to celebrate Dr. Faria’s contribution to this tradition and to the real impacts she has made on her students, her colleagues and home institution, and on the broader interdisciplinary project of intersectional anti-racist feminist geographies.

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AAG is Proud to Announce the 2022 AAG Honors

Each year, the AAG invites nominations for AAG Honors to be conferred in recognition of outstanding contributions to the advancement or welfare of the profession. The AAG Honors Committee is charged with making award recommendations for each category, with no more than two awards given in any one category.  This year, the AAG Honors Committee and the AAG Council are pleased to announce the following AAG Honorees to be recognized during the 2022 AAG Annual Meeting.

2022 AAG Lifetime Achievement Honors

Photo of Douglas Richardson, June 29, 2016. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Douglas Richardson, Harvard University

The 2022 AAG Lifetime Achievement Honors is awarded to Dr. Douglas Richardson for his visionary and far-reaching contributions to the discipline. In 1980, he founded and led GeoResearch, Inc. which invented and patented a real-time, interactive GPS/GIS technology which enabled the continuous creation of accurate maps and their simultaneous integration with GIS. This was truly visionary given that this was developed was long before even cell phones were ubiquitous. Dr. Richardson’s work influenced the development of new horizons for research and applications of geography to transportation, public health, and the environmental sciences. From 2003 to 2019, Dr. Richardson served as the Executive Director of the AAG and brought the same visionary outlook to the organization. At the time of his appointment, the AAG was in a fragile position in terms of finances and membership. To address this, Doug Richardson renegotiated existing contracts, built external partnerships, garnered federal research grants, revamped AAG’s membership services, and took other actions to put AAG on sound financial footing. Dr. Richardson then successfully implemented a broad and inclusive vision for an AAG that has led to the expansion of the AAG’s membership to 12,000 members across nearly 100 countries. Three areas of particular impact were research, publications, and public policy.

Dr. Richardson strengthened the AAG’s capacity and infrastructure for obtaining external funding for geography-related research projects. He hired talented research staff and built productive collaborations between the AAG and academic geographers. As a result of his leadership, AAG received federal funding for a range of projects. For example, NIH provided funding for a project that brought GIScientists together with biomedical researchers to explore research frontiers at the intersection of geography and health research.

Another area of major contribution is publications. Under Dr. Richardson’s leadership, the AAG launched two new journals, GeoHumanities and the AAG Review of Books, bringing new audiences to geography. Another major project was the publication of the 15-volume International Encyclopedia of Geography, for which he still serves as Editor-in-Chief. Updated annually, it has become the most comprehensive and authoritative reference work on geography. The volume received the prestigious CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Title of 2017 by the Association of College and Research Libraries. Dr. Richardson is a prolific scholar who, since 2003, has co-authored or co-edited five other books (The Geographical Dimensions of Terrorism; Geography and Drug Abuse; GeoHumanities: Art, History and Text at the Edge of Place; Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds; and Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience), as well as dozens of articles and book chapters.

Dr. Richardson has also made a lasting impact in the area of public advocacy for geography. He created a Public Policy Research Program with dedicated staff to monitor congressional bills of relevance to the discipline and to lobby on behalf of geography. Thanks to this infrastructure, AAG was able to mobilize a strong response to threats to science/geoscience funding a few years ago, effect positive changes in federal and state K-12 geography education legislation and maintain strong and open federal GIS policies for geographers.

Taken together, Douglas Richardson has had a career of remarkable distinction during which his vision and dedication has place the AAG and the discipline of geography in a position of strength. He is eminently deserving of AAG’s Lifetime Achievement Honors.

Photo of Clyde WoodsClyde Woods, (posthumous)

The American Association of Geographers awards the AAG Lifetime Achievement Honors to Dr. Clyde Woods for his unique and path-breaking impact on the fields of Geography, Black Studies, Environmental Justice, Urban and Regional Planning, and Southern Studies. His scholarship, teaching, rigorous and “life-altering” mentoring, and visionary leadership reshaped fields well beyond academia. His work challenges the systematic exclusion of experiences of Black communities from geographical and social science scholarship while challenging the narrative that the violence and deprivations of racism and capitalism were inevitable or natural. Woods’ work transformed what was possible in Black geographical scholarship while laying a foundation to confront the crises made more acute over the past two decades — authoritarian populism, state and extra-legal racial violence, rising inequality, and environmental catastrophe.

In Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (1998), Woods discovered the “blues epistemology”—centering the complex systems of explanation and understanding developed by Black southerners within and in response to the plantation regime. Wood’s work carved a space and set an agenda for a geographical scholarship that diagnoses social injustice while centering sustainable and equitable geographies. Wood wrote other paradigm-shaping books and articles–including In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina, Black Geographies, and the Politics of Place (a collaboration with Katherine McKittrick). The posthumously published works Black California Dreamin’ and Development Drowned and Reborn signify the increasing uptake of his ideas by geographers over the past decade reflects his influence in expanding the scope and relevance of a field that he continues to shape through his scholarship and legacy.

Professor Woods’s work interwove scholarship, activism, and pedagogy. Wood’s activism challenged post-Katrina restoration plans and brought financial restitution to Katrina residents defrauded by Louisiana’s Road Home Program. This commitment to activism brought him in contact with various people in many different locations—both within and outside the university setting. While the college students he educated frequently became community organizers, Woods also engaged everyday people—barbers, unhoused people, community leaders, and children—as genuine thinkers and theorists of the world.

His pedagogical approach was student-centered, and he made time to work with and motivate students, individually and collectively, in his classes and through independent projects. Whether intentional or unintentional, the mentorship of scholars like Woods kept many Black students in the discipline of Geography. Before there was a space for Black Geographies at AAG meetings, Woods personally sat down with graduate students and junior scholars, inquiring about their projects while always offering honest feedback. Particularly for Black graduate students and junior scholars, Woods might be one of the few Black faces that they saw at large, primarily white AAG gatherings.

Since his death in 2011, Woods’s scholarship and legacy have only grown more influential, shaping the transformative subfield of Black Geographies, providing critical texts, methodologies, theoretical frameworks, and practices of community-engaged activism to reinforce his impact and life’s work and gifts to humanity.

For all these reasons, the AAG is proud to confer its inaugural, posthumous 2022 AAG Lifetime Achievement Honors upon Dr. Clyde Woods.

2022 AAG Distinguished Scholarship Honors

Photo of Laura PulidoLaura Pulido, University of Oregon

The 2022 AAG Distinguished Scholarship Award is awarded to Laura Pulido for her foundational and sustained contributions in environmental justice and Latinx geographies and to human geography more broadly. Pulido’s sustained works have been recognized with the AAG’s highest book awards for A People’s Guide to Los Angeles; Development Drowned and Reborn (by Clyde Woods, co-edited with Jordan T. Camp); and Black, Brown Yellow and Left: Radical activism in Los Angeles. Her foundational article on “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White privilege and urban development in Southern California” remains one of the most cited articles in the Annals of the AAG for its clear and accessible call to move from individuals to a structural understanding of environmental racism. Over three decades, she has published transformative work on social movements and racial capitalism and helped bring crucial interventions in the Black radical tradition into print. Her research has been funded by a wide range of agencies including the Ford, Woodrow Wilson and Guggenheim Foundations. One of the outstanding characteristics of her scholarship is her call for ethical scholar-activism and for scholars to build accountable relationships within and beyond the university. Laura has garnered numerous research grants and awards in support of her research, including from the National Science Foundation, the Antipode Foundation Scholar Activist Fund, and numerous university awards. Pulido’s scholarship has gone beyond simply contributing to human geographic scholarship, instead she has helped to transform human geography by developing new ways to study the intersections among urban political ecology, critical studies of race, and social movements.

Dr. Pulido’s influence is marked not only by her published works, but also by her sustained mentoring focused on first generation scholars and scholars of color. She has an unbroken record of service for over 20 years on the editorial board of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, in addition to serving on the boards of 10 other academic journals and book series editor. Her article in The Professional Geographer, “Reflections on a white discipline,” pointed to the need for anti-racism work in the discipline of geography. Pulido has worked tirelessly to help the discipline of geography meet this challenge through her generous mentorship of students of color and serving as a foundational influence for the Latinx Geographies Specialty Group and Antipode’s Institute for the Geographies of Justice. We honor Dr. Pulido for her consistent contributions toward ethical practice and environmental justice in the discipline of geography.

Photo of Shaowen Wang

Shaowen Wang, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Shaowen Wang, a 2022 recipient of the AAG’s Distinguished Scholarship Honors, has played a leading role in the development of cyber-based geographic information science (cyberGIS) as a transdisciplinary scientific approach that develops and integrates new computational methods, techniques, and instruments with geospatial knowledge, spatial analytics, and their applications in a broad range of research domains. Wang’s research has bridged a broad range of topics ranging from software enhancements to analyses of fundamental differences between serial and parallel computational architectures when addressing geospatial problems. Wang and his collaborators have disseminated their findings and insights through more than 160 peer-reviewed works.

