Post

Continuing Creolization in New Orleans Foodways

March 1, 2018

Among other points of distinction, New Orleans is often and enthusiastically celebrated as a great place to eat. Boosters of the city’s cuisine point to the same cultural hybridity and cosmopolitanism that enabled the flourishing of jazz music and distinctive architectural styles as explanation for the development of Creole cuisine. Tom Fitzmorris, a prominent restaurant critic and radio host in New Orleans since the 1970s and curator of the website nomenu.com, argues in his book Hungry Town: A Culinary History of New Orleans: “Throughout its history, New Orleans was always a net exporter of culinary innovation; we largely ignored what was going on in other cities around the country. With good reason. Outside New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, no other American city was in league with New Orleans in its culture of cookery. And not even those cities had so well-developed and old a native flavor as we did.”^[1] The “native flavor” of which Fitzmorris boasts is a near-proprietary blend of European, African, and Native American preparations that highlight local ingredients, especially seafood and certain fresh produce. The most iconic and classic dishes of the New Orleans culinary canon–gumbo, jambalaya, oysters Rockefeller, red beans and rice, turtle soup, anything with shrimp or crawfish–illustrate the creolization of European, African, and Caribbean cuisines while emphasizing the importance of proximity to the Mississippi river, the Gulf of Mexico, and the bayous that characterize the landscape around New Orleans.

The terms “Creole” and “Cajun” refer to the foodways (and broader cultural characteristics) of urban and rural Southern Louisiana, respectively. Creole describes the population born to settlers in French colonial Louisiana, particularly in New Orleans, as well as native-born people of African descent, both enslaved and free people of color. Like the people, Creole food is a blend of the various cultures of New Orleans (including Spanish, French, African, Italian, German, Caribbean, and Native American, among others), and is typically considered more cosmopolitan and varied than Cajun cuisine. Cajun refers to descendents of the French Canadian settlers forcibly removed from the Acadian region by the British in the mid- 18th century. They settled in the swampy areas of southern Louisiana today known as Acadiana and encompassing four distinct regions: the levees and bayous (Lafourche and Teche), the prairies (Attakapas Native land), swamplands (Atchafalaya Basin), and coastal marshes (New Orleans area and Houma).^[2] Cajun cooking continues to draw heavily, in many cases exclusively, from these local landscapes, and has further blended with Creole cuisine to characterize what many believe is “authentic” New Orleans cuisine.

Seafood photo by Cheryl Gerber courtesy New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau

The prominence of indigenous ingredients and dishes in the formulation of a distinctive cuisine is “central to ideas about what is specific about New Orleans” argues University of New Orleans anthropologist David Beriss.^[3] Prior to Hurricane Katrina, Beriss explains, New Orleans had a “long-standing food culture, a cuisine, built from local products, that is regularly produced in homes and restaurants and frequently discussed around local tables and in the local media.” This food culture, and the celebratory rhetoric surrounding it, seem to indicate that the city’s creolized foodways are more broadly representative of the cultural and ethnic heterogeneity that have long characterized New Orleans. And while contemporary New Orleans foodways continue to claim distinctive terroir^[4] (and merroir – the aquatic equivalent of terroir)–ingredients conveying the taste of their place of origin–the late geographer Clyde Woods reminds us that these foodways and the culture that produced them bear legacies often neglected from the dominant celebratory narratives.^[5] At risk of vastly oversimplifying complex historical processes, I want to highlight the importance of colonialism and enslavement for the development of contemporary New Orleans foodways. (I also acknowledge that those processes contributed to the formulation of Southern U.S. foodways more broadly.)

Between 2,000 and 600 B.C., long before European colonization, the Poverty Point settlement in Northeast Louisiana and its surrounding villages had a highly developed pre-agricultural subsistence system based on local plants and game, especially aquatic. Maize-based farming seems to have come late to Louisiana compared the rest of the Mississippi Valley and the Eastern U.S. — only a few hundred years before the arrivals of Europeans. This may have been because of the abundance of wild sources of food, again aquatic as well as terrestrial. As indigenous agriculture declined under the pressure of European settlement, war and exploitation increased. French settlers enslaved women from defeated nations and forced them to both grow food and endure a lifetime of sexual exploitation.^[6] As European settlement expanded throughout the region, Woods explains, “many of the new immigrants avoided agricultural labor in the fetid, humid, and dangerous bayous. To solve the plantation and farm labor shortages, the Company of the Indies directed the African slave trade toward New Orleans in 1719.”^[7] Most of the enslaved Africans who entered the colony between 1717 and 1731 were transported directly from Senegambia, a West African region whose cooking ingredients (rice, okra, various spices, legumes, and seafoods) and techniques took firm hold in the colonies.^[8],^[9] New Orleans distinctive cuisine, then, is a product not just of local ecologies, but also of legacies of violence, erasure, and enslavement. Those same legacies contributed to disproportionate exposure to violence and death in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the city in 2005.^[10],^[11]

And yet, in the months and years following the storm, a curious thing happened to the city’s culinary landscape: it experienced what many referred to as a “renaissance.”^[12]^[13] For many, the restaurant industry became a barometer for broader recovery within the city. “If eating out was a major part of social life in New Orleans before Katrina, after the disaster, eating in restaurants turned into one of the central ways the city’s fabric was to be rewoven.”^[14] Tom Fitzmorris, mentioned earlier, maintained an index of all open restaurants in the city beginning just a few weeks after the levees broke on August 29; less than two years after the storm, there were more restaurants operating in the city then there were prior to it.^[15] Among these were the old standard-bearers of traditional Creole and Cajun cuisine–Galatoires, Antoines, Commander’s Palace, and countless po-boy shops and neighborhood eateries. But the post-Katrina landscape saw an influx of new restaurants catering to new tastes, including those of young, mostly white transplants, but also large numbers of Latinos, whose labor was essential to the rebuilding of the city. These new New Orleanians embraced a wider range of cuisines and eating experiences, leading to a potential fracturing of what constitutes New Orleans foodways. It is nearly as possible to obtain a banh mi as a po-boy in present day New Orleans^[16],^[17], leading some to fret that “authentic” New Orleans cuisine is under assault. Others celebrate the evolution of a cuisine that embraces tradition while welcoming innovation and expansion–essentially, a further creolization of the “original” Creole cuisine.

While there will always be debates over the meaning (and value) of “authenticity” in foodways, it is certainly the case that foodways and food culture, especially in New Orleans, reflect broader historical and geographic trends and processes. Contemporary New Orleans foodways are a result of forced and voluntary migrations to this ecologically unique region over the course of several centuries. Embedded within the region’s foodways are tensions and contradictions: gourmet excesses abut food insecurity; a mostly white male hegemony reigns in the city’s kitchens (where recent revelations of widespread sexual assault perpetrated by perhaps New Orleans’ most beloved chef have sparked national conversations^[18]); African American creative and cultural capital remains subject to appropriation (and reclamation)–these are just a few examples. And yet, food remains a central source of pride for New Orleanians. With all its complexity and contradictions, New Orleans is (still/more than ever?) full of good places to eat.

-Catarina Passidomo, University of Mississippi

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0030

^[1] Tom Fitzmorris, Tom Fitzmorris’s Hungry Town: A Culinary History of New Orleans, the City Where Food Is Almost Everything (Abrams, 2014).

^[2] Jay D. Ducote, “Cajun vs. Creole Food – What Is the Difference?,” Louisiana Travel, November 25, 2013, https://www.louisianatravel.com/articles/cajun-vs-creole-food-what-difference.

^[3] David Beriss, “Authentic Creole: Tourism, Style and Calamity in New Orleans Restaurants,” in The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of Where We Eat, ed. David Beriss and David E. Sutton (New York: Berg Publishers, 2007), 151–66.

^[4] Amy Trubek, The Taste of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)

^[5] Clyde Woods, Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations of Post-Katrina New Orleans, ed. Jordan T. Camp and Laura Pulido, vol. 35, Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017).

^[6] Woods, p. 7

^[7] Woods, p. 9

^[8] Judith Ann Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2009), https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520269965.

^[9] Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2017).

^[10] Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, 1 edition (New York: Civitas Books, 2007).

^[11] Catarina Passidomo, “Whose Right to (farm) the City? Race and Food Justice Activism in Post-Katrina New Orleans,” Agriculture and Human Values 31, no. 3 (September 2014): 385–96, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-014-9490-x.

^[12] Kim Severson, “The New Orleans Restaurant Bounce, After Katrina,” The New York Times, August 4, 2015, sec. Food, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/05/dining/new-orleans-restaurants-post-hurricane-katrina.html.

^[13] Brett Anderson, “New Orleans Restaurant Scene Emerging Better after Hurricane Katrina,” The Times-Picayune, August 27, 2010, https://www.nola.com/dining-guide/index.ssf/2010/08/new_orleans_restaurant_scene_h.html.

^[14] Beriss, David and David Sutton, “Starter: Restaurants, Ideal Postmodern Institutions,” in The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of Where We Eat, ed. David Beriss, and David Sutton (Oxford ; New York: Berg Publishers, 2007), 1–13.

^[15] Fitzmorris, p. 180-181.

^[16] an McNulty, “Orleans Goes Nouvelle,” Gambit, accessed February 23, 2018, https://www.bestofneworleans.com/gambit/orleans-goes-nouvelle/Content?oid=1571316.

^[17] “The Lives and Loaves of New Orleans,” Southern Foodways Alliance (blog), accessed February 23, 2018, https://www.southernfoodways.org/the-lives-and-loaves-of-new-orleans/.

^[18] Brett Anderson, “John Besh Restaurants Fostered Culture of Sexual Harassment, 25 Women Say,” NOLA.com, accessed February 24, 2018, https://www.nola.com/business/index.ssf/2017/10/john_besh_restaurants_fostered.html.

President's Column

Non-Killing Geographies

February 28, 2018

This column is written with a very heavy heart, coming just several days after the deadly mass shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The massacre ended the lives of 17 students and staff, injured dozens, and left behind many traumatized survivors, as well grieving friends, families, and community members. Counted among the murdered was Scott Beigel, a geography teacher and cross country coach at the high school, who heroically lost his life providing students with shelter from the gunman’s bullets.

This tragedy, which sadly has become just the latest in now a long and growing line of school shootings in the United States, drew significant expressions of sadness and anger from AAG members, our governing Council, and the wider geography community. On behalf of the Association, I express heartfelt sympathy to the victims of the Parkland school shooting. I also demand in the strongest possible terms that U.S. federal, state, and local government officials be tireless and unflinching in examining what can be done to eliminate the pervasiveness of violence not only in schools but across the nation’s communities. Thankfully the news industry has cast a significant spotlight on the massacre in Parkland, but there are scores of neighborhoods, workplaces, campuses, and other spaces and lives marked by this and other forms of violence, much of it going under-reported and under-analyzed.

Disciplinary response to the Florida murders remains very fluid as many of us in the AAG consider the most appropriate way to memorialize Scott Beigel and all the victims and survivors of the shooting. No doubt, this will be the subject of conversations at the AAG Council’s upcoming spring meeting in New Orleans. There is also considerable ongoing discussion among geographers about the impact that this tragedy will have on broader social discussions and debates about gun reform, school safety, mental health, and the responsiveness (or lack thereof) of some government authorities to the precarity of human life. The outrage and political activism recently demonstrated by the surviving students of Stoneman Douglas High School suggest these debates will remain highly charged for some time and rightly so.

While these aforementioned issues cannot be settled overnight, I do feel responsible as AAG President to reflect upon what these recent horrific events might mean for our discipline and our Association. In particular, I would like to use this column to suggest that while a growing number of geographers are engaged in a critical study of violence, it should become an even more central theme within geographic research, teaching, community engagement, and other disciplinary initiatives.

Throughout my tenure as AAG President, I have forwarded efforts to make Geography REAL, that is, responsive, engaged, advocating, and life-improving. As we work to further enhance our discipline’s responsiveness to critical issues and its commitment to the welfare of people and their social and natural environments, geographers can and should play an important role in better understanding the place of violence—and its many forms, causes, and consequences—within contemporary society and space.

In writing monthly columns, I frequently reach out to colleagues with expertise that I don’t have. In the wake of the Parkland massacre, I reached out to newly selected AAG Fellow, James “Jim” Tyner, who has written several books and important articles on the relationship between space, society, and violence. The position of AAG Fellow is meant not only to honor distinguished scholars but to create a cohort of experts and mentors who can advise on AAG strategic directions and assist in responding to grand challenges. Jim and I are united in believing that violence represents one of those grand challenges.

For the remainder of this column, Jim and I shift, perhaps awkwardly but by necessity, to joining voices in a collaborative way. In particular, we wish to offer some initial ideas of what the discipline can offer or contribute, and then what specific role the AAG and its members might play in the study and prevention of “killing geographies” and the advocacy of “non-killing geographies.”

Myriad Geographies and Victims of Violence

Simon Springer recently argued that violence sits in places—a phrase that effectively captures the myriad geographies of violence. The tragedy in Parkland, Florida has called attention both to gun violence and to school shootings. Sadly, there are innumerable other killing geographies that remain off the radar and thus fail to garner political attention. Existing proposals, however well intentioned, to provide additional security to schools will do nothing to prevent the next ‘Aurora’ or ‘Las Vegas’ massacre. The (impractical) proposal to arm teachers not only will not keep students safe at school; it will in no way afford protection to children from violence that happens when they go to the movies, eat at the mall, ride their bicycles to the park, or simply drive and walk through their policed communities. Nor will any of these measures address the now-routine litany of shooting deaths that take place, by accident or intention, in the home. Domestic violence, as Rachel Pain has argued, is a form of “everyday terrorism” that like global terrorism is related to “attempts to exert political control through fear.”

We must acknowledge also that it is not only our children at risk to ever-increasing forms of direct violence. Our mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, friends and co-workers remain vulnerable to premature death. Journalists, politicians, and environmental activists are targets of assassination and forms of violent intimidation. Alt-right attacks on scholars, including some of our colleagues in geography, have resulted in not only criticism and defamation of their research but also in social media trolling, harassment, and even death threats. It prompts a sober discussion, one that has yet to happen among AAG leaders, about what professional societies, universities, and programs can do to safeguard and support faculty and students in the face of this aggression.

Mass shootings, whether at schools, shopping malls, theaters, or open-air concerts, constitute spectacular forms of direct violence. As a discipline, Geography would be remiss to concentrate solely on these moments to the neglect of other forms of structural violence that come from the harm and neglect inflicted by social institutions and governmental policies and spaces. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, for example, has encouraged us to see the role that ever increasing rates of mass incarceration play in inflicting a wider organized, legalized violence and abandonment upon people of color, who are disproportionately represented in America’s prisons. Congressional in-action in the promotion of gun control is matched by a concomitant in-action toward the provision of health-care and welfare. Budget cuts aimed at reductions in food stamps and health insurance prove no less deadly to the human body than a bullet from an AR-15. To date, many geographers have made considerable contributions; but more can and should be done.

A beginning point in the promotion of non-killing geographies is to confront directly the socio-spatial organization of violence: the spaces where violence takes place and those affected. Violence has important geographic consequences; it reshapes people’s perceptions of and interactions with places as well as their survivability and sense of belonging within those places. Violence is produced through social relations and interactions, some very intimate and others more distant. But violence is always social and always coded by dominant ideas and vulnerabilities related to ‘race,’ gender, class, nationality, and so on. To this end, solutions to violence must necessarily address the social milieu of prejudice, hatred, and xenophobia, but also the more banal indifference toward others.

Studying and Preventing Violence as an AAG Initiative

What role can, and should, the AAG perform in studying violence and advocating for non-killing geographies? An obvious call is to promote research. Drawing on a multitude of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, including GIS, participatory mapping, and ethnographies, geographers are well-trained to provide theoretical insight and empirical documentation of wide ranging forms of violence. Recent evidence suggest great potential for such analysis. Geographers at the University of Utah recently mapped and conducted a spatial analysis of hate groups in the U.S., while Kent State’s GIS / Health and Hazards Lab teamed up with officials in Akron, Ohio to study the impact of violence on children in the city.

Geographers can provide a much-needed spatial awareness to violence, namely the scalar connections of violence ranging from the body to the global political economy. The spatiality of violence demands analysis from any number of sub-fields within the discipline, including environmental geographers who could shed significant light on what Rob Nixon calls the “slow,” gradual violence “wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war.” Devoting one of the featured themes of an upcoming AAG meeting to violence and non-killing geographies would be an ideal place to start building such a focused initiative, organizing networks of collaboration among academics and advocacy organizations, and drafting traditional publications as well as white papers to inform public policy.

Research does not occur in a vacuum, but is positioned within and actively shaped by the social and political conditions that can either facilitate or hinder certain avenues of research. Indeed, detailed understandings of gun violence—to take but one example—have been hamstrung by a lack of sufficient federal support. As The Washington Post and criminal justice professor Lacey Wallace reported in the immediate aftermath of the Las Vegas mass shooting, large scale gun violence research has been largely stymied since 1996, when the National Rifle Association (NRA) pressured congressional leaders to place restrictions on the ability of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to fund scholarship that would “advocate or promote gun control.” The measure had a “chilling ripple effect” across other federal agencies and private foundations, leaving scholars not to mention lawmakers with “little up-to-date data about what causes gun violence or how it can be prevented or reduced.” As geographers ramp up their research on violence, it is quite likely that AAG’s growing strides in monitoring, analyzing, and making interventions in public policy on Capitol Hill will be important in calling on national leaders to permit and facilitate research on gun control, gun violence, and other violence-related topics, such as intimate partner violence and hate-crimes.

The Association, with its growing support of outreach and communication, is in a key position to help geographers speak with wider audiences about the spatiality of violence and move toward the training of geography faculty and students as “scientists-advocates.” As explained in a recent presidential column, “advancing ‘awareness’ is too passive of an idea to capture the kind of broader and deeper public investment in geography that needs to occur.” It is necessary, following the Past President Glen MacDonald, for the AAG to initiate and support efforts of a “transformative” nature, that is, the promotion of non-killing geographies. This is a tall order—one that entails a sustained commitment to advocacy on behalf of victims of violence and toward the prevention of violence. Specific proposals include the advocacy of non-violence and non-killing geographies during Geography Awareness Week, the greater development of college geography courses on violence, the hosting of workshops and teach-ins not only on campuses, but beyond, to include K-12 institutions, places of worship, and other public forums.

AAG might consider supporting the compilation and dissemination of data and research on violence; such materials, in line with existing efforts by the Association, would include a variety of outreach-related publications, brochures, handouts, and multimedia tools. And we can think bigger: The AAG could establish a clearinghouse on geographies of violence, a repository for journalists, politicians, academics, and activists to learn about the study and prevention of violence as well as what a geographic perspective can lend to such work. From our perspective, the resource would appear to have a natural connection with the Association’s long-time focus on human rights.

Efforts are already underway within the AAG to develop a “culture of mentorship,” including for example the establishment of the Susan Hardwick Excellence in Mentoring Award, the AAG Department Leadership Workshop, the AAG-ESRI ConnectED GeoMentors Program, the Women’s Mentoring Network, and the AAG Fellows Program. There is a rich opportunity for geographers to expand our understandings of mentorship in light of a greater sensitivity to violence and victims, such as partnering with the Scholars at Risk (SAR) program. Scholar At Risk is an advocacy network that provides institutional support to those scholars “suffering grave threats to their lives, liberty and well-being by arranging temporary research and teaching positions at institutions in [the SAR] network as well as by providing advisory and referral services.”

In closing, geographers are encouraged to consider the promotion of non-killing geographies as one of the discipline’s and society’s grand challenges and to reflect on what role they and the AAG might play in studying, preventing, and speaking out against violence. Cultivation of non-violence feels like an insurmountable issue, especially in light of the loss of life and the political debates surrounding Parkland massacre, but there is arguably no more important task confronting Geography. And there can be no greater way to remember the sacrifice of Scott Beigel, a fellow geography educator who gave his life to save his students from violence.

No doubt, there are some readers of this column already making important contributions in scholarly and public understanding of geographies of violence and non-killing. Share these contributions and any other ideas and opinions by email or on Twitter using #PresidentAAG.

— Derek Alderman, AAG President
University of Tennessee
Twitter: @MLKStreet
Email: dalderma [at] utk [dot] edu

— James Tyner, AAG Fellow
Kent State University
Twitter: @Tynergeography
Email: jtyner [at] kent [dot] edu

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0028

Awardees

AAG Announces 2018 AAG Award Recipients

February 23, 2018

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 2018 AAG Annual Meeting in New Orleans during the AAG Awards Luncheon on Saturday, April 14, 2018.

2018 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.

Dr. Fenda Akiwumi, University of South Florida

Fenda Akiwumi is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of South Florida with affiliations with Africana Studies, the Honor’s College, and the Patel College of Global Sustainability. Her teaching has already been recognized with an Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award from USF and a Higher Education Teaching Award from the National Council for Geographic Education, both received in 2017.

Dr. Akiwumi teaches a variety of undergraduate courses, including World Regional Geography, Global Conservation, Sustainability and Development, and Environmental Conservation and Policy. In addition, she has taken students to Ghana and Guyana, and she teaches at USF’s Honors College, where she has directed a number of undergraduate theses. The Assistant Dean of the Honors College, Shawn Bingham, notes that Dr. Akiwumi is, “…the rare faculty member who views teaching, service and research not as discreet categories, but as threads woven into a larger vocation. Her courses link the classroom to the community and the local to the global. She teaches students in their very first semester of college who have in some cases never travelled outside of our Tampa area.”

Students have described Akiwumi as passionate, inspiring and relatable. Former student, Ivana Kajtezovic, writes, “I am confident Professor Akiwumi has impacted many students’ lives, just as she has impacted mine. It is professors like her that make the university experience memorable. It is professors like her that shape young minds and inspire them. It is professors like her who open the door to knowledge and not simply information. I could not think of an educator more worthy of this award.”

Dr. Lawrence Estaville, who nominated her for this award, echoes these sentiments, describing Dr. Akiwumi as, “…a dynamic, articulate teacher who deeply and sincerely cares that her students do well and, at the same time, that they are intellectually challenged.”

2018 AAG E. Willard and Ruby S. Miller Award

This annual award recognizes members of the Association who have made truly outstanding contributions to the geographic field due to their special competence in teaching or research. Funding for the award comes from the estate of Ruby S. Miller. More than one award may be awarded each year. Each award includes $1,000 and a commemorative plaque.

Judith A. Tyner, California State University, Long Beach

The AAG Awards Committee selected Professor Emerita Judith A. Tyner from the Department of Geography, California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) for the 2018 AAG E. Willard and Ruby S. Miller Award. The award recognizes members of the Association who have made truly outstanding contributions to the geographic field due to their special competence in teaching and/or research.

Tyner’s career has been as long as it has been distinguished, and as far-reaching as it has been pioneering. Over nearly five decades, she has made significant contributions to the fields of map design, historical cartography, women in cartography, textile maps, persuasive cartography and lunar cartography. She has made particularly important contributions to the development and teaching of GIS at CSULB, and has been a champion for women in both geography and, more specifically, cartography. Moreover, Tyner’s research into women cartographers during World War II engages directly with the work of Ruby Miller in the Office of Strategic Services during the American war effort. Such parallelism makes her a uniquely deserving recipient of the Miller Award.

Tyner has written and edited seven books, has published 39 journal articles and book chapters, and delivered 86 conference presentations. She has also contributed 36 invited reviews on cartography and GIS. Of particular note are her textbooks, The World of Maps and Mapping and Principles of Map Design, which have provided key texts for the teaching of cartography since the early 1970s. Her published outputs are all the more remarkable given the heavy teaching commitments of the California State University system.

Tyner’s ground-breaking research, excellent teaching record and overarching professionalism render her a clear and deserving winner of the 2018 AAG E. Willard and Ruby S. Miller Award.

2018 Wilbanks Award for Transformational Research in Geography

The AAG Wilbanks Award 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 Award will consist of a cash prize of $2,000 and include a memento with the name of the Award and the recipient.

Douglas Richardson, American Association of Geographers

Dr. Douglas Richardson, Executive Director of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), is the inaugural recipient of the AAG Wilbanks Award for Transformational Research in Geography.

His selection is based on his outstanding and far-reaching research contributions to Geography, GIScience, and geographic technologies, which have impacted and transformed nearly every aspect of the discipline of geography, as well as science and society more broadly. Dr. Richardson was Founder and President of GeoResearch, Inc., which invented, developed and patented the first real-time interactive GPS/GIS mapping and data collection technology in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This breakthrough innovation enabled for the first time ever, the continuous and mobile creation of highly accurate real-time geospatial location, attribute, and temporal data, and its simultaneous integration with GIS for interactive real-time use for innumerable applications as the user moves through various environments. This technology is also central to the explosive and pervasive growth and availability of new spatio-temporal data, now generally referred to as Big Data.

As part of his leadership at the AAG, Dr. Richardson has developed the ability to undertake major strategic research programs that advance the discipline broadly, for example, in areas such as Geography and Health Research, Geographic Technologies and Sustainable Development, Space-Time Integration in GIScience, and on the interactions between Geography and the Humanities. Dr. Richardson also has very successfully promoted geospatial approaches to health research and opened up pathways for health research and discovery, and has created new opportunities for geographers and GIScientists to play a major role in health and medical research. Dr. Richardson published these results as the lead-author in an article entitled “Spatial turn in health research” in Science in 2013.