Wang has a played a pivotal role in bold initiatives that brought together researchers from multiple institutions in geography, geographic information science (GIScience), computer science, and myriad other fields. A hallmark of his work has been his role in forming and leading research teams from multiple institutions and diverse disciplines that have garnered external funding and produced successive waves of cyberGIS enhancements. Wang has been a principal investigator for more than $30,000,000 in awards, with industry support complemented by funding from a diverse range of U.S. government agencies, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and National Institutes of Health.

Wang’s transdisciplinary community-building skills has been evident in numerous different endeavors. As founding director of the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Wang oversaw projects that developed new software, research frameworks, and analytic approaches to address problems in hydrology, public health, agriculture, environmental sustainability, and other realms. Working with UIUC’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Wang spearheaded the development of the first supercomputer focused on geospatial computation. He led a broadly based effort to establish one of five new national institutes supported through NSF’s Harnessing the Data Revolution initiative.

This institute will create an integrative discovery environment for harnessing geospatial data to increase understanding of interconnected interactions across diverse socioeconomic-environmental systems in order to enhance community resilience and environmental sustainability.

Wang has always demonstrated a strong commitment to interconnections among service, research, and teaching. He partnered with the AAG and other organizations to conduct a series of summer schools focused on developing the next-generation workforce for advancing cyberGIS and geospatial data science. He created a fellowship program to advance covid-19 research and education through reproducible geospatial science. He has had great passion for and extensive experience in leading and contributing to initiatives and activities focused on enhancing justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion. His numerous research and education projects have engaged many scholars, students, and stakeholders with diverse and underrepresented backgrounds.

Because of his many significant accomplishments; his boundless energy, advocacy, and passion for GIScience and geography; and his remarkable ability to anticipate future needs and address them by building intellectual bridges and working across interdisciplinary boundaries, the American Association of Geographers awards Distinguished Scholarship Honors to Shaowen Wang.

2022 Gilbert Grosvenor Honors for Geographic Education

Photo of Jerry MitchellJerry T. Mitchell, University of South Carolina

The 2022 Gilbert Grosvenor Honors for Geographic Education is awarded to Dr. Jerry T. Mitchell for his exceptional service to the discipline of geography and unique contributions to the geographic education community. From 2004 to 2021, Dr. Mitchell served as the Coordinator of the South Carolina Geographic Alliance (SCGA). He has received more than $5 million in grants to support geographic education and has provided pre-service training, professional development, and geographic content lectures for more than 40,000 educators throughout South Carolina. Under Jerry’s direction, the South Carolina Geographic Alliance developed the highly publicized and successful Geofest conferences, held twice annually to bring together educators from across the state of South Carolina to learn and share innovations for teaching geography. Jerry was the lead author of the South Carolina Social Studies Academic Standards in Geography that reach more than 700,000 students taking geography in grades 3, 7, and 9. For his geographic education work in South Carolina, Dr. Mitchell also received the South Carolina Governor’s Award for Excellence in Scientific Awareness.

In 2018, Jerry received the National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE) President’s Award for Service, and he became the President of NCGE in 2020. As President of NCGE, he made a point of ensuring that the organization’s annual meeting, held in December 2020 in conjunction with the National Council for Social Studies, prominently addressed issue of race, place, and social justice in the meetings’ talks and keynote presentations. Jerry was also selected as a National Geographic Explorer in 2019 by the National Geographic Society. Dr. Mitchell served as the editor for the Journal of Geography from 2010-2019 where he oversaw the publication of nearly a decade of geography teacher resources and peer-reviewed research that helped to define contemporary geographic education.

Dr. Mitchell has shown a clear commitment to diversity and inclusion through his personal publications, his student advising, his outreach to teachers and students across the state of South Carolina, and in his media engagement. Over the past several years, Jerry has co-authored pieces in Journal of Geography, The Geography Teacher, and Social Education that assist teachers in developing and teaching lessons that advance critical understandings of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Jerry’s research has explored the connectivity between the Carolina Lowcountry and Africa through rice cultivation, and he has contributed to scholarship exploring the complex histories and geographies connecting hospitality and slavery and the role of social power and locational discrimination in naming streets for famed civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Through his coauthored research on the segregation era travel guide The Negro Motorist Green Book, Dr. Mitchell integrates geography and language arts to help educators and their students explore the racial politics of African American mobility, highlighting the resistant agency that Black travelers exercised in planning trips to navigate racially hostile highways and accommodations. For his many contributions to geographic education and beyond, the AAG awards Dr. Jerry T. Mitchell with this year’s Gilbert Grosvenor Honors for Geographic Education.

2022 AAG Gilbert White Distinguished Public Service Honors

Photo of Craig ColtonCraig Colten, Louisiana State University

Craig E. Colten receives the 2022 AAG Gilbert F. White Distinguished Public Service Honors for his many contributions while a government employee during his early career and, later, while an academic. After earning a 1984 PhD at Syracuse University under the mentorship of Donald W. Meinig, he applied his skill in historical geography at the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

The Love Canal disaster of the 1970s had prompted state governments to identify historic industrial sites contaminated with toxic waste, and Colten led an interdisciplinary team to develop a hazardous waste information system, a pioneering application of GIS to primary sources such as Sanborn maps. During the early 1990s, his ongoing research on toxic environmental hazards supported Superfund litigation by the US Department of Justice. In 1996, however, he transitioned into an academic position at Texas State University, both as a faculty member in the Geography Department as well as the Director of the Center for Hazards and Environmental Geography.

Since 2000, as a professor in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University, he has contributed seminal research on environmental racism and the environmental history of New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, and the Lower Mississippi River Valley. While the author of many publications that negotiate the borderlands of academic research and public policy, a series of monographs well captures his historical perspective on the shifting interface of water, land, and life along the Gulf Coast: An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (2005), Perilous Place and Powerful Storms: Hurricane Protection in Coastal Louisiana (2009), Southern Waters: The Limits to Abundance (2014), and State of Disaster: A Historical Geography of Louisiana’s Land Loss Crisis (2021).

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, as the public sought to understand the shocking devastation of one of America’s iconic cities, he demonstrated through his many media appearances and newspaper essays just how essential historical geography is for understanding people and places. Now emeritus, he and his many PhD graduates continue to apply their research to support communities threatened by flooding and coastal land loss. As one of his nomination letters puts it, “the highest art of an academic’s work is to be able to work within several worlds simultaneously and to directly provide voice for one’s ideas and knowledge in the halls of power and on the stage of public debate. It is a rare academic that can achieve this … highest bar of achievement that Gilbert White left for us. And it is [a] bar that Craig certainly passes at the highest level.”

2022 AAG Media Achievement Award

Photo of Joshua Inwood

Joshua Inwood, Pennsylvania State University

Dr. Joshua Inwood is the recipient of the 2021 Media Achievement award for his distinguished record of achievement in media engagement on important topics that advance societal understanding of racism, civil rights, and social justice. Dr. Joshua Inwood currently holds a joint appointment as a Professor in the Department of Geography and the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University. He is also an affiliated faculty member in the African American Studies Program. Since earning his Ph.D. in 2007, Dr. Inwood has authored and co-authored more than 35 op-eds, including 8 articles with The Conversation that have attracted over half a million readers. Many of these contributions have been distributed or recirculated in prominent news outlets such as Newsweek, the Associated Press, the Huffington Post, and the Houston Chronicle. Additionally, Dr. Inwood has promoted the discipline of geography and articulated an anti-racist view on social issues through interviews with various local, national, and international print, television and radio media outlets, including USA Today, The Atlantic Magazine, PBS, The Christian Science Monitor, France24, and El Confidencial. In particular, Dr. Inwood’s research has been quoted in two Atlantic articles that advanced arguments in support of a truth commissions for confronting social and political issues such as the #MeToo movement and the January 6th capital riot. Throughout his career, Dr. Inwood has demonstrated and advocated for an ethos of public engagement among academics by leading initiatives within the AAG and through the Penn State Humanities Center to better prepare geographers and humanities researchers to engage with the media. Toward that end, Dr. Inwood has also consulted directly with the media to advance stronger connections between media and academics. Further, Dr Inwood, alongside Dr. Derek Aldermann, co-edited a special forum on public intellectualism in the AAG journal Professional Geographer, which argued for the need for media-savvy and community-engaged geographers. Dr. Inwood has authored over 50 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and book reviews with publications in leading journals such as the Annals of the American Association of Geographers and Geoforum. Dr. Inwood and his research group have secured multiple external grants to support his civil rights research, including two recent National Science Foundation (NSF) grants to evaluate a truth and reconciliation commission in Greensboro, NC, and to explore the use of geospatial intelligence
by civil rights organizations. Collectively, Dr. Inwood’s record of success with media engagement and scholarly research has garnered an international scholarly reputation for a commitment toward communicating counter-narratives to anti-justice and white supremacy movements. For these accomplishments, the AAG Honors Committee wholeheartedly supports his receipt of the AAG Media Achievement award.