Doug Richardson embodies the ideals of Tom Wilbanks’ own research, which also spanned the public, private, and academic spheres. For all these reasons Dr. Richardson is an ideal and exemplary inaugural awardee for the AAG Wilbanks Award for Transformational Research in Geography.

2018 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.

Sharlene Mollett, University of Toronto Scarborough

Dr. Sharlene Mollett of the University of Toronto Scarborough’s Department of Human Geography and Centre for Critical Development Studies is being recognized with the AAG 2018 Glenda Laws Award, as she is an outstanding critical social geographer, who has made a significant impact on feminist political ecologies. She has been influential in establishing the study of postcolonial intersectionality through her work on Latin America.

Dr. Mollett’s work has always been critical and cutting edge. She began her career studying race, gender and property rights in Honduras. In doing so, her work brought critical race theory into discussion with political ecology, something few scholars were considering at the time. She draws from postcolonial political geographies, historical geographies of race, as well as policy documents to reveal how modern day ex-patriot tourism development reinforces historically-produced racial regimes in the region. More recently, Dr. Mollett has turned her attention to space, power, rights and development. Specifically, she is exploring how power-laden historical geographies shape present day land claims and citizen rights. She argues that development discourses continue to dehumanize Afro-descendants and Indigenous peoples in Latin America, particularly women. Notably, Dr. Mollett was invited to speak about this work as the plenary speaker for the Jan Monk Distinguished Lecture at the 2016 AAG Annual Meeting.

With her work, Dr. Mollett intends to inspire justice-oriented debates in geography and contribute to on-the ground change in development practice. Importantly, she is increasingly bringing her research and writing to audiences beyond academia, through media publications and policy documents. Overall, her work has made significant contributions to discussions of race and gender in geography. Dr. Sharlene Mollett is a most deserving recipient of the AAG 2018 Glenda Laws Award.

2018 AAG Award for BA/BS Program Excellence

This annual award and cash prize honors 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 award honors non-PhD granting Geography programs at both the baccalaureate and master levels.

Department of Geography SUNY – Geneseo

Founded in 1967 and currently celebrating its 50th anniversary as a degree-granting Bachelors program, SUNY-Geneseo is committed to curricular innovation, active student organizations and alumni relations, faculty research, and disciplinary engagement both on and off campus, regionally and nationally. The SUNY-Geneseo program has grown robustly over the past fifteen years, from less than thirty undergraduate majors in 2002-2003, to over a hundred majors in the fall of 2017. This increase in student interest in geography has been generated by an exciting curriculum that blends human and physical geography and offers undergraduates study abroad experiences to Canada, Argentina, the Netherlands, and elsewhere.

On campus, SUNY-Geneseo offers both GIS and physical geography laboratories, field courses, and institutional support to invest in facilities such as a ‘wet lab’ with flumes and other hydrological simulation features. The Department also offers minors in Geography, Environmental Studies, and Urban Studies, alongside a concentration designed specifically to support the institution’s Education degree.

With eight tenure-track faculty, the Department hosted the 2017 meeting of the AAG’s Middle States Division and has a strong track record of encouraging undergraduate students to present their own scholarship at this conference and others. The AAG Program Excellence Award Committee applauded the Department’s social media efforts through its active Facebook page, and the manner in which it has reached out on campus to augment curricula offered by programs ranging from Africana Studies and Conflict Studies to International Relations.

Off campus, SUNY-Geneseo offers students opportunities to develop their research at the nearby Letchworth State Park; to work with organizations like YouthMappers and the local chapter of Friends of Recreation, Conservation, and Environmental Stewardship; and to pursue service-learning and internships in the Rochester-Geneseo area of upstate New York. Also notable is the Department’s commitment to supporting faculty research, faculty co-authoring with students, and successful applications for external grants and research awards that have enabled faculty to fund undergraduate student research assistantships. The Committee was particularly impressed by SUNY-Geneseo’s engagement with its alumni, bringing them back to campus annually to meet current undergraduate students, and raising funds to support fieldwork and other departmental extra-curricular activities.

In sum, SUNY-Geneseo is a Department where collaboration between faculty, students, and the local community delivers an exemplary learning experience for undergraduate geographers.

Honorable Mention

Department of Geography, Macalester College

The AAG recognizes Macalester College, in St. Paul, Minnesota with an honorable mention for the quality of its Bachelors program, which delivers to undergraduate students a curriculum centered on civic engagement, and a faculty that is active in numerous research endeavors and in service to the discipline.

2018 AAG Dissertation Research Grants

The AAG provides support for doctoral dissertation research in the form of small grants of up to $1000 to PhD candidates of any geographic specialty.

Nerve Macaspac, UCLA

Maegen Rochner, University of Tennessee

Mayra Roman-Rivera, University of South Carolina

Dara Seidl, San Diego State University

Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Mark Rhodes, Kent State University

Kevin Mwenda, University of California at Santa Barbara

2018 AAG Research Grant

AAG Research Grants are competitively awarded to provide direct expenses of research or fieldwork that address questions of major importance to the discipline excluding master’s or doctoral dissertation research.

Nathan Gill, Clark University

2018 AAG Community College Travel Grants

Provides financial support for students from community colleges, junior colleges, city colleges, of two-year educational institutions to attend the Annual Meeting and enjoy a complimentary year of AAG membership.

Cameron Arceneaux, Lone Star College-Kingwood, Texas

Perla Veloz, Rio Hondo College, California

2018 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 $1,500 for educational expenses. The scholarship has been generously provided by Darrel Hess of the City College of San Francisco to 31 students since 2006.

Julie Burcham transferring from Grossmont Community College to San Diego State University

Jacob Gagnon transferring from Sinclair Community College to the University of Cincinnati

Mario Perez and Tony Vo transferring from Montgomery College to the University of Maryland

Newsletters

Newsletter – February 2018

February 7, 2018

PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

Time for a Radical Geographic Literacy in Trump America

By Derek Alderman

Globe-masked-in-fist-252x300 I am sure many of you know of the strong allegations that Mr. Donald Trump—frustrated with a bipartisan immigration proposal—argued that America needs more immigrants from places like Norway and fewer from Haiti, El Salvador and African nations, which the President reportedly called “shithole countries.” More than mere “locker room cartography,” as one late night comic put it, the President’s harmful words project a racialized map of the world that represents Haitians, Salvadorians, and Africans not only as unwelcomed, but also as inferior. By reducing countries and an entire continent to a pejorative label, Mr. Trump denies the complexity, dignity, and richness of life in these countries and the creative resilience and resistant survivability that have always existed amid and in opposition to political oppression and poverty.

Continue Reading.

Read past columns from the current AAG President on our President’s Column page.

ANNUAL MEETING

Preliminary Program for #AAG2018 Available!

Schedule Button The Preliminary Program for #AAG2018 has been released! The online searchable program includes a preliminary agenda of sessions, plenary speakers, and specialty group meetings. You can browse the schedule by author, title, keyword, sponsor group, theme and day.

Browse the program.

Plan Your Trip to #AAG2018

med_20130131_jacksonsquare_014-300x200 With the release of the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting Preliminary Program, now is the best time to book your travel to New Orleans. The AAG is pleased to partner with United Airlines, Amtrak, and Super Shuttle to help reduce costs for Annual Meeting attendees traveling to New Orleans by train or airplane. Stay close to the action in the AAG co-headquarter hotels. The Opening Plenary and International Reception will take place in the Sheraton New Orleans and the Exhibition Hall and Registration can be found in theMarriott French Quarter. Limited rooms are still available in the AAG block of rooms in each hotel.

Plan your trip.

Nora Newcombe and David Lambert to Keynote Geography Education Research Track at 2018 AAG Annual Meeting

NCRGE_logo The National Center for Research in Geography Education (NCRGE) is pleased to announce keynotes by Nora Newcombe and David Lambert for a special track of geography education sessions during the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting in New Orleans. Nora Newcombe’s lecture, “GPS in Our Heads: What Do Behavioral and Neural Data on Navigation Offer to Geography Educators?”, engages the long and controversial proposal that humans can develop cognitive maps of their environment. Following Newcombe’s lecture, David Lambert will deliver a lecture entitled “Nurturing the ‘Garden of Peace’: Powerful Geographical Knowledge and the Pursuit of Real Education.”

Learn more about the NCRGE keynote.

FocusOnNewOrleansLogo

Élisée Reclus in Louisiana (1853-1855): Encounters with racism and slavery

Fig.-2_Reclus

In 1853, New Orleans was second only to New York City as the largest port city in the United States. The early capitalist economy welcomed a young Élisée Reclus, French geographer and future anarchist, to its shores, forever changing the scholar’s philosophical stance. In this article, Federico Ferretti uses Reclus’ accounts of the city to trace the roots of a geographer “later considered as a founding figure in both scientific geography and socialist libertarianism (anarchism).”

Read the full story.

Louisiana’s Turn to Mass Incarceration: The Building of a Carceral State

“The history of the Louisiana penal system is marked through crisis,” states Lydia Pelot-Hobbs in her expose on the decentralization of ‘Angola,’ the state of Louisiana’s only prison, during the late 20th century. The carceral geographies of New Orleans during the 1970s and 1980s are continuing to shape its political geographies today.

Continue reading.

New Orleans: Place Portraits

2018 marks the tricentennial anniversary of the city of New Orleans, site of the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting. Over the course of its 300 years, the Big Easy has experienced quite a few changes. New Orleans’ unofficial “geographer laureate” Richard Campanella of the Tulane School of Architecture chronicles a few in this month’s Place Portraits: how Bourbon Street became a place to publicly imbibe, the shift of the Louisiana state capitol from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, and three centuries of responses to natural and human disasters.

Read all three articles:

“Focus on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast” is an ongoing series curated by the Local Arrangements Committee to provide insight on and understanding of the geographies of New Orleans, Louisiana, and the greater Gulf Coast region in preparation for the 2018 Annual Meeting.

ASSOCIATION NEWS

First Round of 2018 AAG Award Recipients Announced

The American Association of Geographers congratulates the individuals 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 during the AAG Awards Luncheon at the Annual Meeting on Saturday, April 14, 2018.

See the Awardees.

AAG Welcomes Two Spring Interns

The AAG is excited to have two new interns join our staff for the Spring 2018 semester. Laura Akindo, graduate of Frostburg State University, and Hannah Ellingson, sophomore at The George Washington University, will both be assisting staff on a variety of internal projects in addition to the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting.

Learn more about Laura and Hannah.

2018 AAG Elections – Now Open!

The 2018 AAG election is being conducted online between January 31 and February 22, 2018. Ballots will be emailed to members based on the email address provided to the AAG. Candidate information is currently available on the AAG website.

Details on the election process.

MEMBER NEWS

Profiles of Professional Geographers

Each month, learn more about the field of geography from people who are working in it! This month, AAG talked to Leslie McLees, Undergraduate Coordinator & Instructor at the University of Oregon Department of Geography, and Pete Chirico, Research Geographer & Associate Director of the Eastern Geology and Paleoclimate Science Center at U.S. Geological Survey. Both discussed the need for effective communication skills on the job market and their passions for geography.

Learn more about Geography careers.

Qihao Weng named fellow by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has named geographer and long time AAG Member, Qihao Weng to its list of fellows. Weng has been a professor at Indiana State University since 2001 where his research focuses on urban remote sensing. The author of 210 articles and 10 books, Weng is the 2015 AAG Willard and Ruby S. Miller Award recipient.

Find out more about Weng and the IEEE.

RESOURCES & OPPORTUNITIES

AAG Snapshot: AAG Journals

snapshot aag Looking to learn more about the four scholarly journals published by the AAG throughout the year? In this month’s AAG Snapshot, delve into the academic publishing sphere as AAG Publications Director Jennifer Cassidento shares tidbits about the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, The Professional Geographer, GeoHumanities, and The AAG Review of Books!

Learn more about AAG journals.

PUBLICATIONS

Winter 2018 Issue of ‘The AAG Review of Books’ Now Available

Volume 6, Issue 1 of The AAG Review of Books has now been published online. In this first issue of 2018 be sure to check out the discussions of Concrete Revolution: Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the US Bureau of Reclamation, Degraded Work: The Struggle at the Bottom of the Labor Market, and Cities in Global Capitalism.

Read the reviews.

New Books in Geography — December 2017 Available

New Books in Geography illustration of stack of books

Forests and labor and states, oh my! Check out the list of new books in geography that were received by the AAG during the month of December. The New Books list contains recently published titles in geography and related fields.

Browse the whole list of new books.

February 2018 Issue of the ‘Professional Geographer’ Now Available

PG cover The Professional Geographer, Volume 70, Issue 1, has been published. The focus of this journal is on short articles in academic or applied geography, emphasizing empirical studies and methodologies. Volume 70, Issue 1 includes a focus section entitled: Critical Data, Critical Technology.

See the newest issue.

Read the January 2018 Issue of the ‘Annals of the AAG’

Annals-cover-2016

The first issue of volume 108 of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers has been published. Read articles that span the breadth of the discipline, organized into four major areas: Methods, Models, and Geographic Information Science; Nature and Society; People, Place, and Region; and Physical Geography and Environmental Sciences.

Full article listing available.

OP-ED

Confessions of a Conference Thief

By Mark Fonstad

No-recording-microphone-300x300 “I was a thief. A mild thief, but a thief nonetheless. In 1996, the Binghamton Geomorphology Symposium held a series of talks on the topic of “The Scientific Nature of Geomorphology”. As a young a 23-year old graduate student, I registered and then covertly audio-recorded the talks from a cassette recorder hidden in my jacket pocket. Even though it wasn’t stated explicitly, I guessed that doing this would probably constitute theft of intellectual property. But I did it anyway…”

Continue reading.

FEATURED ARTICLES

Teaching Modern GIS

“As educators, we are always faced with challenges on how we structure our curriculum activities to ensure that we are in line with modern industry practices. This is easier said than done—for one, there is likely no consensus on what a “modern geographic information system (GIS)” means; and two, it takes a tremendous amount of time to do curricula updates… Below is an attempt to outline a few important topics amid the massive digital transformation we have experienced.”

Read the list.

Featured Articles is a special section of the AAG Newsletter where AAG sponsors highlight recent programs and activities of significance to geographers and members of the AAG. To sponsor the AAG and submit an article, please contact Oscar Larson olarson [at] aag [dot] org.

GEOGRAPHERS IN THE NEWS

IN THE NEWS

Popular stories from the AAG SmartBrief

EVENTS CALENDAR

Submit News to the AAG Newsletter. To share your news, email us!

Post

Nora Newcombe and David Lambert to Keynote Geography Education Research Track at 2018 AAG Annual Meeting

February 2, 2018

The National Center for Research in Geography Education (NCRGE) is pleased to announce keynotes by Nora Newcombe and David Lambert for a special track of geography education sessions during the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting in New Orleans.

The keynotes by Professors Newcombe and Lambert are respectively scheduled for 1:20 – 3:00 PM and 3:20 – 5:00 PM on Thursday, April 12 in Room Galerie 2 in the Marriott French Quarter Hotel. Both exemplify the type of work and thinking that is driving current innovative approaches to researching geographic and spatial learning.

Nora Newcombe’s lecture, “GPS in Our Heads: What Do Behavioral and Neural Data on Navigation Offer to Geography Educators?”, engages the long and controversial proposal that humans can develop cognitive maps of their environment. This talk will give a high-level overview of recent advances in understanding how people navigate at the behavioral and neural levels of analysis, from a wide variety of human as well as non-human species, studied from infancy through aging. Newcombe will also examine development and individual differences. For example, children of three to eight years show progressive increases in their proficiency at combining sources of information. By around 12 years, they show adult-level performance on cognitive mapping tasks requiring the integration of vista views of space into environmental space but also show large individual differences in accuracy. Finally, Newcombe will discuss the relevance of this body of knowledge for geography educators, and present data on the effect of GIS experience on spatial thinking.

Following Newcombe’s lecture, David Lambert will deliver a lecture entitled “Nurturing the ‘Garden of Peace’: Powerful Geographical Knowledge and the Pursuit of Real Education.” The work on which Lambert’s talk is based was in part stimulated by a paper by David Wadley that appeared in the Annals of the AAG some ten years ago. A retort to neoliberal orthodoxies, Wadley’s paper “The Garden of Peace” made a special case for the role of education in helping us resist the famous Thatcher line that ‘there is no alternative’. This democratic sentiment was not dissimilar to the thinking that fueled the Geographical Association’s 2009 ‘manifesto’ entitled A Different View, which was an explicit endorsement of the western liberal traditions in education – essentially, that to be educated means that you can think in a reasoned manner, and for yourself. Lambert’s talk explores what has followed from these beginnings, especially in the context of Michael Young’s concept of ‘powerful knowledge’ and its influence on curriculum thinking. One aspect of Young’s recent work is the distinction he now makes about power: that is, between the power over someone/something and the power to be able to do something. Lambert will explore whether geographical knowledge, such as that which is taught in schools and colleges, can be considered ‘powerful’ – and if so in what way? In terms of the capabilities it affords those who possess it, powerful knowledge must be considered a pedagogic right to all – not just the ‘academically gifted’ or the elite. Lambert will conclude by discussing the ambition and potential of powerful knowledge in geography education, as well as its major challenges and difficulties.

About the National Center for Research in Geography Education

NCRGE is a research consortium with headquarters at the American Association of Geographers and Texas State University. Funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, private foundations and other agencies, NCRGE works to build capacity for transformative research in geography education.

Each year at the AAG Annual Meeting, NCRGE organizes a track of research-oriented geography education sessions and workshops to highlight contemporary work in the field and advance the development of a research coordination network. The sessions planned for the 2018 meeting in New Orleans will illustrate the dynamism and breadth of research, theory, and practice in geography education and how geographers and educational researchers are engaged in collaborative work to address contemporary challenges affecting the discipline.

AAG members and others interested in geography education research are encouraged to join the NCRGE research coordination network by completing an application at www.ncrge.org/rcn.

About the Speakers

Nora S. Newcombe is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology at Temple University. She received her B.A. in 1972 from Antioch College and her Ph.D. in 1976 from Harvard University. Her research focuses on spatial cognition and development, and the development of episodic memory. She is currently Principal Investigator of the NSF-funded Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) whose purpose is to develop the science of spatial learning and to use this knowledge to support children and adults in acquiring scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematical (STEM) skills. Dr. Newcombe is the author of numerous publications including Making Space with Janellen Huttenlocher (MIT Press, 2000). She has received numerous awards, including the Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from SRCD (2015), the William James Award from APS (2014), the George A. Miller Award for an Outstanding Recent Article in General Psychology (twice, 2004 and 2014) and the G. Stanley Hall Award for Distinguished Contribution to Developmental Psychology (2007). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006) and to the Society of Experimental Psychologists (2008). She has served as Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and Associate Editor of Psychological Bulletin, has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. She is currently the Past Chair of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society, Chair of Section J (Psychology) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and President-Elect of the Federation of Associations of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

David Lambert is Professor of Geography Education at University College London Institute of Education (UCL – IOE). Obtaining his BA from the University of Newcastle in 1973 he went on to his post graduate professional training at the University of Cambridge. He was a secondary school teacher for twelve years, becoming a deputy principal of a comprehensive school. He became a university teacher-educator from 1986, developing research interests in curriculum, pedagogy and assessment in geography education. His school textbook series Jigsaw Pieces published by Cambridge University Press won the TES school book of the year award in 1991. Receiving his doctorate in 1995 from the University of London, he rose to become Assistant Dean for teacher education in 1999. He left temporarily the academy in 2002 when he was appointed full-time chief executive of the Geographical Association (GA) (www.geography.org.uk). He returned to the IOE as professor in 2007 and was awarded the Royal Geographical Society Taylor Francis Award for leadership in geography education in 2015. Recent books include Knowledge and the Future School (2014), Learning to Teach Geography (3rd Edition, 2015), and Debates in Geography Education (2nd Edition, 2017). He chairs the Editorial Collective of Geography and serves as Associate Editor of International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education. He led the European Union funded GeoCapabilities project from 2013-17 (www.geocapabilities.org).

Post

Confessions of a Conference Thief

February 2, 2018

The views and opinions expressed in op-eds published in the AAG Newsletter are those of the author(s) and do not imply endorsement by the American Association of Geographers. The AAG accepts submissions of op-eds for AAG news content consideration. Authors must be current AAG members. The decision to publish op-eds is at the discretion of the AAG with consideration of how the topic contributes to relevant and important discussions among and interests of the AAG membership community. Questions or submissions can be sent to efekete [at] aag [dot] org.

I was a thief. A mild thief, but a thief nonetheless. In 1996, the Binghamton Geomorphology Symposium held a series of talks on the topic of “The Scientific Nature of Geomorphology.” As a young 23-year old graduate student, I registered and then covertly audio-recorded the talks from a cassette recorder hidden in my jacket pocket. Even though it wasn’t stated explicitly, I guessed that doing this would probably constitute theft of intellectual property. But I did it anyway.

I did it because I had no intention of using the recordings other than for my own private education, which I felt I had paid for when I paid my registration fee. I wasn’t going to scoop the speakers on some published content, and I wasn’t going to give out the recordings to friends. I knew that the content of the talks would be new to me, complex, and that I wouldn’t understand everything the first time I listened, and that it was material I wanted to master as I worked towards a “Doctor of Philosophy.”

The recordings were horrible quality, but they were adequate. I could hear to the degree necessary to be able to listen over and over and gradually understand what was being communicated. I had purchased the symposium special issue, so I had many of the figures to go with the talks. I also had the luxury of being a very fast note-taker and figure-drawer, a luxury many lack. Like many presentations, the talks were far more informal as compared with the written articles. It was the audio tapes I understood far more readily. Today, I am often asked to teach classes and address groups on philosophical issues subjects raised in that symposium. My theft was worth it.

Today, every major association that my students and I frequent has banned recordings of any kind at their meetings – the AAG, AGU, EGU, and others. These bans exist for many reasons – to protect presenters’ intellectual property, to foster a “safe” environment where researchers can present new ideas, to encourage people to come to (and pay registration to) meetings, and others. These are noble and justifiable reasons, and I am not surprised by them.

But these bans are problematic. First, they seem to be becoming increasingly futile. Technology that nearly every attendee carries in their pocket can record hours of audio and video. Many people, in spite of the bans, are involved in some aspect of recording – taking pictures of slides or posters, videorecording talks, or whatever. Not one or two people here and there, but a huge number of people. For every person asked to stop a recording, ten seem to spring up. Sometimes the price of being caught is to be publicly told to stop. Rarely, it is to be cast out of the conference.

Second, a generation is entering the profession that have been required to take fewer notes, and instead have been given pre-made educational materials to a larger degree. They are asking to be able to record lectures on campus, thus they wonder: why shouldn’t they be able to do so at a conference? Some are able to process and record presentations much better than others (especially those for whom English is not a first language), why should they not get further opportunities to understand what is being presented?

Third, there appear to be partially conflicting ideas of the purposes of a conference. Rather than simply being a safe forum for trying out new ideas, associations are making increasingly vocal calls for these conferences to be visible public forums. Major lectures are publicized in the press. Science journalists report findings from the conferences. The development of e-posters, live tweeting, and other alternative modes of delivery seem to be reaching towards maximum visibility of the presentations. Anyone can pay to enter and hear any presentation they wish. If ten people tweet reactions to parts of a particular talk, how much intellectual property has been “given away”? Moreover, these presentations (or, at least their abstracts) are citable. On a related note, I can’t guess how many times I have heard in conversation from junior and senior researchers alike: “I really wish we had a recording of Professor M giving that pivotal talk from way back when.” If that is really what we want, why do we ban doing so?

Fourth, a revolution of open access, data, and publication is underway. The incoming generation of scholars perhaps is more knowledgeable and comfortable with the idea that results from publicly-funded projects are not completely “their own,” and that sharing of data and ideas is a basic expectation. Interim reports are still shared, usually with the proviso that they should be treated as draft reports. Are not conference presentations a type of draft report?

The argument of intellectual property protection as the basis of these recording bans is important, and I do not advocate wholesale recording and distribution of every conference talk. But I’d like to offer an alternative to these total bans. I think that it should be up to each individual presenter to decide whether they would like to allow recording of their talks, posters, and other modes of communication. It seems reasonable to me that at the beginning of a talk a speaker might say “these results are too preliminary for me to feel comfortable with their being recorded,” or “the research is to the point where you may record for your own personal use.” In the cases where presenters are comfortable with the audience-made recordings, it might be with the proviso that this privilege comes from a mutual understanding that the recordings or materials derived from them would not be shared or circulated.

I welcome discussion on this topic. Whether the bans stay or are modified, one thing is for sure – there will be those audience members who decide that the benefits of recording will outweigh the risks of being caught doing so.

Mark A. Fonstad
Associate Professor
University of Oregon
fonstad [dot] uoregon [dot] edu

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0027

For information about current AAG Annual Meeting policies, including the use of video or recording technology, please visit the Annual Meeting Guidelines web page.

conference, intellectual property, recording

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Teaching Modern GIS

February 2, 2018

As educators, we are always faced with challenges on how we structure our curriculum activities to ensure that we are in line with modern industry practices. This is easier said than done—for one, there is likely no consensus on what a “modern geographic information system (GIS)” means; and two, it takes a tremendous amount of time to do curricula updates. As an instructor of a variety of courses on Web GIS, programming, and spatial analytics at Johns Hopkins University, I am relentlessly faced with course updates. However, my being a Solutions Engineer at Esri as well provides me with a unique perspective into the technology and helps me stay focused on what is important in the geospatial industry.