VerySpatial.com logo - the earth wearing headphonesSue Bergeron, Frank LaFone, Barbara MacLennan, and Jesse Rouse VerySpatial.com

The 2022 AAG Media Achievement Award goes to VerySpatial and its four co-founders and hosts: Jesse Rouse (Instructor, Department of Geology and Geography, UNC Pembroke), Sue Bergeron (Associate Professor, Department of Politics and Geography, Coastal Carolina University), Frank LaFone (Senior Internet Applications Programmer, WV GIS Technical Center) and Barbara MacLennan (Assistant Professor, Department of Behavioral Sciences, Fairmont State University). VerySpatial is an internationally known, award-winning podcast that has provided outstanding geographic content and teaching methods to geography enthusiasts and educators around the world for 15 years. VerySpatial was founded the same year as YouTube and before the first iPhone appeared, demonstrating the co-founders’ innovation in media achievement. Since then, the hosts have regularly produced topical podcasts appreciated by a loyal and dedicated worldwide following.

VerySpatial seeks to point out how Geography and geospatial technologies filter into our digital and daily lives. The content is a mix of academic issues, current commercial and industrial advances in Geospatial technologies, and contemporary events. This combination has been important in bringing together material from published academic works in the context of recent events and trends. In doing so, the podcast monitors the pulse of geographical events and geospatial advances and maintains a sense of excitement and enthusiasm for geography. The content has ranged from political geography, spatial statistics, spatial privacy, virtual reality, interviews with world-renowned geographers, and hundreds of other topics over the course of 500 hours of material spanning over 650 episodes. The website receives approximately 180,000 page views, 75,000 visits, and 14,500 new visitors per month from around the world.

VerySpatial has been recognized for its contributions to geographic education: ESRI awarded the podcast a Special Achievement in GIS award in 2007; National Geographic listed VerySpatial in their top education blogs for four years in a row; and iTunes rated the podcast in the top 5% of all K–12 podcasts. In 2020, the AAG Guide to GeoWeek Activities contained suggestions for participating in Geography Awareness Week including listening to VerySpatial. The AAG Media Achievement Award not only adds to this list of honors bestowed upon VerySpatial, but also demonstrates the gratefulness that the field of geography has for this group of people for dedicating the last fifteen years to making geography exciting and accessible to thousands of people around the world every week.

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Awardees

Graduate Students Honored During AAG Regional Division Annual Fall Meetings for Outstanding Work

The American Association of Geographers (AAG) announces the recipients of the 2016 Council Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper at a Regional Meeting. Graduate student AAG members from around the U.S. participated by submitting to their region’s paper competition and attending their regional division fall meeting. A student paper from seven out of nine AAG regions was chosen by a jury of AAG regional division leaders and the honors for this inaugural award were given at each of the division meetings.

The award is designed to encourage graduate student participation at AAG regional division meetings and support their attendance at major AAG annual meetings. Each awardee will receive $1,000 in funding for use towards the awardee’s registration and travel costs to the AAG annual meeting.

Jacob Watkins, recipient of the East Lakes (ELDAAG) division’s award, is a master’s student at Western Michigan University. The award was presented by AAG President Glen MacDonald and ELDAAG Regional Councillor Patrick Lawrence.

Paul Miller, recipient of the Southeast division’s award, is a Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia.

Melody Lynch, recipient of the  New England\St. Lawrence Valley division’s award, is a master’s student at McGill University.

Ashley Marie Fent, recipient of the Pacific Coast division’s award, is a Ph.D. student at the University of California – Los Angeles.

The Middle States and Mid-Atlantic regional divisions did not issue an award in this category this year.

Learn more about submitting a paper next year

Kathleen Epstein, recipient of the Great Plains/Rocky Mountains (GPRM) division’s award, is a master’s student at Montana State University. Her paper is titled, “The multiple meanings of ecosystem management: A historical analysis of modern environmental conflict in the Greater Yellowstone.” Pictured from left to right are AAG Executive Director Doug Richardson, Vice President of GPRM Brandon J. Vogt, awardee Kathleen Epstein and AAG Past President Sarah Bednarz.
Stephanie Mundis, recipient of the Southwest (SWAAG) divisions’ award, is a master’s student at New Mexico State University. Her paper is titled “Spatial distribution of mosquitoes that vector Zika, dengue, and West Nile Virus in New Mexico” and included co-authors: Michaela Buenemann, Kathryn A. Hanley and Nathan Lopez-Brody.
Jason LaBrosse, recipient of the West Lakes division’s award, is a master’s student at the University of Northeastern Illinois. His paper is titled, “The Relationship Between Concentrated Commodified Pets Populations and the Urban Environment of Chicago.”
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Changing Human Populations Collective Concerns Spatial Narratives
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Awardees

2021 AAG Specialty and Affinity Group Awards

Photo of bright sparkly lights on dark background

The AAG’s 75 interest-based specialty groups and eight affinity groups recognize their members accomplishments over the course of the year. Following are the awardees within each group for 2021:

Africa Specialty Group

Distinguished Emerging Scholar Award, Hanson Nyantakyi-Frimpong, University of Denver

Florence Margai Student Paper Award, Matthieu Ahouangbenon, University of Delaware

Graduate Research Award, Dinko Hanaan Dinko, University of Denver

Animal Geographies Specialty Group

Animal Geography Graduate Student Presentation Award, Jacquelyn  Johnston, Florida International University, Death in the dark: Ethical considerations of making animal death visible through public records data mining in multispecies research

Applied Geography Specialty Group

Applied Geography Travel & Research Award

  • Changzhen Wang, Delineation of Cancer Service Areas Anchored by Major Cancer Centers in the USA
  • Claire  Burch, Energy sector buy-in and climate change solutions: A case study of support and trust of climate change initiatives in Oklahoma
  • Xiantong Wang, Quantifying the Temporal Pattern of Land Change of a Time Series: an Analysis on Categorical Variables with MapBiomas
  • Dan Tian, BLP3-SP: A Bayesian Log-Pearson Type III model with Spatial Priors for reducing uncertainty in flood frequency analyses
  • Jiyoung Lee, Spatiotemporal Analysis of Nighttime Crimes in Vienna, Austria
  • Lauren Mabe, Application of a decentralized approach to waste facility siting: the case of food waste in Los Angeles County, California
  • Hanlin Zhou, Using Street View Imagery to Examine the Relationship between Perception of Park Environments and Time Spent in Parks

Asian Geography Specialty Group

Graduate Student Paper Competition, Shamayeta  Bhattacharya

Graduate Student Research Fellowship, David  Bachrach

Biogeography Specialty Group

Parsons Award for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement in Biogeography, Kathleen Parker, University of Georgia

Best Master’s Student Paper Presentation, Tali Hamilton, Texas Tech University, The Effects of Grass Invasion and Fire Severity on Acacia koa Regeneration

Best Ph.D. Student Paper Presentation, Jonathan Kleinman, University of Alabama, Department of Geography, Floristic indicators of ecosystem recovery after wind, logging, and fire in a Pinus woodland

Student Research Grant, Clara Mosso, Colorado State University – Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability, Urban expansion into native forest: Assessing impacts on fire risk and ecosystem services provision in San Martín de los Andes (Neuquén) and Aspen (Colorado)

Cowles Award for Best Biogeography Publication, Evan Larson, University of Wisconsin-Platteville, People, Fire, and Pine: Linking Human Agency and Landscape in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and Beyond, published in the Annals of the AAG

Master’s Student Presentation Award, Tali Hamilton, Texas Tech, The Effects of Grass Invasion and Fire Severity on Acacia koa Regeneration in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park

Ph.D. Student Presentation Award, Jonathan Kleinman, University of Alabama, Floristic Indicators of Ecosystem Recovery after Wind, Logging, and Fire in a Pinus woodland

Ph.D. Student Research Award, Clara Mosso, Colorado State University, Urban expansion into native forest: Assessing impacts on fire risk and ecosystem services provision in San Martín de los Andes (Neuquén) and Aspen (Colorado)

James J. Parsons Award for Lifetime Achievement in Biogeography, Kathleen Parker, University of Georgia

Henry C. Cowles Award for Best Biogeography Publication, Evan Larson, University of Wisconsin-Platteville, People, Fire, and Pine: Linking human agency and landscape in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and beyond

Black Geographies Specialty Group

Graduate Student Travel Award, Maya Kearney

Clyde Woods Black Geographies Specialty Group Graduate Student Paper Award, Zaira Simone, CUNY, Earth and Environmental Systems,  Essay: Tek Down Nelson! The Struggle for Repair in Barbados

Caribbean Geography Specialty Group

Travel Award, Jenna Pulice

Conference support award, Suzanne Nimoh, University of Texas at Austin

Cartography Specialty Group

Travel Grant for Underrepresented Groups

  • Morgan P. Vickers
  • Fikriyah Winata

China Specialty Group

Best Student Paper Award

  • Lisha He, The University of Hong Kong, The uneven geography of Chinese real estate investment in the United States: Local market conditions, migration and ethnic networks
  • Yining Tan, Arizona State University, Cross-border Mobility of Skilled Migrants from the US to China: Migration Motivations and Return Intentions (runner up)

Outstanding Service Award

  • Ronald Knapp, The State University of New York New Paltz
  • Qihao Weng, Indiana State university

Climate Specialty Group

Lifetime Achievement Award, Andrew Comrie

Student Paper Competition

  • Daniel Vecellio (1st place)
  • Flavia Moraes (2nd place)
  • Lori Wachowicz (3rd place)
  • Holli Capps (3rd place)

John Russell Mather Paper of the Year, Ariane Middel, Arizona State University, Solar reflective pavements — A policy panacea to heat mitigation?