What will the next generation GIS curriculum look like? We may call it Web GIS or something else, but we will have to address the need for this forward-looking curriculum and embrace it as educators. GIS graduates are telling us this, as seen in this Esri Young Professionals Network (YPN) survey.

Below is an attempt to outline a few important topics amid the massive digital transformation we have experienced. For now, these topics are meant to serve as points of discussion—a means for self-assessment and reflection—to make us think about what we teach today and what tomorrow will bring. Yes, it is a bit IT heavy, but in today’s GIS environment, IT is much needed. These topics come from feedback we received from students and graduates, who pointed out that we may not be placing a strong enough emphasis on the software and application development competency of the Geospatial Technology Competency Model (GTCM).

GIS Today—GIS is not just a desktop technology anymore. We need to think about the trends that have influenced GIS evolution, such as cloud computing, mobile devices, big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), and machine learning. An important point to discuss here is the use of the technology to solve problems as well as facilitate access to information—anywhere, anytime, on any device.
GIS as a Service—The industry is shifting rapidly from specific software implementations to services in which the underlying technology is less visible–and probably less important—to the user of this technology. While the enterprise deployments providing some of these services will be important to understand, we probably need not focus on that in these early stages. Information products are fueled by services—ready-to-use services or those we can create—and there are different protocols and capabilities we can expose through these services, which would be important concepts to discuss. Understanding the notion of hosting, whether through the cloud or on-premises infrastructure, and demonstrating how GIS is web-oriented architecture (without necessarily calling it that) are key.
GIS in Your Apps—People use simple, focused apps to access information at home, and this same trend is now in the workplace. The industry is moving away from long development cycles to the use of apps that are easily configured, which allows organizations to stay current with technology. How people experience GIS through apps that are ready to use, configurable, native, web based, etc., also emphasizes the notion that information can be made available in many possible ways to those who need it. These apps are fueled by underlying maps, layers, and services provided by server technology, to which access is facilitated through a portal. Access, of course, could be dictated by identity and credentials.
GIS APIs and SDKs—GIS, as an information system, is built with SDKs and APIs. As GIS has become embedded into all aspects of business, the need for developers has grown. Understanding that GIS capabilities can be extended and having knowledge and experience with software libraries, APIs, and SDKs will afford students opportunities to grow into their careers. Graduates have expressed a strong desire and employers have expressed a strong need for this programming knowledge, whether it is Python, JavaScript, or any other language that emerges in the future.
GIS in Your IT—This also falls under the “software and application development” competency of the GTCM, specifically, to design a geospatial system architecture that responds to user needs, including desktop, server, and mobile applications. Understanding what it means to architect and manage a GIS, using an organization’s infrastructure, whether in the cloud or on-premises, is a must. The focus is on the management of the networks, portals, map servers, web servers, databases, and data stores and on the understanding of how these components work together. Graduates entering today’s workforce will be needing these skills.
GIS in the Field—Organizations are employing field GIS workflows, whether through crowdsourcing, citizen science, secure data collection, or maintenance. Content can be delivered in many ways in the field, such as via a public-facing, highly available app or by supporting an internal-facing, intermittently connected, field collection app. Teaching a variety of approaches is important.
More Types of Services—Other services provide additional capabilities—whether through client- and server-rendered services or by simply enabling users to access specific functionality, such as real-time GIS capabilities, to solve a problem.
GIS as Geospatial Data Science—Careers that include data science are expanding. Geospatial technology curricula ought to better mesh with data science/analytics curricula, infusing traditional geospatial technology topics with data science methods. This should include big data analytics platforms/databases, machine learning, Python and R data scientific libraries, business intelligence (BI) technologies, NoSQL databases, and mapping APIs. A program might promote these as data analytics, data engineering, machine learning, artificial intelligence, or in other ways.
And, of course, one should not neglect traditional topics, such as mapping and visualization, spatial analytics, and data management, being infused with the above.

Now how do we learn and how do we teach GIS? GIS is a changing field, and change is accelerating. Transformation is occurring not just in the curriculum but also in how we learn, the resources we use to teach, and pedagogic approaches. The way one learns GIS in class should probably equate with how one learns it in the workplace. We ought to be considering a shift in the traditional resources we’ve used so far in our classrooms; a single book that covers a whole class may not be enough anymore. Also, a book that was written six months ago may likely be outdated.

Modernized Curriculum → Shift in Resources Used and Pedagogy

Classes need to be agile, which means that writing and following cookbook exercises are not sustainable ways to teach rapidly changing technology. The Internet and the wealth of information available provide ways for users to find answers fast. Relying on recently updated online documentation, blogs, and other freely available web-based resources and channels is key.

An important concern persists, though—how do we know what information is good to include (i.e., truly current and worthy material)? There is a lot of information to weed out. “Less is more” is a generally appropriate approach; when in doubt, leave it out. A less desirable approach is a disclaimer of “keep in mind that . . . ” or “use at your own discretion.” In the workplace, students will also come across a staggering amount of information, so it is important to learn how to discern what is quality content (with guidance, if need be) and applicable to solving a problem.

At Johns Hopkins, we follow some of the above approaches to keep content current and foster a culture of collaboration and peer-to-peer interaction among students, which, in turn, encourages community building; this is particularly important for fully online courses. As an instructor, standing back, observing, and providing guidance before things go off track, and challenging students to take more responsibility for their learning when solving a problem, has worked well.

There certainly are many other approaches to handling some of the challenges in teaching modern GIS. The AAG Annual Meeting and the Education Summit @ Esri User Conference (Esri UC) sessions on “Modern GIS Practices in Your Curriculum,” along with various other online tools such as GeoNet or Esri’s HIGHERED-L LISTSERV, could be great venues for continuing this discussion.

Esri, geography education, GIS, jobs in GIS

News

Louisiana’s Turn to Mass Incarceration: The Building of a Carceral State

February 1, 2018

Louisiana’s prison and jail incarceration rates from 1978 to 2015 showing the number of people incarcerated in state prisons and local jails per 100,000 people; https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/jailsovertime.html#methodology

The history of the Louisiana penal system is marked through crisis. For the majority of the 20^th century such crises revolved around the state’s singular prison, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly referred to as Angola. Having long been known as the “bloodiest prison in the nation,” the prison entered into an unmatched crisis of legitimacy in the 1970s. Conditions were wretched and stabbings and escapes were monthly affairs.[1] Within this climate, scores of incarcerated people filed lawsuits against the penitentiary. In 1975, U.S. Magistrate Frank Polozola found in favor of four Black prisoners at Angola, Arthur Mitchell Jr., Hayes Williams, Lee E. Stevenson, and Lazarus D. Joseph, who had filed a lawsuit against Angola in 1971 for numerous constitutional issues including medical neglect, unsafe facilities, religious discrimination, racial segregation, and overcrowding. Polozola declared the penitentiary to be in a state of “extreme public emergency.”[2] Massive changes were ordered in the name of restoring incarcerated people’s constitutional rights.[3] For the next several years, the Louisiana penal system, including parish jails, were under the jurisdiction of federal court orders.

Map of Louisiana State Penitentiary-Angola, Creative Commons

While many issues were brought to the forefront through this legal ruling, overcrowding became the central issue for the Department of Corrections (DOC) and the broader state. The federal courts ordered that Angola’s prison population be reduced from over 4,000 prisoners to 2,641 prisoners within a few months time.[4] In response, the DOC advocated for the “decentralization” of Angola through creating small rehabilitation focused prisons and the potential for shuttering Angola altogether. With time at a premium, the DOC scrambled to find and convert a wide range of surplus state property from schools, to hospitals, to even a decommissioned navy ship into new prisons.[5] Recent infusions of federal funds in the form of Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) grants and the exponential increase in state revenues do to the global jump in oil prices following the 1973 OPEC price hike meant that funding such conversions was of little concern to the state. However, the DOC had extreme difficulty in attaining the support of local residents who routinely protested new prison plans.[6] Mobilized via fears of “dangerous criminals” that they believed would not only make their communities unsafe but would also lower their property taxes, communities from Caddo Parish to Bossier City to New Orleans East were successful in keeping out new satellite prisons.[7] At the same time, parish jails throughout Louisiana entered into their own state of emergency as they were forced to accommodate the hundreds of prisoners prohibited from being transferred to Angola inciting anger in local sheriffs statewide.[8] In response to these challenges, DOC Secretary Elayn Hunt and Angola Warden C. Paul Phelps, who had long been concerned with the rise of “lifers” at Angola, joined the call led by Angola’s incarcerated activists for a different solution to the overcrowding crisis: the early release of prisoners.[9]

Harry Connick Campaign Ad 1973, The Times-Picayune

However, the New Orleans D.A. Harry Connick was adamantly against such proposals. At the time, Connick was in the process of building his career upon the racialized tough on crime politics sweeping the nation. He routinely attacked DOC officials in the press for advocating early release and alternatives to incarceration.[10] In fact, in the same months the federal court orders were coming down, he successfully pushed for more punitive policies and practices through working with the NOPD to attain LEAA grants to expand policing powers.[11] In addition, he personally drafted dozens of draconian crime bills that instituted mandatory sentencing and reduced good time and parole eligibility, which the increasingly law and order state legislature was more than happy to pass.[12] With arrest rates going up,[13] sentencing becoming harsher and the number of people being paroled steadily dropping, overcrowding pressure intensified across the state.[14] Thus, Louisiana was confronted with a range of different pushes and pulls, from federal court rulings, to parish level politics, to active disagreement among state and city officials, to global political economic realignments and new federal monies, as state leaders attempted to figure out the future direction of the penal system.

By the decade’s end, it was clear that Louisiana’s politicians were attempting to build their way out of the overcrowding crisis. Three new prisons had been built with more on the way and thousands of new beds were added to Angola more than doubling the state’s prison population from 3,550 people in 1975 to 8,661 people in 1980.[15] This unprecedented carceral state building project was emboldened and buttressed by the 1980 election of David Treen to governor who had explicitly campaigned on a tough on crime platform and by Polozola, now a federal judge, who began to mandate that Louisiana deal with its continual overcrowding crisis through expanding the prison system.[16] Yet, as incarcerated activists with The Angolite and the Lifers Association as well as free world prison reformers argued at the time, growing the state’s carceral apparatus did not solve the crisis but propelled further overcrowding.[17] The ongoing overcrowding at the prisons further increased pressure on dozens of parish jails as they were yet again, relied on to house thousands of state prisoners, leading to overflowing jails from New Orleans to Lafayette.[18] In the case of New Orleans, the situation became so dire that in the summer of 1983 then Sheriff Foti erected a tent jail in the face of overcrowding at the city jail, Orleans Parish Prison (OPP).[19]

Editorial cartoon; Sept. 24, 1989, from the Times-Picayune

While sheriffs everywhere were frustrated by this situation, their response to such overcrowding was markedly different in the early 1980s than it had been in the mid-1970s. When parish jails had filled to capacity in response to the 1975 court orders, sheriffs lobbied to get state prisoners out of their jails.[20] But only a few years later, while sheriffs collectively petitioned the state to get so-called “violent offenders” out of their jails they also pushed for funds to renovate and expand the parish jails to make space for both folks awaiting trial as well as state prisoners.[21] We can understand this shift from a number of vantage points. While in 1975 the overcrowding crisis appeared to be temporary, by the early 1980s there was no sign of incarceration rates letting up as Governor Treen and the state legislature continued to press for the passage punitive crime bills. In addition, when parish officials had been compelled to release people to stay within the population limits set by Judge Polozola, the media attacked them for letting “criminals” loose into the streets.[22] With both politicians and the media employing such fear-mongering tactics, political will was on the side of jail expansion versus early release or alternatives to incarceration as a solution to the overcrowding. In fact, Governor Treen’s decision to prioritize jail construction over education, healthcare, and levees in the state budget was “not out of a desire to make life easier for these convicts but to make sure that no judge feels compelled to release somebody back into society who should not be there just because prisons are overcrowded.”[23] And indeed, as the Louisiana Coalition on Jails and Prisons would highlight in their decarceration campaigns throughout the 1980s, the atrocious conditions within jails persisted alongside their shiny new renovations.[24]

Sheriffs’ desires to build up their parish jails aligned not only with the dominant law and order politics of racial neoliberal governance, but also with the economic conditions confronted by the state. When sheriffs were first required to take in state prisoners in 1975 it was a financial burden since the DOC was paying sheriff departments a per diem rate of only $4.50/day per prisoner.[25] But as the overcrowding crisis wore on, local parish officials, including sheriffs, successfully petitioned the state to increase the per diem to $18.25 by 1980.[26] The higher per diem rate made sheriffs much more amenable to housing state prisoners as they were able to use the funds to build out their departments’ carceral infrastructure. Sheriffs throughout the state leveraged such jail growth to expand their political power both within their own parishes and through the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association.