Coastal and Marine Specialty Group

Norbert Psuty Student Paper Competition Honorable Mention,

Norb Psuty Student Paper Competition Honorable Mention,

Norbert Psuty Student Paper Competition

  • Pei Zhang, University of Alabama, An algorithm for objective analysis of grainflow morphology (winner)
  • Thomas Bilintoh, Clark University, A Generalized Method to Quantify the Dynamics of a Specific Category to Compare Sites (honorable mention)
  • Duc Nguyen, University of Otago, Incident wind direction and topographic steering through foredune notches (honorable mention)

Critical Geographies of Education

Critical Geographies of Education Dissertation Award, Symon James-Wilson, Geographies and Infrastructures of School Segregation: A Historical Case Study of Rochester, NY

Cultural and Political Ecology

CAPE Scholar-Activist, Sara Maxwell, Seeing the people for the trees: Connecting plant labor to human lives in fighting a biomass wood pellet factory in North Carolina

Graduate Student Paper Award, Cynthia Morinville, The Toil of Waste: capitalist value and biopolitics in the global e-waste economy

Student Field Study Award

  • Zachary Tabor, A Scourge on Texas: Identifying local Scale CWD and Feral Hog Management Strategies
  • Hernán  Bianchi Benguria, Demystifying Electromobility: The lithium hinterland and socioenvironmental transformationin the Atacama Desert

Student Paper Award, Julia Sizek, Regulatory Alchemy

Cultural Geography Specialty Group

Denis Cosgrove Ph.D. Research Award, Ned Wilbur

Honararium – CGSG Paper Competition Judge, Caitie Finlayson

M.A. Research Award, Kiera McMaster

Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov Paper Award, Travis Bost

Cyberinfrastructure Specialty Group

Robert Raskin Student Competition

  • Lin Yue, The Ohio State University, Traffic density estimation from camera feeds using deep learning and high accuracy regions (1st place)
  • Arif Masrur, Pennsylvania State University, Multi-scale machine learning for interpreting spatiotemporally heterogeneous drivers of geographic events (1st place)
  • Ahmad Ilderim Tokey, University of Toledo, Mobility During COVID-19 in the USA: Its Spatiotemporal Pattern and Associations with COVID Cases (3rd place)

Digital Geography

Racial Justice Award

  • Emily Barrett
  • Wenfei Xu
  • Isaac Rivera
  • Candice Wilfong
  • Joyce-Ann Percel

Disability Speciality Group

Todd Reynolds Student Paper Competition, Caitlin Joseph, Temple University, My Body, The Planet: On the potential of relational geographies of disability within the climate change discourse

Economic Geography Specialty Group

Best dissertation award

  • Wanjing Chen, The Power of Mirage: State, Capital, and Politics in the Grounding of ‘Belt and Road’ in Laos
  • Erin Torkelson, Taken for Granted: Geographies of Social Welfare in South Africa
  • Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen, Bordering Blackness: The Production of Race in the Morocco-EU Immigration Regime (honorable mention)

Best Student Paper in Economic Geography, Samuel Nowak, The social lives of network effects: Platform urbanism, speculation, and collective risk management amongst gig workers in Greater Jakarta, Indonesia

Graduate Research Award, Albina Gibadullina

Energy and Environment Speciality Group

Advancing Diversity and Inclusion Award

  • Zihan Kan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
  • Edgar Andres Virguez Rodriguez, Ph.D. Candidate at Duke University

Best Student Paper, Carelle Mang-Benza, University of Western Ontario, Many shades of pink in the energy transition: Seeing women in energy extraction, production, distribution, and consumption

Dissertation Data and Field Work Award

  • Elena Louder, University of Arizona, Renewing Injustice? A multi-scalar examination of solar energy development in Chile’s Atacama Desert
  • Saumya Vaishnava, Pennsylvania State University

Ethnic Geography Specialty Group

Early Career Award, Paul McDaniel, Kennesaw State University

Eurasian Specialty Group

Research/Travel/Conference Travel Award

  • Sameera Ibrahim, University of Wisconsin
  • Francis Naylor, University of Colorado at Boulder

European Specialty Group

Student Paper Competition

  • Samantha Brown, Univeristy of Oregon, Pork Politics: What the Danish Meatball War Can Teach Us About Race, Migration, Identity and Belonging
  • Beth Nelson, University of South Carolina, Spaces of Inclusion and Exclusion: Algerians in France

Feminist Geographies Specialty Group

Glenda Laws Student Paper Award, Annie Elledge, UNC-Chapel Hill; Her paper, The Future of Corpulence: Geographies of Fatness, Medical Care, and Tomorrow, pushes feminist geographers to rethink theorizations of fat embodiment, neoliberal control of the body, as well as conceptions of “fat futures.” The awards committee was particularly impressed by the paper’s ambitious scope, which combines literatures on geographies of fatness with work on national and neoliberal embodiment, frameworks in health geographies on the violence of care, and work in Black geographies on futurity.

Jan Monk Service Award, Ann Oberhauser, Iowa State University; This award recognizes her significant service to women in geography and/or feminist geography. As a feminist scholar and mentor, Dr. Oberhauser also has a distinguished record of service to women in geography. She has served on the AAG Committee on the Status of Women in Geography, the Executive Committee of the IGU Commission, and the Executive Board of this specialty group. In this time, she played an important role in facilitating the name change of this group.

Rickie Sanders Junior Faculty Award, Caroline Faria, University of Texas, Austin, Recent Publication: Faria, C. and Whitesell, D., 2021. Global retail capital and urban futures: Feminist postcolonial perspectives. Geography Compass, 15(1): https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12551

Susan Hanson Dissertation Proposal Award, Vivian Deidre Rodriguez Rocha, Pennsylvania State University; Her proposal, “Counter-topographies of care: Caring activism in the movement for women’s lives in Mexico” centers the material practices of women’s protest movements against femicide in urban space in central Mexico. The committee was intrigued by the proposed investigation into how women’s intimate care-practices in and through protests rework urban landscapes and assert women’s right to the city. Further, her mixed-method approach to documenting a counter-cartography of women’s solidarities in urban space and long-term partnership with anti-violence feminist organizers on the ground exemplify a strong commitment to feminist geographical epistemologies and ethics.

Geographic Information Science and Systems

Graduate Honors Student Paper Competition

  • Bing Zhou (1st place)
  • Zhen Liu (2nd place)
  • Scarlett Rakowska (2nd place)

Graduate Honors Student Paper Competition

  • Wataru Morioka
  • Jinwoo Park

Undergraduate Honors Student Paper Competition, Kexin Chen (1st place)

Geographies of Food and Agriculture

Graudate Research Award

  • Lauren Asprooth
  • Atlanta-Marinna Grant

Geography Education Specialty Group

Gail Hobbs Student Paper, Christopher Krause, University of South Carolina,

Geomorphology Specialty Group

Graduate Student Paper Award – Ph.D., Sumaiya Tul Siddique, Louisiana State University, Paper Presentation: Assessing over 100-years of geomorphic and anthropogenic alterations on the Grand River, Michigan

Reds Wolman Research Award

  • M.S. research proposal: Taylor Johaneman, University of Colorado – Boulder, Research Proposal: “Geomorphic and ecological responses to human modification of the Fremont River, Captiol Reef National Park, Utah”
  • Ph.D. research proposal: John Kemper, Colorado State University, Research Proposal: “Sediment-ecological connectivity: establishing the links between tributary morphological processes and downstream riparian vegetation dynamics”

Undergraduate Student Poster Award, Trung Tran, Louisiana State University, Poster Presentation: “A classification of neck cutoffs incorporating cutoff centerline curvature based on a global database of meandering rivers”

Graduate Student Affinity Group

Research & Support Award

  • Rachel  Arney, University of Georgia
  • Vani Singh, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
  • Morgan Vickers, UC Berkeley Department of Geography
  • Grace Chun, University of Hawaii Manoa Geography and Environment Department
  • Mia Dawson, UC Davis
  • Robert Anderson, University of Washington
  • Mindy Price, University of California – Berkeley
  • Carlos Serrano
  • Maritza Geronimo, UCLA
  • Maya Kearney, American University, Department of Anthropology

Travel Award, Sylvia Rocio Cifuentes

Hazards, Risks, and Disasters Specialty Group

The Gilbert F. White Thesis Award, Joseph Toland, University of South California, A model for emergency logistical resource requirements: supporting socially vulnerable populations affected by the (M) 7.8 San Andreas earthquake scenario in Los Angeles County, California

The Gilbert F. White Thesis/Dissertation Award, Marissa Bell, SUNY Buffalo, Energy justice, nuclear landscapes, and consent: An examination of Canadian nuclear waste siting

Health and Medical Geography

Emerging Scholar Award

  • Trang VoPham, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
  • Marta Jankowska, City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center

Health Data Visualization Award

  • Dynamic: Dylan Halpern, University of Chicago, The US COVID Atlas: https://theuscovidatlas.org
  • Static: Changzhen  Wang, Louisiana State University, Spatial Network of Cancer Care Utilization and Automated Delineation of Cancer Service Areas in Northeast US

Student Travel Award, Zhiyue Xia

Jacques May Thesis Prize

  • Siewying Shee, National University of Singapore, Moving bodies, feeling health: Examining the embodied politics of health-promoting infrastructure in Singapore (Master’s)
  • Makato  Takahashi, Munich Centre for Technology in Society (MCTS) , The Improvised Expert: Performing expert authority after Fukushima (2011-2018), (Ph.D.)
  • Meredith Alberta Palmer, Cornell University, Land, Family, Body: Measurement and the Racial Politics of US Colonialism in Haudenosaunee Country (Ph.D.)

Melinda S. Meade Distinguished Scholar in Health and Medical Geography, Sarah Curtis, Durham University

Peter J. Gould Student Paper Award, Yanzhe  Yin, University of Georgia, DTEx: A dynamic urban thermal exposure index based on human mobility patterns

Historical Geography

Andrew Hill Clark Paper Award

  • Travis Bost, University of Toronto, After Sugar: Plantation Persistence in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana (1st place)
  • Andrew Hill Clark paper award (2nd place), Ian Spangler, University of Kentucky, Sweat matters: on the spatial politics and epistemology of perspiration (2nd place)

Carville Earle Research Award (Ph.D. student), Ian Spangler, U. of Kentucky, Research project: “The Impact of Platform Real Estate Technologies on Housing and Home”

Human Dimensions of Global Change

2021-2022 Student Initiatives for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award, Siya Aggrey, Stellenbosch University

2021-2022 Student Research Grant, Emily Melvin

Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group

Plenary Honorarium

  • Aude Chesnais
  • Josh Meisel
  • David Bartecchi

Landscape Specialty Group

Conference Registration Award (inaugural), Joshua Merced, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Membership Award (naugural), Desiree Valadares, University of California, Berkeley

Landscape Photography Competition

  • Preston Welker, University of Calgary,  for photo titled “The Unruly ‘Natural Landscape:’ Graffiti Pier” (1st place)
  • Pankaj Bajracharya, University of North Carolina Greensboro, for photo titled “Kathmandu Valley” (2nd place)

Student Presentation Competition

  • Sanober Mirza, University of Montana, Understanding Global Perspectives on Large-Landscape Conservation (1st place)
  • Key MacFarlane, University of California, Santa Cruz, The Temporality of Landscape: Between Sauer and Benjamin University (2nd place)

Latin America Specialty Group

Field Study Award, Ph.D. Level: Mirella Pretell Gomero, Syracuse University, Project title: “Environmental Justice and Indigenous Women’s Struggles in the Northern Peruvian Amazon” (2nd place)

Best Student Paper Award, Megan Dwyer Baumann, Pennsylvania State University, Paper title: “No es rentable”: Land rentals as a form of slow exclusion and dispossession in Colombia’s irrigation megaprojects

Student Field Study Award

  • MA Level: Mehrnush Golriz, UCLA, Managing Difference: Inequalities in Boa Vista’s Migrant Shelters
  • Ph.D. Level: Ruchi Patel, Pennsylvania State University, Nature-based tourism, development, and change on El Salvador’s Bálsamo Coast

Latinx Geographies

Mutual Aid Award

  • Hazim Abdullah-Smith
  • Jin Chen

Mutual Aid Funds

  • Channon Oyeniran
  • Flavia Lake
  • Zaira Simone
  • Mernush Golriz
  • Annita Lucchesi
  • Fikriyah Winata
  • Shamayeta Bhattacharya
  • Suzzanne Nimoh
  • Diego Martinez-Lugo

Mountain Geography Specialty Group

Barry Bishop Career Award, Sarah Halvorson, University of Montana, for significant contributions to Mountain Geography over her career

Chimborazo Student Research Grant Award, Elise Arnett, University of Michigan-Dearborn, Using Oblique Aerial Photography from 1931 to Assess Changes in Tropical Glaciers in the Peruvian Andes

Paleoenvironmental Change

Butzer Award, Sally Horn, University of Tennessee

Mosley Thompson Award, Tim Beach, University of Texas, Austin, Beach, T., Luzzadder-Beach, S., Krause, S., Guderjan, T., Valdez, F., Fernandez-Diaz, J.C., Eshleman, S. and Doyle, C., 2019. Ancient Maya wetland fields revealed under tropical forest canopy from laser scanning and multiproxy evidence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(43), pp.21469-21477

Student Research Award – Ph.D., Jamie Alumbaugh, University of Tennessee, A Multiproxy Record from the Ecuadorian Andes  Incorporating sedaDNA Analysis

Student Poster/Presentation Award, Rebecca Vail, CSU-Sacramento, Reconstructing 4,000 years of fire at Markwood Meadow Sierra National Forest, California

Student Paper/Presentation Award

  • Luke Blentlinger, University of Tennessee, Compound specific stable C and H isotope analyses of vegetation and precipitation change in Belizean pine savanna (M.S.)
  • Julie Edwards, University of Arizona, Multiple climate signals in quantitative wood anatomical measurement of Rocky Mountain bristlecone pine (Ph.D.)

Political Geography

Alexander B. Murphy Dissertation Enhancement Award, Lauren Fritzsche, University of Arizona

Graduate student paper award in MA/MS category, Grace Chun

Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award, Sara Smith, University of North Carolina, Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory, and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold (Rutgers University Press)

Undergraduate Paper Award, Aubrey Cunningham, The Sino-Indian Border Dispute: A Case of Cartographic Ambiguity and Empire Expansion in the Western Himalayas

Richard Morrill Public Outreach Award, Mia Bennett, University of Hong Kong

Stanley D. Brunn Junior Scholar Award, Danielle Purifoy, University of North Carolina

Virginia Mamadouh Outstanding Research Award, Anna Jackman, Racheal Squire, Johanne Bruun, Pip Thorton, Unearthing feminist territories and terrains (Political Geography 2020)

Queer and Trans Geographies Specialty Group

Graduate Student Conference Fund Award

  • Bobbi Ali Zaman
  • Shamayeta  Bhattacharya
  • Hazim Abdullah-Smith
  • Jinwen Chen
  • Chan Arun-Pina

Recreation, Tourism, and Sport

John Rooney Award, Dallen  Timothy

Student Paper Award, Dalilah Laidin, Department of Geography and Environment, University of Hawai’i at Manoa

Roy Wolfe Award, Salvador Clavé

Remote Sensing

Student Honors Paper Competition Award

  • Qi Dong, Beijing Normal University, Correction of area estimates derived from subpixel mapping: a two-term method (TTM) (1st place)
  • Rowan Converse, University of New Mexico, Assessing drought vegetation dynamics at the landscape scale in semiarid grass and shrubland using MESMA (2nd place)
  • Yuean Qiu, Beijing Normal University, A spatiotemporal fusion method to simultaneously generate full-length normalized difference vegetation index time series (3rd place)
  • Yilun Zhao, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Monitoring phenology of deciduous forest community and individuals with multiple satellites (3rd place)

Rural Geography

Student Paper Presentation Award, Clare Beer, University of California, Los Angeles, Big Philanthropy, Big Conservation: Ecology as Resource Spectacle in Chilean Patagonia

Student Research Award, Dinko Hanaan Dinko, Department of Geography & the Environment, University of Denver, Negotiating Water Security for Irrigation and Smallholder Agriculture in Northern Ghana

Socialist and Critical Geography SG

Blaut Award, Richa Nagar, University of Minnesota

Student Paper Award

  • Robert Chlala, USC Sociology
  • Travis Bost, Dept. of Geography & Planning, University of Toronto

Travel Award

  • Ricardo Barbosa Jr., Socialist and Critical Geography Specialty Group
  • So Hyung Lim, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
  • Yawei Zhao, University of Calgary
  • Amelia Merhar, University of Waterloo, Geography and Environmental Management

Spatial Analysis and Modeling

Student Travel Award

  • Mingzheng  Yang
  • Binbin Lin
  • Connor Donegan
  • Yaxuan Zhang
  • Ruowei Liu
  • Chenxiao Guo
  • Wataru Morioka

John Odland Student Paper Award

  • Jessica Strzempko, Flow matrix avoids problems of the popular Markov matrix
  • Junghwan Kim, An examination of the effects of the neighborhood effect averaging problem (NEAP) on the assessment of sociodemographic disparities in air pollution exposures: Evidence from Los Angeles
  • Joe Chestnut, Exploring the Utility of Gini Coefficients as a Measure of Temporal Variation in Public Transit Travel Time

Transportation Geography

Masters Thesis Award, Elise Desjardins, McMaster University

Dissertation Award, Mischa Young, University of Ontario

Edward L. Ullman Award, Selima Sultana, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, for contributions to the field of Transportation Geography

Undergraduate Student Affinity Group

Undergraduate Student Poster Competition

  • Alexandra Lister, Rattlesnake Safety on the Black Forest Trail (1st pace)
  • Samantha Proulx-Whitcomb, Hurricane Season During a Pandemic: Changes in Disaster Response and Migrant Farmworkers in Hillsborough County, Florida (2nd place)

Urban Geography Specialty Group

Dissertation Award, Elsa  Noterman

Glenda Laws Undergraduate Paper

  • Mariam Abdelaziz
  • Lauren Weber

Graduate Student Fellowship

  • Sameera Ibrahim (M.A.)
  • Sara Tornabene (Ph.D.)