What’s more is this per diem system met the financial needs of the broader state as well. Since the Jim Crow regime, the state had been loathe to finance the penal system.[27] To meet mandates of the federal courts, the state was required to increase funding to the Department of Corrections on an unmatched scale. The DOC budget during this time shot up from $20 million in 1974 to $135 million by 1982 with tens of millions of dollars spent on new prison construction which, as previously mentioned, was easily funded for the first several years through unexpected oil revenues.[28] Yet as oil dependent economies are notoriously precarious, Louisiana entered into a fiscal crisis in the early 1980s in response to the global oil slump.[29] With the state’s fiscal crisis and accompanied economic recession deepening throughout the 1980s, state officials sought new solutions for maintaining carceral growth. While state officials turned to debt-financing for new carceral construction, the state’s inability to cover prison operating costs with such debt schemes put the state in a conundrum. Although prisoners and decarceration activists offered the solution of the state curtailing law and order politics and instituting mass parole as other states had in similar situations, Louisiana turned to upping its reliance on the parish jail system as a more politically and financially viable option. [30] As the per diem rate was much lower than the costs of keeping prisoners incarcerated in state prisons, the state forged ahead with creating multi-decade cooperation endeavor agreements between the Department of Corrections and a slew of primarily rural parishes to house the lion’s share of state prisoners. What had started out as a temporary spatial fix had become the long-term geographic solution to prison overcrowding.

By the time Louisiana gained the title of having the highest incarceration rate in the nation in the late 1990s, almost half of the state’s prisoners were behind bars in parish jails with New Orleans’ OPP at 7,000 plus beds, the largest carceral facility in the state.[31] Although when the jail was first enlarged to this mammoth size, its jail population had stabilized to around 5,000. Yet only five years later, the jail was at capacity. Three thousand of those locked away were state prisoners while a combination of people awaiting trial who could not afford to pay exorbitant bail bonds, individuals serving municipal offenses, a growing number of juveniles, and INS immigrant prisoners held through federal contracts filled the remaining 4,000 beds. Many of those held behind OPP’s walls at Tulane and Broad avenues were targets of intensified policing crackdowns during the 1990s. Although officially most crime was in decline during the 1990s in New Orleans, the escalation of fear-based, racially-coded news media made controlling the city’s supposed lawlessness a priority for city leaders who were concerned about the negative impacts of such reporting on the tourist economy.[32] Under the administration of Mayor Marc Morial and his Police Superintendent Richard Pennington, the NOPD implemented a form of “community policing” to saturate the city’s housing projects, the French Quarter, and Downtown Development District with law enforcement.[33] This spatial strategy for law enforcement illuminated the interlaced primacy of “sanitizing” the city’s tourist epicenters of the homeless, youth, queer and trans people, and sex workers as well as containing and controlling Black working class spaces. Such policing tactics served to fill OPP to the brim by the time Hurricane Katrina made landfall in the Crescent City on August 29, 2005 and prisoners were abandoned by the state to flooded cells.[34]

In the dozen years since the levee breaks, attention has finally begun to be given to the crisis of mass incarceration in Louisiana. The sustained community organizing of the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition (OPPRC) successfully campaigned for OPP to be rebuilt on the much smaller scale of 1438 beds in 2010 while the creation of the Independent Police Monitor’s Office and the Department of Justice’s implementation of a consent decree on the NOPD has tempered police misconduct.[35] This past summer organizations such as VOTE (Voice of the Experienced) were successful in getting the state legislature to pass ban the box legislation and raising the age that juveniles can be tried as adults.[36]

French Quarter Security Task Force vehicle; photo by Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, 2017

However, these local gains have never been final victories. Public defenders in Louisiana continue to be woefully underfunded. The current New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu has been pushing a law and order surveillance plan for the city while the New Orleans city council is bending towards the will of Sheriff Marlin Gusman that the city needs to raise the jail cap for a “Phase Three” of construction at OPP.[37] Several front-runners in the upcoming mayoral and city council elections are following old tough on crime scripts in making expanding the NOPD the number one piece of their political platform. The current Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry recently sent his own rogue band of state troopers to police New Orleans and has been working with AG Jeff Sessions to repeal the consent decree governing the NOPD.[38] AAG attendees are likely to catch a glimpse of the French Quarter Management District’s private security vehicles that work in alliance with the NOPD and state troopers. Their explicit mandate from the French Quarter business leaders is to crack down on perceived sex workers, transgender individuals, street musicians, and others they deem “undesirable” to the imperatives of racial capital.

While the future of the Louisiana carceral state remains uncertain, it is clear that understanding the multiscalar factors that have produced the current crisis of mass incarceration is a critical starting point to undoing this systematic violence and striving towards the still unrealized project of abolition democracy.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0025

[1] “State Prison Inmate Slain in Stabbing,” State Times (Baton Rouge, LA), July 18, 1974, 9-A.

[2] Williams v. McKeithan C.A 71-98 (M.D.La, 1975), US Magistrate Special Report; Gibbs Adams, “Federal Court Orders State Prison Changes,” The Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA), April 29, 1975. Judge West backed up Polozola in ordering sweeping changes. However, it is worth noting that Polozola had nothing to say about one of the plaintiffs main complaints: solitary confinement. “4 Inmates Ask Changes in Pen Safety Reform Plan,” State Times (Baton Rouge, LA), May 6, 1975.

[3] Williams v. McKeithan C.A 71-98 (M.D.La, 1975), Judgement and Order.

[4] Louisiana Prison System Study, 29, Governor’s Office Long Range Prison Study Files, 1972-1980, Box 1, Louisiana State Archives.

[5] C.M. Hargroder, “7 Prison Sites Proposed,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), September 16, 1975; “World War II Troopship May Be Used As Floating Louisiana Prison,” Monroe Morning World (Monroe, LA), October 26, 1975.

[6]“Executive Budget 1974-1975, Vol. 1,” Box 1: Executive Budget 1975-1980, State Budget Reports 1970-1989, Louisiana State Archives (LSA); “State of Louisiana Budget Fiscal Year 1974-1975,” Box 3, State Budget Reports 1970-1989, LSA; “State of Louisiana Budget Fiscal Year 1975-1976,” Box 3, State Budget Reports 1970-1989, LSA.

[7] Bonnie Davis, “Residents Will Protest Use of Carver School as Prison,” Shreveport Times (Shreveport, LA), July 24, 1975; Lynn Stewart, “State May Seize Site in Caddo for Prison,” Shreveport Times (Shreveport, LA), August 19, 1975; “Bossier Prison Site Reported Ruled Out,” Morning Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA), March 19, 1976; Richard Boyd, “Council Vows to Fight East N.O. Prison Facility” States Item (New Orleans, LA), April 23, 1976; Patricia Gorman, “Homes Closed to Inmates” States Item (New Orleans, LA), April 30, 1976.

[8] Roy Reed, “Louisiana’s Jails Are Being Packed,” New York Times (New York, New York), September 18, 1975; Pierre V. DeGruy, “ ‘State of Emergency’ at Parish Jail—Foti, “The Times Picayune (New Orleans, LA), October 16, 1975.

[9] “Two Year Time Limit Termed Impossible for Angola Changes,” State Times (Baton Rouge, LA), June 17, 1975; Tommy Mason, “Lifer’s,” The Angolite, August 1975, 23; John McCormick, “Legal Action: Our Goodtime Law May Be Changed,” The Angolite, September 1975, 1-2.

[10] Associated Press, “Inmate Release Policy Blasted,” Morning Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA), June 9, 197; Ed Anderson, “Connick Attacks Parole Board Plan,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), October 28, 1975.

[11] “ ‘Career Criminal’ Bureau for N.O.” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), March 19, 1975.

[12] Jack Wardlaw, “Connick Wins Anti-‘Good Time’ Battle in House,” State Item (Baton Rouge, LA), July 2, 1975; 12-a; Pierre V. DeGruy, “Connick Endeavors in Legislature Pay Off: Entire Package is Passed” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), July 31, 1975.

[13] “Jail Overload Credited to Police Work,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), April 17, 1980.

[14] “Criminals Face Harsher Penalties as New Law Takes Effect,” State Item (Baton Rouge, LA), September 17, 1975.

[15] Louisiana Prison System Study, 4, Governor’s Office Long Range Prison Study Files, 1972-1980, Box 1, LSA; Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement, “The Data: Prison Crowding in Louisiana, 1988,” Folder 9: Prison Reform Reports, Remarks, Statements 1987-1988, Box 3, Rev. James Stovall Papers, Louisiana State University.

[16] Treen: ‘Going to Be Touch to Get a Pardon From Me’ “ Alexandria Town Talk (Alexandria, LA), March 9, 1980; Gibbs Adams, “State Prisons Must Expand,” Morning Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA), May 19, 1983.

[17] “Remarks by Jack D. Foster, Project Director Law and Justice Section, The Council of Staet Governments Before The Governor’s Pardon, Parole, and Rehabilitation Commission,” May 9, 1977, Folder 2: Governors Pardon, Parole, and Rehabilitation Commission Remarks and Reports, Box 3, Rev. James Stovall Papers, Louisiana State University; “The Crowded Cage,” The Angolite, November/December 1983, 35-60.

[18] “Orleans Prison Above Inmate Ceiling for 3 Months,” State Times (Baton Rouge, LA), May 17, 1983; Nanette Russell, “District Attorney Angry State Prisoners in Jails,” Lafayette Advertiser (Lafayette, LA), June 28, 1983.

[19] “Foti Gets OK to Put Inmates in Tents,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), June 14, 1983.

[20] Pierre V. Degruy, “Packed Prison Feared,” The Times Picayune (New Orleans, LA), September 12, 1975.

[21] Memo from Carey J. Roussel to Donald G. Bollinger, March 17, 1981, Folder 1: Public Safety 1981, Box 815: P 1981, David Treen Papers, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University; “Sheriff Layrisson Angry Over Jail Fund Postponement,” Vindicator (Hammond, LA), May 25, 1983.

[22] Monte Williams, “Crowded Jails Let Criminals Free,” Daily Iberian (New Iberia, LA), June 12, 1983.

[23] “Comments on Governor David C. Treen’s Criminal Justice Package for Possible Use by President Reagan in his September 28 Speech to the International Association of Chiefs of Police,” Folder 4: Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice 1981, Box 796: L 1981, David Treen Papers, Tulane University.

[24] Louisiana Coalition on Jails & Prisons, “Jail Project Update” pamphlet, 1981, Folder: Louisiana Coalition, Box 2, Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons Records, 1974-1980, The Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Louisiana Coalition on Jails & Prisons, “Louisiana Jails” pamphlet, n.d., Folder: Louisiana Coalition, Box 2, Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons Records, 1974-1980, The Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

[25] “Legislative Digest,” The Angolite, September/October 1978, 9.

[26] Memo from C. Paul Phelps to William A. Nungesser, October 3, 1980, Folder 8: Corrections 1980, Box 666: C 1980, David Treen Papers, Tulane University.

[27] Mark T. Carleton, Politics and Punishment; the History of the Louisiana State Penal System (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971).

[28] “Executive Budget 1974-1975, Vol. 1,” 9, Box 1, State Budget Reports 1970-1989, Louisiana State Archives; “Louisiana State Budget 1982-1983,” 39, Box 4, State Budget Reports 1970-1989, Louisiana State Archives;

[29] “Executive Budget Program 1982-1983 Vol 1,” A11, Box 2: Executive Budgets 1980-1985, Louisiana State Archives. For more on the precarity of oil economies at this time see Petter Nore and Terisa Turner, Oil and Class Struggle (London: Zed Press, 1980).

[30] “The Moment of Truth” The Angolite, May/June 1982, 12.

[31] Southern Legislative Conference, Louisiana Legislative Fiscal Office, Adult Corrections Systems 1998, by Christopher A. Keaton, (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1999), 7-8.

[32] Chris Adams, “Tragedy Marks a Night of Crime,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), August 5, 1990; Walt Philbin, “Shooting Sets Murder Record,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), October 23, 1990; Michael Perlstein, “Beyond the Bullet – Murder in New Orleans,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), July 1, 1993; Sheila Grissett, “Murder Rate in N.O. Exceeds One a Day,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), July 17, 1993; Sheila Stroup, “When Will It All End?” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), July 26, 1994. International Association of Police Chiefs, The New Orleans Police Department Revisited, June 29, 1993, 2-8, Marc H. Morial Papers. Box 33, Folder 1: Morial Transition The New Orleans Police Department, Revisited 1993, Amistad Research Center.