Graduate Student Paper

  • Allen Xiao
  • Diala Lteif, University of Toronto

Virtual Conference Access Award

  • Allen  Xiao
  • Maira Magnani
  • Ivin Yeo
  • Josh Merced
  • Wenjing  Zhang
  • Hung Vo

Water Resources Specialty Group

Student Research Paper

  • Madeline Wade, Texas State University, Community Education and Perceptions of Water Reuse: A Case Study in Norman, OK
  • William Delgado, University of Texas-Austin, Solar desalination: Cases, synthesis, and challenges

Student Research Presentation, Natallia Diessner, University of New Hampshire

Student Research Proposal, Lukman Fashina, East Tennessee State University, Water Quality Assessment of Karst Springwater as a Private Water Supply Source, Northeast Tennessee

Olen Paul Matthews and Kathleen A. Dwyer Fund for Water Resources Award, Michelaina Johnson, UC-Santa Cruz, Towards Equitable Groundwater Governance: A Case Study of California’s Most Critically Overdrafted Coastal Basin

Wine Beer and Spirits

Percy Dougherty Career Achievement Award (inaugural), Percy Dougherty, Kutztown University, As a founding and active member, Percy Dougherty was honored by having the biennial Wine, Beer and Sprits career achievement award named in his honor and being its first recipient

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Awardees

AAG Announces Undergraduate Program Excellence Awards

The American Association of Geographers (AAG) has named two recipients of the 2021 Award for Bachelors’ Program Excellence in Geography: The Geographic Science Program at James Madison University (JMU) in Virginia, and the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.

The annual award and cash prize for Bachelors’ Program Excellence is one of three subcategories in AAG’s Program Excellence Awards, honoring Geography departments and Geography programs within blended departments that have significantly enhanced the prominence and reputation of Geography as a discipline and demonstrated the characteristics of a strong and engaged academic unit. The Bachelors’ Program award honors non-PhD-granting Geography programs at the baccalaureate level. Such programs play an important role in educating future geographers and promoting the discipline to a wider world, but tend not to be included in national rankings within the Academy.

JMU’s Geographic Science Program has shown remarkable growth over the last nine years, increasing from 156 to 240 majors, and employing 9.5 full-time tenure-track faculty. The program has invested in high-impact teaching practices that engage undergraduate students in field experiences in water resources, advanced cultural geography, and biogeography, often in the context of community engagement and service learning, both locally and abroad, and project-based instruction with partners such as Shenandoah National Park. The program is also known for its collegiality and maintenance of connections with its alumni.

Kennesaw State University’s Department of Geography and Anthropology has shown extraordinary energy and success in its promotion of geography on and off campus, since its founding in 1997. Offering six degree tracks — a Geospatial Sciences B.S., a Geography B.A., a Geography Minor, an Environmental Studies Minor, a Certificate in Geographic Information Sciences, and a Certificate in Land Surveying–the program serves about 7,000 students per year with 15 full-time faculty, 4 limited term full-time faculty, and 9 part-time faculty. Emphasizing experiential learning, professional experiences, high-impact practices, community engagement, internships and co-ops, teaching assistantships, and study abroad opportunities, the department tailors its coursework for students based on their educational interests and career goals.

“Undergraduate programs in Geography are the lifeblood of the discipline,” said Gary Langham, Executive Director of AAG. “These programs open so many doors to students, preparing them for careers in every sector and virtually every imaginable field, from environmental science to public health to business logistics, and so much more. We commend James Madison University and Kennesaw State University for their innovation in attracting and engaging students and their communities.”

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AAG Announces 2020 Book Awards

The AAG is pleased to announce the recipients of the three 2020 AAG Book Awards: the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize, the AAG Globe Book Award for Public Understanding of Geography, and the AAG Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography. The AAG Book Awards mark distinguished and outstanding works published by geography authors during the previous year, 2020. The awardees will be formally recognized at a future event when it is safe to do so.

The John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize

This award encourages and rewards American geographers who write books about the United States which convey the insights of professional geography in language that is both interesting and attractive to lay readers.
Adam Mandelman, The Place with No Edge: An Intimate History of People, Technology, and the Mississippi River Delta (LSU Press, 2020)

Adam Mandelman’s The Place with No Edge: An Intimate History of People, Technology, and the Mississippi River Delta offers an engagingly written interpretation of one of North America’s most unique cultural landscapes. Probing the environmental history of the lower Mississippi Delta, Mandelman reveals the intimate interplay of people, technology, politics, land, and water in a setting that for centuries has challenged and frustrated Euro-Americans. What he discovers is a rich story of how humans modified the delta environment as sugar cane farmers, rice producers, timber harvesters, oil drillers, and petrochemical manufacturers dramatically transformed the regional landscape. He documents how the technologies they utilized actually brought the Delta’s culturally diverse peoples into more intimate, interdependent relationships with their complex natural setting.

Rejecting the simple argument that this was merely another example of people destroying an environment they did not understand, Mandelman encourages us to appreciate the complexity of that human-land relationship. He argues that people need to look more closely at the interplay of technology and nature and to responsibly intervene in respectful ways where possible.

Mandelman’s nuanced narrative explains why this is so important and he suggests how it is necessary to understand and make sustainable this exotic setting for the people, plants, and animals that call it home. Mandelman’s work is indeed an excellent example of the kind of geographical research and writing recognized by the AAG John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize.

The AAG Globe Book Award for Public Understanding of Geography

This award is given for a book written or co-authored by a geographer that conveys most powerfully the nature and importance of geography to the non-academic world.

Alison Mountz, The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020)

Alison Mountz’s monograph The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago is an important, timely and critical intervention in debates over the deadly curtailment of refugee rights globally.

By carefully charting the hidden geographies in which forced migrants are increasingly detained, Mountz provides a clear account of how contemporary states are using territory and off-shore management sites to deny access to asylum. While drawing on sophisticated geographical theories in its analysis of these deadly developments, the book is never intimidating. It is certainly sobering and overwhelming at moments, but by drawing readers in with compelling and sometimes surprising stories it remains at once accessible and alluring. It shows how a wide array of works by other geographers – from scholars of migration and borders to theorists of geopolitics, precarity and spaces of exception – can help us and a wider public come to terms with the practical death of asylum as a human right.

By thereby connecting the fates of real human beings with the construction of spaces where being human is repeatedly denied to the point of death, the book also invites readers to reflect deeply on how their own human geographies are bound up with those of others deemed illegal and unwanted. It is an urgent indictment of our times, but also of the intersecting territories of sovereignty and security in which borders demarcate belonging with such deadly consequence.

The AAG Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography

This award is given for a book written by a geographer that makes an unusually important contribution to advancing the science and art of geography.

Chie Sakakibara, Whale Snow (University of Arizona Press, 2020)

In Whale Snow, Chie Sakakibara pioneers a vision of surviving humankind and kin safely segueing a conjoined path in the future. On the frontier between tundra and ocean, she engaged in the kind of years-long fieldwork that exemplary geographers have pursued for generations in an effort to understand the why of where. Recognizing that whales and whaling remain integral to Inupiat lifeways, despite the onslaught of globalization and climate change, her work explores and elucidates the significance of bowhead whales to the persistence of Inupiaq culture and community.

This book offers a rare, qualified, and yet substantiated optimism to readers around the world. Hers is a vision of “being in a togetherness” that perseveres against myriad adversities on the near horizon, and that can continue to do so far into the future. This research is exemplary in its
sustained commitment to the community. It demonstrates the best of embedded, ethically-driven, and collaborative knowledge production. Those who seek, through their own studies with diverse cultural communities of practice, to overcome – as do the whaling Inupiat of Alaskan North Slope Borough, in unity with their animal kin — the existential threats of our unprecedented and contingent present will be inspired and transformed by reading this book.

In so many ways, Whale Snow epitomizes the essence of geography as an art, science, method, literary practice, and a way of understanding and relating to the world.

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AAG Announces 2021 Grant Recipients

The American Association of Geographers congratulates the individuals and entities named to receive an AAG Grant. The AAG will confer these awards at a future event to be determined, once the travel and in-person meeting restrictions have been lifted.

The 2021 Anne U. White Grant

This grant enables people, regardless of any formal training in geography, to engage in useful field studies and to have the joy of working alongside their partners.

Erik Johanson, Florida Atlantic University, will conduct paleoenvironmental research in Guayaquil, Ecuador with partner Jessie Johanson, and will lead a coring team with Florida Atlantic University (FAU) students associated with the FAU field school.

Max Woodworth, Ohio State University, will study historical urban geography with partner Namiko Kunimoto, in Tokyo for a project titled: Colonial Modernism in Datong, Shanxi.

2021 Dissertation Research Grant recipients ($1,000/each)

The AAG provides support for doctoral Dissertation Research in the form of grants up to $1,000 to PhD candidates of any geographic specialty.

Shamayeta Bhattacharya, University of Connecticut

Alicia Danze, University of Texas at Austin

Brandon Finn, Harvard University

Gengchen Mai, UC Santa Barbara

Scott Markley, University of Georgia

Sophie O’Manique, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Ruchi Patel, Pennsylvania State University

2021 Research Grant recipients ($500/each):

The AAG provides small Research Grants of $500 to support direct costs for fieldwork and research.

Ryan Burns, University of Calgary

Mei-Huan Chen, Pennsylvania State University

Jennifer Greenburg, Stanford University

Wenliang Li, University of North Carolina Greensboro

Anna Van de Grift, Texas A&M University

Qi Zhang, Boston University

2021 AAG Darrel Hess Community College Geography Scholarships

Outstanding students from community colleges, junior colleges, city colleges, or two-year educational institutions who will be transferring as geography majors to four-year universities receive support and recognition from this scholarship program, including $1,000 for educational expenses.  The scholarship has been generously provided by Darrel Hess of the City College of San Francisco to 29 students since 2006.

Devon Michelle Borthwick, transferring from Front Range Community College to the University of Wyoming,

Constance Connors, transferring from Sinclair Community College to Arizona State University

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2021 AAG Award Recipients Announced

The American Association of Geographers congratulates the individuals and entities named to receive an AAG Award. The awardees represent outstanding contributions to and accomplishments in the geographic field.

2021 AAG Presidential Achievement Award

The AAG Past President recognizes individuals who have made long-standing and distinguished contributions to the discipline of geography.

Michael DeVivo
After a career in the military and in the merchant marines, Mike DeVivo began a new life as a geographer. Since then, he has defined the value of the community college as a nurturing ground for new geography students by singlehandedly managing the geography program at Grand Rapids Community College. In his 30 years as an instructor, DeVivo has turned many students into geographers, several of whom have gone on to careers in the field.

Beyond teaching and advising, Mike has chronicled the field of geography. His book, Leadership in American Academic Geography: The Twentieth Century, looked at how geography chairs made a difference in the success of many prominent geography departments. His Conversation with a Geographer oral history series has enabled us to hear from these leaders directly. Mike has also reflected on the role of geographers in community colleges, many of whom stand alone in their institutions.

Prof. DeVivo maintains a steady involvement with the AAG and with higher education in general. He serves on the Healthy Departments Committee, he is active in the International Geographical Union Commissions on the History of Geography and on African Studies, and he has long demonstrated a passion for the field, typified in Mike’s motto: “Geography Lives!”

Jacqueline Housel
There are many opportunities found in a community college education, and Prof. Jacqueline (Jacquie) Housel has demonstrated these as a teacher, a mentor, and an advocate. Jacquie spent most of her career at Sinclair Community College, near Dayton, Ohio, where she has taught the value of a geographical perspective to students, many of whom have gone on to spread geography themselves.

Prof. Housel’s graduate work examined racialized patterns in urban areas. As a professor, she continued to publish on the role of race and refugees in journals such as Urban Studies, Urban Geography and Social and Cultural Geography. But her more recent works – in the Professional Geographer and other outlets – have focused on documenting the role and challenges inherent in community colleges. In these pieces, Jacquie shows just how pivotal two-year colleges are in shaping future geographers, and how community college professors and stand-alone geographers need to forge collaborations to maximize their impact on the curriculum.

Housel has consistently advocated for the inclusion of community college professors in the academy, and especially organizations such as the AAG. She was the first community college professor to head the East Lakes Division of the AAG, she led the stand-alone geographers and the community college affinity groups, has worked on establishing an AP GIS program, and serves on the Healthy Departments Committee. Jacquie also engages in the community by improving police-neighborhood relations and in educating her neighbors on local immigrants/refugees.

2021 Glenda Laws Award

The Glenda Laws Award is administered by the American Association of Geographers and endorsed by members of the Institute of Australian Geographers, the Canadian Association of Geographers, and the Institute of British Geographers. The annual award and honorarium recognize outstanding contributions to geographic research on social issues. This award is named in memory of Glenda Laws—a geographer who brought energy and enthusiasm to her work on issues of social justice and social policy.

Jen Jack Gieseking, University of Kentucky

Jen Jack Gieseking is an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky whose scholarship combines critical urban theory, GIS, and digital humanities to study queer, feminist, and trans geographies.

Having received his PhD in 2012, Dr. Gieseking has amassed an impressive research record including nearly two dozen peer-reviewed articles in high-impact outlets (many of them open- access) and a defining, cross-disciplinary reference text: A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers. Dr. Gieseking’s scholarship extends beyond publications to include leadership of ACME: International Journal of Critical Geographies, where his recommenders hail the inclusive culture he fosters among editorial staff and contributors. He actively mentors junior scholars and pioneers innovative teaching strategies drawn from critical roots. Furthermore, Dr. Gieseking’s LBGTQ Heritage Initiative Theme Study for the National Parks Service demonstrates the broader societal impacts of his scholarship.

Overall, the AAG Diversity & Inclusion Committee was excited to highlight the work of a queer, feminist, and trans geographer whose work fervently promotes the visibility of LBGTQ+ individuals, spaces, and place histories.

Pavithra Vasudevan, University of Texas at Austin

Pavithra Vasudevan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her feminist-inspired, participatory action research calls attention to environmental racism in Black communities in rural North Carolina. Despite only being in her second year on the tenure track, Dr. Vasudevan’s scholarly record includes peer-reviewed publications in Antipode, Area, and Environment and Planning C, several edited chapters, and a book manuscript in progress based on her field research: Toxic Alchemy: Black Life and Death in Industrial Capitalism.

Dr. Vasudevan engages creatively with community members, community organizations, and students, fusing ethnographic methods and performance arts (e.g., theater, music, and visual arts) with social science. Her recommenders include previous advisors, students, and colleagues who all testify to the extraordinary intellectual and emotional labor she invests in her activist research.

The AAG Diversity & Inclusion Committee felt strongly that Dr. Vasudevan’s research efforts not only exceeded the criteria of the Glenda Laws award, but that her inspirational pedagogy embodied the spirit of Glenda Laws’ own approaches to research, teaching, and advocacy.

2021 AAG Harold M. Rose Award for Anti-Racism Research and Practice

The Rose Award was created to honor Harold M. Rose, who was a pioneer in conducting research on the condition faced by African Americans. The award honors geographers who have a demonstrated record of this type of research and active contributions to society, and is awarded to individuals who have served to advance the discipline through their research, and who have also had an impact on anti-racist practice.

John Frazier, Binghamton University

Dr. John Frazier has made crucial contributions to anti-racist knowledge and praxis in geography in his nearly four-decade long career. His leadership as the founder of the Race, Ethnicity, and Place (REP) Conference is a hallmark of his contributions to challenge racism in the discipline and beyond. REP, geography’s most diverse conference now in its second decade, features research across the discipline and provides unmatched opportunities for networking and mentoring. Frazier has been instrumental in bringing this conference to a wide range of universities, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities, to expose geography to more diverse audiences and students. He has also served as a stalwart leader in the AAG Ethnic Geography Specialty Group. Frazier has dedicated his academic life to advancing the research and careers of geographers of color, having long lasting effects on the discipline through this conference and the professional network he has fostered.

Frazier’s research has addressed core issues in contemporary racial and ethnic geography and immigrant experiences. His publications have become key resources for researchers and instructors. Notably, he has co-edited three editions of Race, Ethnicity and Place in a Changing America, The African Diaspora in The U. S. and Canada at the Dawn of the 21st Century, and Multicultural Geographies of the United States, and co-authored Race and Place: Equity Issues in Urban America. Widely used in teaching, Frazier’s work has paved a pathway into the discipline for generations of geographers.

Overall, John Frazier has played a significant role in institutionalizing a critical study of race, equity, and inclusion within geography and making anti-racism part of the official, programmatic life of geographers—as found in its conferences, knowledge communities, publications, and pedagogy.

2021 AAG Harm de Blij Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

This annual award recognizes outstanding achievement in teaching undergraduate Geography including the use of innovative teaching methods. The recipients are instructors for whom undergraduate teaching is a primary responsibility.  The award consists of $2,500 in prize money and an additional $500 in travel expenses to attend the AAG Annual Meeting, where the award will be conveyed. This award is generously funded by John Wiley & Sons in memory of their long-standing collaboration with the late Harm de Blij on his seminal Geography textbooks.

Heather Bedi, Dickinson College

Dr. Heather Bedi is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Dickinson College where her teaching and research focus on peoples, places, and environments and the many connections between them. Students and faculty colleagues recognize her passion for teaching and her dynamic approach. She not only creates fresh ways for students to engage with course material in the classroom, but also provides opportunities for them to actively contribute to the local community using tools and knowledge obtained in the numerous courses she has developed.