[33] Building New Orleans Together: City of New Orleans 1997 Annual Report, 1997, 7, Box 43, Folder 7: Mayoral City of New Orleans Annual Reports, Marc H. Morial Papers 1994-2002, Amistad Research Center.

[34] ACLU National Prison Project, Abandoned and Abused: Orleans Parish Prisoners in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina, report (2006).

[35] https://www.nola.gov/nopd/nopd-consent-decree/

[36] This is not to be confused with the widely lauded bipartisan package of prison reform bills that passed the Louisiana legislature last summer, which has served to primarily tinker with the penal system rather than make meaningful reforms. “Louisiana’s Parole Reform Law Continues a Positive Trend in Criminal Justice Reform,” Voice of the Experienced, accessed September 26, 2017, https://www.vote-nola.org/archive/louisianas-parole-reform-law-continues-a-positive-trend-in-criminal-justice-reform.

[37] Emily Lane, “At Orleans Jail, Monitor and Judge See ‘light at the End of the Tunnel‘,” NOLA.com, June 08, 2017, accessed September 26, 2017, .

[38] Jim Mustain, “Attorney General Jeff Landry Slams Mitch Landrieu, Says New Orleans ‘more Dangerous than Chicago’,” The Advocate, January 07, 2017, accessed September 26, 2017; Richard Rainey, “AG Landry Met with Trump, Sessions; Discussed Law Enforcement,” NOLA.com, March 01, 2017, accessed September 26, 2017.

incarceration, Louisiana, New Orleans

President's Column

Time for a Radical Geographic Literacy in Trump America

February 1, 2018

Like many geographers, I have a world map hanging in my office. Last time I looked, I didn’t see any “shitholes” on that map. It does not come easy for me to begin my commentary with an expletive (and I apologize to those who I offend), but our current U.S. President really leaves me no choice. I am sure many of you know of the strong allegations that Mr. Donald Trump—frustrated with a bipartisan immigration proposal—argued that America needs more immigrants from places like Norway and fewer from Haiti, El Salvador and African nations, which the President reportedly called “shithole countries.”

More than mere “locker room cartography,” as one late night comic put it, the President’s harmful words project a racialized map of the world that represents Haitians, Salvadorians, and Africans not only as unwelcomed, but also as inferior. By reducing countries and an entire continent to a pejorative label, Mr. Trump denies the complexity, dignity, and richness of life in these countries and the creative resilience and resistant survivability that have always existed amid and in opposition to political oppression and poverty.

Mr. Trump’s “shithole” remark also works to erases, quite likely by design, a consideration of socio-spatial processes and difficult decisions that make migration necessary for many people, along with the very real contributions that immigrants from these denigrated nations have brought (and continue to bring) to the United States. Also obfuscated in the President’s unjust words is America’s own historical and ongoing complicity in destabilizing the governments and economies of some of these derided countries.

As a global leader and the head of a diverse nation, the President had the responsibility to create and communicate a much more informed and inclusive rendering of the world—regrettably, it appears that he chose not to do so.

There is no shortage of organizations, journalists, and individual citizens condemning Trump’s words as vulgar, racist, and unbecoming of the nation’s highest elected leader. I share in their outrage and feel strongly that the President’s remarks—and the ideology that underlies them—strike at the heart of who and what we are as geographers. His maligning of certain parts of the world runs directly contrary to our Association’s core values regarding scientific knowledge, international collaboration, support for developing regions, human rights, and anti-racism.

Before going any further, I want to be clear that this column, like all of my monthly columns, reflects my opinions and mine alone. They do not represent an official stand or position taken by the American Association of Geographers (AAG). At the same time, the AAG can and does encourage its members to speak out to express their own individual opinions about social and policy issues important to them as geographers.

The President’s recent language and policies regarding immigration are open to question on a variety of economic, diplomatic, and social justice grounds. I wish to focus here on the damage potentially done to the “geographical ethics” that we try to create within our classrooms and communities, specifically the intellectual and moral obligation to develop a sophisticated global understanding, to represent the world in just terms, to care about and develop an empathy for others—as much as that is illusive.

Regrettably, Mr. Trump’s “shithole” reference is not an isolated event, but part of a pattern of regularly degrading people and places as part of the process of governing—whether he is offering defamatory portrayals of people from Mexico, African American communities, or those living in certain Muslim nations.

I encourage members of the AAG to consider what this national ethical crisis means for our discipline—especially in terms of raising the already high stakes of geographic education—and I suggest that now is the time for articulating and promoting a “radical geographic literacy” among a public bombarded with harmful images from the White House.

The High Stakes of Geographic Education, Especially Now

When Mr. Trump uses his bully pulpit to portray an entire country as the equivalent of a toilet, he is single handedly damaging what many of us have spent our careers trying to achieve in the classroom. The full damage comes not from a single comment in a single moment, but in how that remark perpetuates a long history of nativism and white supremacy within the United States while also reinforcing centuries old negative tropes about the Global South. In this regard, we cannot dismiss the President’s words as simply political incorrectness or “Trump just being Trump”—they are part a larger historical and contemporary geography of racial injustice.

The President’s stigmatizing of Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries—and the unwillingness of some elected officials to condemn these actions—threaten not only the global outlook and values of our students, but also potentially the very safety of some of these students and other community members. I join other geographers in being gravely concerned about the wider toxic effect that the ‘shithole” controversy will have on patterns of prejudice, public treatment of targeted immigrant groups, the sense of belonging of people of color in general.

While the President has been criticized (and rightly so) by the media and teachers, the truth is that his offensive comments join a tradition among journalists and even some educators of framing African people and places largely in terms of disaster without carrying out a full and responsible historical and geographic analysis and depiction of the region. Indeed, several months before the President’s infamous “shithole” reference, a number of my colleagues who grade AP Human Geography exams contacted me. They expressed outrage this past year in finding high school student AP essays containing damaging stereotypes about Africa along with clear elements of racism, sexism, and classism. There were also concerns from my colleagues about some of the Eurocentric assumptions written into the AP exam questions and grading rubrics.

If the goal of geographic educators are, according to John Finn, to wage a “ruthless” critique of the taken for granted ways we order and fix the meaning of the world, then our job has always been a tough one and I would argue that it has gotten even tougher in the Trump era. This challenge from the White House, while clearly indicating the need for increased advocacy for geographic education, comes at a difficult time in the discipline. While not discounting significant national and international strides made in educational standards, research, and programs in geography, much of it led by the AAG, and the ever growing pedagogical importance of GIScience, the view seen by some geographers is not so rosy.

We are in a time in which some states are cutting or diluting geography within public school curriculum—a baffling decision given the international challenges and uncertainties facing us. And the National Geographic Network of State Alliances—who for thirty years was the “boots on the ground’ in the battle to train teachers and lobby for geography with state legislatures—learned in 2017 that the university-state alliance model will be de-funded by National Geographic Education for a new, and still not clearly outlined regional model of support. Coordinators of some state alliances are quite certain their offices will close—eliminating important allies in the promotion of geographic education at a most critical time.

The dramatic restructuring of the Alliance Movement, the curriculum challenges facing educators and the recent ethical challenges that I have described suggest that the stakes are especially high for a discipline-wide reinvestment in geographic education and championing what I call a “radical geographic literacy.”

Toward a Radical Geographic Literacy

I choose the word “radical” to characterize geographic literacy for two reasons. First, radical signals a profound change and I am calling for a significant discipline-wide elevation and intensification of geographic education-related outreach and advocacy. The radical approach proselytizes the educational and political necessity of having a broad comprehension and appreciation of the world’s complexity and diversity as a means of countering ongoing national efforts to deny that reality. This enhanced promotion of geographic literacy has always been important, especially given the continuing abysmal base of geographic knowledge among Americans, but particularly needed now when our President, a self-identified “stable genius,” appears unable or unwilling to articulate even the most basic understanding of the world mosaic.

To some degree, this radicalism requires geographers to keep doing what they do well, which is offer critical and accessible learning about the world and how it looks, feels, and works in actuality rather than in political rhetoric. Yet, effective teaching may not be enough. Geographers of all sub-fields should consider additional places where they can push back against unethical portrayals of the world and its people. That could be lobbying for curriculum change, designing lessons, training teachers, attending educational conferences, publishing in pedagogical journals, consulting with colleges of education, participating in community teach-ins, visiting K-12 classrooms, or collaborating, while you can, with your state geographic alliance. This radical mode of advocacy is, in my view, a responsibility of all geographers and not solely the job of those who conduct research in the theories of methods of geographic education.

Second, I use “radical” geographic literacy in a deeper way, recognizing the word’s association with revolutionary change. I believe it is time to redefine, for the public and our profession, what we fundamentally mean by and represent as geographic literacy, while also actively considering what role a revamped version of the concept can and should play in advancing a geographical ethics seemingly missing from the Oval Office.

Geographic literacy is not something that I hear many of my fellow faculty members talk about, perhaps because the public, media, and even some geographers identify it with the rote learning of the names and locations of human and physical features on the earth. There are broader and more useful conceptions of literacy. For example, Geography for Life: National Geography Standards (2^nd edition) emphasizes the analytical perspectives, content knowledge, and applied skills needed to be a geographically informed person. Within the “In Brief” version of these standards, what is distributed widely to schools and teachers, geographic literacy is defined as being critical to “economic competiveness,” “quality of life,” “sustaining the environment,” and “national security.”

Absent, at least prominently, within standard definitions of geographic literacy is the relationship between geographic education and the promotion of peace, social and environmental justice, and anti-discrimination—the very matters that seem to matter the most at this historical juncture. Importantly and rigtly, Geography for Life suggests that a geographic education enables students to “engage in ethical action with regard to self, other people, other species, and Earth’s diverse cultures and natural environments,” but it stops short of identifying ethical geographical awareness and action as one of the discipline’s core or essential elements and competencies. At best, it would be subsumed under “the uses of geography.”

Strikingly, Geography for Life suggests that geography can assist in protecting the US economy and its position in defense and international relations (a point that I don’t necessarily disagree with), but it does not appear to say nearly as much about extending that concern and responsibility to a worldwide scale or the efficacy of geographic literacy in promoting international cooperation. Drawing from the writings of Barney Warf, an alternative, radical definition of geographic literacy would be more explicit in creating moments to challenge the privileging of that national order. Such a literacy would be key to “widen[ing] geographical imaginations and circles of compassion, to illustrate how students’ lives are connected to distant others, and to inject issues of empathy and caring into geographic pedagogy.”

In contrast to traditional definitions of geographic literacy, which tend to focus largely on the ability of students to process and apply geographic information, a radical version of geographic competence considers more centrally the affective and emotional aspects of developing a basic but critical knowledge of the world. Again, reading from Warf, such an approach promises to “call attention to students’ positionality, highlight their prejudices, and to make explicit the cultural ﬁlters with which they perceive those different from themselves, and thus equip them with tools to negotiate the complex terrain of social difference in meaningful and constructive ways.”

It is this very sort of reflexive engagement with values and attitudes, as part of basic geographic literacy, which is necessary for being sensitive to and standing in solidarity with the differences and legitimacies of other countries—something grossly missing from a Trump worldview. Importantly, a radical geographic literacy does not abandon the need for foundational content and skill development, but it realizes that these geographical competencies are incomplete if not leveraged to examine, critique, and challenge inequalities—including dehumanizing portrayals of countries and regions. Importantly, this radical geographic literacy is not restricted to our colleagues in critical human geography; it can and should be part of the pedagogical DNA of our whole discipline.

Many of you already engage in and advocate for radical geographic teaching, learning, and outreach, but it is time to institutionalize these values within the promotional materials distributed to K-12 schools, universities, and public groups, the learning objectives of our introductory courses, the way we introduce ourselves to strangers, and national geography definitions and curriculum standards. Perhaps a new edition of Geography for Life is in order. Please share your ideas of how to develop and carry out a radical geographic literacy and your thoughts and experiences on the geographic ethics at work (or not) in Trump America by emailing me (dalderma [at] utk [dot] edu) or share on Twitter #PresidentAAG.