Dr. Bedi’s teaching and community outreach are well-informed by her research into relationships among civil society, socio-environmental movements, and natural resource and landscape modifications. Moreover, she successfully obtains teaching related grants and student-faculty-community collaboration grants to advance the work.

Dr. Bedi is already making a strong mark on geography teaching and is poised to make an even more distinguished impact into the future.

2021 Wilbanks Prize for Transformational Research in Geography

The AAG Wilbanks Prize for Transformational Research in Geography will honor researchers from the public, private, or academic sectors who have made transformative contributions to the fields of Geography or GIScience. Provided there is sufficient availability of funds, the Wilbanks Prize will consist of a cash prize of $2,000 and include a memento with the name of the Prize and the recipient.

Mei-Po Kwan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Mei-Po Kwan has had transformational impacts on how transportation specialists and geographic information scientists think about accessibility and activity-travel patterns analysis; how feminist geographers understand quantification and GIS; how geographers and geographic information scientists integrate quantitative and qualitative methods and insights from different theoretical traditions; and how health geographers, public health researchers, and scholars in other disciplines think about environmental exposure and the significance of the neighborhood.

Employing feminist perspectives, Dr. Kwan has dramatically altered geo-visualization, the inclusion of qualitative data through geo-narratives, and she has broadened geographic information science beyond a narrow “objective” standard to more humanistic standards that include perceptions, emotions, and behavior as core concerns. She has also advanced conceptualization of concepts like uncertainty and bias by promoting more dynamic perspectives that examine spatial contexts as rooted in everyday behaviors and experiences rather than as containers fixed in space and time.

Both the significant substance and impact of Dr. Kwan’s work have transformed the discipline of geography and geographic information science and infused the broader community of researchers and practitioners with more robust geospatial understanding, thereby making her a highly deserving recipient of the Wilbanks Prize.

2021 AAG Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography

The AAG Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography is given annually to an individual geographer or team of geographers that has demonstrated originality, creativity and significant intellectual breakthroughs in geography. The award includes a prize of $1,000.

Dawn Wright, Esri

Over her career, Dr. Dawn Wright has combined her expertise in spatial data science and oceanography to make creative and pioneering contributions to geography. She has authored or co-authored more than 180 articles and 12 books on oceanography and geographic information systems, including one of the first marine GIS books, Marine and Coastal Geographical Information Systems, co-edited with Darius Bartlett. Dr. Wright is no armchair scientist. Her saltwater fieldwork began with many expeditions on the scientific research ship, the JOIDES Resolution. Through those as well as subsequent expeditions which she joined and led, Dr. Wright has brought to the surface previously unknown ocean terrain in some of the most remote oceanic regions.

Dr. Wright began her academic career at Oregon State University and then joined Esri in 2011 as their Chief Scientist, the position she currently holds. She was a key leader of the joint Esri/US Geological Survey team that developed the first truly 3-Dimensional map of the waters within the world’s ocean, also known as the Ecological Marine Units.

During her distinguished career, she has received numerous awards and recognitions, including: 25 BadAxx Women Shaping Climate Action in 2021, the American Geographical Society George Davidson Medal, the Society of Extraordinary Women Science and Innovations Extraordinary Leaders Award, and the AAG Presidential Achievement Award. Dr. Wright has also been named a fellow of several notable societies, including: the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geological Society of America, the American Association of Geographers, The Oceanography Society, and the California Academy of Sciences.

In recognition of her extraordinary contributions to science, pioneering and synthetic thinking about oceanography, geography, and GIS, and for her years of leadership, the American Association of Geographers confers the 2021 Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography to “Deepsea Dawn” Wright.

The 2021 AAG-Kauffman Awards for Best Paper and Best Student Paper in Geography & Entrepreneurship

This award identifies innovative research in business, applied or community geography that is relevant to questions related to entrepreneurs and their firms as well as to practitioners and policymakers. Award winners and runners up will be invited to present their research in a session highlighting geography and entrepreneurship at the AAG Annual Meeting on Thursday, April 9, 2020.

2021 Best Paper Award

Qingfang Wang, University of California Riverside – Fostering Art and Cultural Entrepreneurship in Underserved Communities: A Case of Newark, NJ

2021 Best Paper Award Runner-Up

Örjan Sölvell, Stockholm School of Economics – The dark side of agglomeration, sustained wealth and transposition of trading institutions—the case of Bordeaux in the 18th and 19th centuries

2021 Best Student Paper Award

Nicole Bignall, University of North Carolina at Greensboro –
Self-Employment by US County: Key Predictors

2021 Best Student Paper Award Runner-Up

Elina Shepard (Sukaryavichute), University of North Carolina at Charlotte – Opportunities and Challenges for Small Businesses in New Transit Neighborhoods

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AAG Announces 2021 AAG Award Recipients

The American Association of Geographers congratulates the individuals and entities named to receive an AAG Award. The awardees represent outstanding contributions to and accomplishments in the geographic field.

2021 Diversity and Inclusion Award

The AAG Diversity and Inclusion Award (formerly the Enhancing Diversity Award) honors those geographers who have pioneered efforts toward, or actively participate in efforts towards encouraging a more diverse discipline.

Raynah Kamau and Whitney Kotlewski, Esri

Raynah Kamau and Whitney Kotlewski are both Esri employees and grassroots activists whose collaborative work has fostered increased visibility for community- engaged geography and greater inclusion within GIS professional culture.

The AAG is impressed by their work beyond academia, especially their service as role models for aspiring BIPOC and female geographers. They deploy an effectivene public outreach strategy using StoryMaps to support Black Lives Matter and other social justice causes. Ms. Kamau’s and Ms. Kotlewski’s co-founding of “Black Girls M.A.P.P.” and “People 4 the People” are two such examples.

Equally important is their work in changing GIS and tech culture at Esri to incorporate a more diverse set of voices (e.g., women, women of color, the LBGTQ+ community). Within a few short years, these two awardees have built a bridge between geography and these diverse communities, which is a testament to their interpersonal skills and steadfast dedication to community members.

Ms. Kamau’s and Ms. Kotlewski’s efforts champion the ideals of diversity and inclusion of this AAG award, while demonstrating the transformative potential of geography. Read more from Esri here.

Jovan Lewis, University of California Berkeley

Dr. Jovan Lewis is an Assistant Professor at the University of California Berkeley whose efforts in research, teaching, mentorship, and service are bringing Black geographies (and Black geographers) to the forefront of the discipline.

We commend his integration of multiple facets of work to leverage and amplify Black Geographies within the AAG: he has taken a leadership position in the Black Geographies Specialty Group and led a symposium that resulted in the inclusion of Black Geographies as a theme of the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting. Locally, Dr. Lewis is changing UC Berkeley Geography’s intellectual culture in emphasizing Black studies and Black geographies. He has worked across departments and programs on his campus and beyond, to engage public groups. He is integrating this work into his teaching (e.g., he developed a symposium on the topic and is recruiting black students to his program), research (e.g., his co-edited volume, The Black Geographic), and service (e.g., his mentorship of other faculty and students).

His efforts are comprehensive and effective at multiple levels and with different audiences. Dr. Lewis’s dedication to his students and to the larger community is remarkable for a junior scholar and reflects the best of what Black geographies and the discipline have to offer.

2021 Susan Hardwick Excellence in Mentoring Award

The AAG bestows an annual award recognizing an individual geographer, group, or department, who demonstrates extraordinary leadership in building supportive academic and professional environments and in guiding the academic or professional growth of their students and junior colleagues. The late Susan Hardwick was the inaugural Excellence in Mentoring awardee. The Award was renamed in her honor and memory, soon after her passing.

Hilda Kurtz, University of Georgia

Dr. Hilda Kurtz’s mentorship strategies demonstrate variety, replicability, novelty, inclusivity, and community creation both within and beyond geography.

Her students benefit from her hands-on facilitation of quality research papers and proposals, with a high track record of funding success. Through journal editorship, she mentored diverse early career scholars with regard to academic publishing. Dr. Kurtz is co-Founder of the Franklin College Diversity and Inclusion Graduate Fellows Program, which establishes a local community of engagement around social justice. Multiple individuals commented on her success in mentoring focused on work-life balance through both formal and informal channels.

Finally, Kurtz developed a quasi-formal professional development workshop series in 2015, emphasizing job market preparation and tangible skills for success in academe. The workshops have since been integrated formally into the University of Georgia Geography Department’s required first year graduate student seminar.

For all these reasons, the AAG is proud and pleased to recognize Hilda Kurtz as the recipient of the 2021 AAG Susan Hardwick Excellence in Mentoring Award.

The 2021 Marble-Boyle Undergraduate Achievement Award in Geographic Science
The Marble-Boyle Undergraduate Achievement Award recognizes excellence in academic performance by undergraduate students from the U.S. and Canada who are putting forth a strong effort to bridge geographic science and computer science as well as to encourage other students to embark upon similar programs. The award is an activity of the Marble Fund for Geographic Science of the AAG.

Jessica Embury, San Diego State University

Daniel Council, Ball State University

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