— Derek Alderman @MLKStreet
Professor Geography, University of Tennessee
President, American Association of Geographers

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0026

Post

Élisée Reclus in Louisiana (1853-1855): Encounters with Racism and Slavery

February 1, 2018

In January 1853, the future anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus (1830-1905) arrived in Louisiana, where he spent almost three years. Reclus was in self-exile, having left France in the wake of Louis-Napoléon’s 1851 coup d’état. Élisée and his older brother Élie, future anarchist anthropologist, had organized local opposition to the coup, but left ahead of the authorities for sanctuary in England and Ireland. After various jobs, Élisée decided to see the New World, and booked passage on a ship bound for New Orleans. Antebellum New Orleans was still largely a bilingual city, with both professional and proletarian class French speakers, and francophone publications. Reclus’s biographers are unanimous in stating the importance that this sojourn played in shaping the ideas and the personality of someone later considered as a founding figure in both scientific geography and socialist libertarianism (anarchism). (Dunbar 1978; Clark and Martin 2013; Ferretti 2014; Pelletier 2013). In Louisiana, according to his most recent biographer Christophe Brun, Reclus “fortified his atheism, anticlericalism, antislavery, anti-capitalism” (Brun 2015, 29). The New Orleans Reclus entered was the second largest port in the U.S., exceeded only by New York. It was also second to New York in the number of immigrants arriving, and New York had just surpassed New Orleans as the nation’s prime banking center. By many measures New Orleans rivalled New York as the most prosperous city in the U.S., led by its banking, shipping, sugar, cotton and slave trading economy. Reclus stepped ashore into scenes of dynamic, raw capitalism – a bustling world port, trading all manner of commodities, including humans. It also boasted a non-stop carnivalesque character (not much changed from today) with more bars and bordellos per unit area than anywhere in North America, save frontier boomtowns. Atop this street-level demimonde, a genteel stratum of older “Creole” (French and Spanish) and newly arrived “Anglo” planters preceded over a society bent on both pleasure and profit. Reclus initially found work on the docks, where free labor was the exception. Given his background and education, he soon found employment as a tutor to the children of sugar planter Septime Fortier, at their upriver plantation Félicité. This gave Reclus an intimate inside view of the workings of planter society, one that he increasingly found repellent.

Fig. 1 – La Nouvelle Orléans – vue prise par la levée (Reclus, 1892, 492)

At the same time, Reclus took the opportunity to further his geographical studies (he had studied with Carl Ritter in Berlin). Fascinated by the Mississippi River and its hinterlands, he travelled upriver as far as Chicago (Reclus 1859). The amphibious nature of the city of New Orleans, he compared to “an enormous raft on the river’s water” (Reclus 1860a, 189), and the problems of town and regional planning that this situation implied, were one of the first issues that impressed the young geographer. In the aftermath of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, John P. Clark argued that “much of what [Reclus] said is rather prophetic” (Clark 2007, 11), stressing the accuracy of Reclus’s analyses on the necessity of a rational planning and a harmonic integration between humankind and environment. For the anarchist geographer, this task stood in complete antithesis with the logics of capitalism, building on speculation and commodification. Almost forty years later, in the volume of the New Universal Geography dedicated to the United States, Reclus described his old Saint-Simonian dream of claiming this land for social purposes. “When the line of division between land and sea will be established, then it will be possible to claim this region for agriculture and to transform Louisiana in a new Holland through a system of dams” (Reclus 1892, 489).

Fig. 2. Paquebot et bateau remorquer sur le Mississippi (Reclus, 1860a, 185)

However, it is on the topics of race, slavery and exploitation that Reclus took special advantage of his experience in Louisiana, becoming one of the principal European advocates of North American abolitionists during the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865, and a lifelong antiracist and anti-colonialist (Ferretti 2014). According to Clark, “Reclus was unusual among classical radical theorists in grasping racism as a major form of domination – an understanding that resulted in large part from his experience in Louisiana” (Clark 2007, 16-17). Ronald Creagh (2012) also notes that Reclus’s analyses of the American Civil War were more complex than the merely economistic views of Karl Marx, because the anarchist geographer analyzed the different kinds and levels of oppression that operated in the North American society.

In Reclus’s (1855) “Fragment d’un voyage à la Nouvelle Orléans,” an article published as a travel narrative for the popular French journal Le Tour du Monde, his dismay and indignation before the spectacle of a slave market were expressed in vivid terms:

On a platform stands the auctioneer, a large, red-faced, bloated man with a booming voice: “Come on, Jim! Get up on the table. How much for this good nigger Jim? Look how strong he is! He’s got good teeth! Look at the muscles on his arms! Come on, now, dance for us, Jim!” And he makes the slave turn around. “Here’s a nigger who knows how to do everything – he’s a carpenter, a cartwright, and a shoemaker. He won’t talk back – you never need to hit him.” But most of the time there are long whitish rays etched by the whip on their black skin. Then it is a Negro woman’s turn: “Look at this wench! She’s already had two niggers, and she’s still young. Look at her strong back and sturdy chest! She’s a good wet nurse, and a good negress for work!” And the bidding starts again amid laughter and shouts. Thus all the Negroes of Louisiana pass in turn on this fateful table: children who have just ended their seventh year and whom the law in its solicitude deems old enough to be separated from their mothers; young girls subjected to the stares of two thousand spectators and sold by the pound; mothers who come to see their children stolen from them, and who are obliged to remain cheerful while threatened by the whip; and the elderly, who have already been auctioned off many times, and who have to appear one last time before these pale-faced men who despise them and jeer at their white hair. … Sold off for a few dollars, they might as well be buried like animals in the cypress forest. According to the advocates of slavery, all this is willed by the cause of progress itself, the doctrines of our holy religion, and the most sacred laws of family and property (Reclus 1855, 190; English version in Clark and Martin 2003, 83-84).

Nevertheless, together with the dynamics of oppression, Reclus also analyzed subaltern agency and resistance, stressing the on-going efforts of Black slaves to get an instruction, a point that the geographer considered as strategic for any project of social emancipation. “One even mentions Blacks who learned reading alone by studying the names of the boats they saw constantly floating on the Mississippi. Planters are aware of that and start to fear for their future” (Reclus 1859, 625). Reclus was likewise prophetic in foreseeing the incoming conflicts which Southern society would have experienced in the following years, and concluded that: “For all generous men, rare in America as all over the world, the only homeland is liberty” (Reclus 1855, 192). In his correspondence, Reclus expressed the impossibility of remaining in this system without being morally accomplice of slavery and oppression, what determined his decision of leaving. As he wrote to his brother Élie in 1855, “I need to starve, now … For me, it would be better than robbing the Blacks, who deserve the money I put in my pocket by their blood and their sweat; getting back on the chain of oppression, that’s me who keep somehow the whip, and I am hating that” (Reclus 1911, 104-105). Feeling the need to leave Louisiana before he was further compromised, Reclus embarked on the steamboat Philadelphia in December 1855, bound for Colombia via Cuba and Panama. He settled in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region of Colombia with the idea of forming a multi-ethnic community of progressive-minded European colonists and local folk, including indigenous people. Disease and failed recruitment efforts doomed the venture. But his time in Colombia gave him material for his first book – Voyage à la Sierra-Nevada de Sainte-Marthe; paysages de la nature tropicale (1861) (Mathewson 2016).

Reclus returned to France in 1857 to embark on a highly successful career as publisher of geographical studies and political writings. As a geographer, he started with publishing articles in the popular journal Revue des Deux Mondes. He contributed a series of articles describing the condition of the Afro-Americans and expressing radical anti-slavery positions. According to Soizic Alavoine-Muller, “Reclus’s clear opinions and his sharp arguments could exert a decisive influence on the Revue’s readers” (Alavoine-Muller 2007, 43). This meant that Reclus’s ideas had an important impact on French public opinion, because the Revue was the most read French periodical of that time, with a distribution of around 16,000 copies per issue. A very significant topic discussed by the anarchist geographer was the principle of the solidarity of freedoms and rights: if they are threatened anywhere, this concerns all kinds of oppressed people all over the world. “The degradation of Black slaves is that of all proletarians, and their liberation will be the most beautiful victory for all the oppressed in the two worlds” (Reclus 1860, 870). Another significant feature of Reclus’s thinking was his idea that juridical equality and end of formal slavery would not mean automatically complete emancipation, a problem which still today dramatically haunts the debates on the rights of Afro-Americans.

Indeed, Reclus’s articles continued to focus on these problems also after the end of the war in 1865, denouncing the sloppy or ineffective purge of pro-slavery Southern leaders and the retaliation that freed slaves were suffering in several Southern states (Reclus 1866). Again, Reclus insisted on the necessity of education for emancipation, praising those teachers who challenged the threads of pro-slavery people by reconstructing the schools where “the children of the ancient slaves … will certainly learn the virtues of the citizens” (1866, 788). In countering the advocates of scientific racism, especially those committed to the notion of “purity” of race (Coquery-Vidrovitch 2003), Reclus proposed generalized miscegenation as an antidote to racial hatred. He came back to this proposal in his final book, L’Homme et la Terre (1908), published posthumously fifty years after his departure from New Orleans. Here he offered a final assessment of the social progresses accomplished in the United States in the decades after the end of the Secession War:

“Despite what is being said, the population of the United States, red, white and black, is ready for this despised evolution called miscegenation. The union of races will be done from below. Among the abolitionists’ sons, generous men will be able to stand upon prejudices of caste and colour and found families whose children may have a brown shadow on their cheeks. In the big cities, where migrants are more and more concentrated, the girls from abroad, Irish, German and Slavic, are no longer willing to be subjugated … Several of them become wittingly the partner of a Black who charms them for his handsomeness, strength and goodness. Finally, among Americans, misery often associates the wretched of the two races. In the big army of revindications, Blacks and Whites march side by side, and the shared sufferings made the colour diversity disappear (Reclus 1908, 108-109).

Therefore, in Reclus’s thinking, racial emancipation was linked to class struggle and also to women’s emancipation, a view that anticipated some features of what is called today “intersectionality.”

Nevertheless, in the same work, Reclus nuanced his optimism by denouncing the “disguised slavery” which was represented by the discrimination and social subordination that most of the Afro-Americans still suffered in the United States. He sarcastically wrote: “Everywhere, in the buses, trains, theatres, schools, churches, one cares for people of the despised caste can’t soil the noble sons of Japheth with their contact. In case of serious violations, horrible practices of torture became so common that one might consider them as a part of local common law” (Reclus 1908, 107).

It is also worth noting that Reclus was not only a supporter of the Afro-Americans, but also of the Amerindian peoples in both North and Latin America, condemning the crimes of the conquest and the still on-going genocide of the “Redskins” by war, alcohol and diseases (Ferretti 2013). It is possible to conclude that Reclus’s sojourn in Louisiana was paramount in inspiring some of the most radical contents of his engaged geography, one which still talks to present-day debates on geography as a means to counter oppression, racism, sexism and social exclusion.

— Federico Ferretti
School of Geography
University College Dublin
Dublin, Ireland

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0024

References

Alavoine-Muller, S. 2007. Introduction. In Reclus, É. Les États-Unis et la Guerre de Sécession: articles publiés dans la Revue des Deux Mondes, 1-70. Paris, Editions du CTHS.

Brun, C. 2015. Élisée Reclus, une chronologie familiale. Raforum, https://raforum.info/reclus/spip.php?article455

Clark, J. 2007. Letter from New Orleans. In élisée Reclus, natura e educazione, ed. M. Schmidt di Friedberg, 11-33. Milan: Bruno Mondadori.

Clark, J. and C. Martin. 2003. A Voyage to New Orleans: Anarchist Impressions of the Old South (revised and expanded edition). Thetford, VT: Glad Day Books.

Anarchy, geography, modernity: Selected writings of Élisée Reclus. Oakland: PM Press.

Coquery-Vidrovitch, C. Le postulat de la supériorité blanche et de l’infériorité noire. In Le livre noir du colonialisme, ed. M. Ferro, 646-691. Paris: Laffont.

Creagh, R. 2012. Élisée Reclus et les États-Unis. Paris: Noir & Rouge.

Dunbar, G. 1978. Élisée Reclus historian of nature. Hamden: Archon Books.

Ferretti, F. 2010. Comment Élisée Reclus est devenu athée. Un nouveau document biographique. Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography: https://cybergeo.revues.org/22981

Ferretti, F. 2013. Un regard hétérodoxe sur le Nouveau Monde: la géographie d’Élisée Reclus et l’extermination des Amérindiens (1862-1905). Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 99, 141-164.

Mathewson, K. 2016. Élisée Reclus’ Latin Americanist geography. Terra Brasilis https://terrabrasilis.revues.org/1849

Nettlau, M. 1928. Élisée Reclus, vida de un sabio justo y rebelde. Barcelona: Ediciones de la Revista Blanca.

Pelletier, P. 2013. Géographie et anarchie. Paris: Editions du monde libertaire.

Reclus, E. 1859. Le Mississipi. Études et souvenirs. 2. Le delta et la Nouvelle-Orléans. La Revue des Deux Mondes, 22, 608-646.

Fragment d’un voyage à La Nouvelle-Orléans, 1855. Tour du Monde, 1, 177-192.
De l’esclavage aux États-Unis I. Le Code noir et les esclaves. Revue des Deux Mondes, 30, 868-901.
Histoire des États Américains, États-Unis. Annuaire des Deux Mondes, 1, 646-788.
Nouvelle Géographie universelle, vol. XVI, les Etats Unis. Paris: Hachette.
L’Homme et la Terre, vol. 6. Paris : Librairie Universelle.
Correspondance, vol. 1. Paris : Schleicher.

anarchist, Élisée Reclus, geographer