Robert “Bob” Moline

The daily work rhythms Robert “Bob” Moline observed for nearly 40 years reflected a passion for landscape, weather, culture, and thinking about the human place in the environment. After teaching his 8:00 am meteorology class, Bob took his daily run through the prairie and forested landscapes of the campus arboretum. Then, it was time to print and post the daily upper air and surface weather charts, teach another class or two, followed by late afternoons spent listening to jazz at high volume while organizing his slide carousels for the next day. Bob Moline was a beloved professor and colleague and the guiding force in building both the geography and environmental studies programs at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. Although he passed away in January 2024, his influence continues to be felt through the thousands of people he inspired to pay careful attention to the skies, to the landscape, and to their place in the region and river basin.

Bob Moline, was born in Gary, Indiana and grew up on the Southside of Chicago where his dad was pastor of Gustavus Adolphus Lutheran Church. Bob graduated from Chicago’s Hirsch High School in 1951 and entered Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, where he majored in science and met his future wife, Janet Reedquist. After college he served in the Air Force from 1955-1959 as an instructor in the weather training program at Chanute Air Base in Illinois and then at Etain, France, where he taught meteorology and held the post of Chief Weather Observer. The experiences in the Air Force prompted Bob to pursue a career in teaching. When he and Janet returned to the United States, he began graduate work in geography at the University of Illinois.

As Bob was finishing his master’s degree in 1961, Gustavus Adolphus College was in the process of establishing a geography program. Bob’s alma mater, Augustana College, had established its geography program in 1949. Like Gustavus, it was affiliated with the Swedish-American Lutheran Church. A telephone call between the deans at Gustavus and Augustana identified Bob as a likely candidate, and an interview at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago led to a job offer. Soon Bob and Janet Moline were on their way to Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, where he would spend the next 37 years teaching full-time, raising two children (Jeff Moline and Karen Wallin) and living out the remainder of their lives until Janet died in 1999. For most of the years since that time Bob remained in St. Peter with his new wife Kay.

Sharing the basement of Old Main and later the Nobel Hall of Science with the lone geologist, Bob Moline set about building the geography department while working on his Ph.D. in geography at the University of Minnesota. Under the supervision of University of California-Berkeley-trained Ward Barrett, Bob completed his dissertation in 1969 on agricultural drainage of wetlands and shallow lakes entitled, “The Modification of the Wet Prairie in Southern Minnesota.” This work led to two published monographs on public attitudes in water resources management. Bob’s long-term research passion was to update Jan Broek’s classic 1932 study of landscape evolution in California’s Santa Clara Valley to document the transition from prunes and cherries to microprocessors and computer software.

Bob’s teaching portfolio reflected his diverse interests: Meteorology, Water Resources, Cultural Geography, The American West, and a course whose title reflected the questions he cared most about: Environmental Attitudes and Landscape Change. Bob knew well the value of maps and the importance of field experiences. He curated the map collection at Gustavus Adolphus College, one of the largest map libraries in the country at a liberal arts college. Between 1974 and 1998 he led an annual January Term field course titled San Francisco: The City and Its Region. To bring the expansive western landscape into the classroom, Bob shot his photographs in side-by-side mode and equipped his classroom with side-by-side slide projectors operated in tandem. In recognition of his excellence in the classroom, Gustavus awarded Bob with the college’s Distinguished Teacher Award in 1987. In presenting the teaching award, a faculty colleague described Bob as evincing “enthusiasm from the heart, commitment to the land, and deep care for students.”

Bob Moline put his geographic expertise into practice by running a regional rain gauge network with local farmers and serving on the Minnesota state power plant siting committee, the River Bend regional planning organization, the Minnesota Water Resources Board, and the City of St. Peter Planning Commission. In the preamble to the city’s 1995 comprehensive plan Bob managed to quote Lewis Mumford, Michael Sorkin, and James Howard Kunstler.

Bob’s geographical fascination never wavered. He seemed to never not be a practicing geographer. His love of places and his deeply ingrained sense of the world as landscape were constants throughout his life. His family vacations, often road trips to the American West, were geographical field trips. Visitors to his house were met with walls covered in maps, each with beloved stories. Who could have much patience for faculty meetings when, out there, the landscape, even the most mundane, was waiting to be explored? Bob Moline’s legacy of service and endless geographic curiosity lives on through his many former students who have found positions in university geography departments, high school geography classrooms, city planning departments, and water resources agencies across the country. Bob is survived by his brother Norm Moline, professor emeritus of geography at Augustana College (Rock Island, Illinois), his spouse Kay, and children Jeff, Karen, and their families.

This memorial was prepared by former colleagues and family members Mark Bjelland, Robert Douglas, Jeff Moline, Norm Moline, and Anna Versluis.

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Victor Gregor Limon

By Emily Frisan

Education: Master’s in Urban & Regional Planning, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, Bachelor of Science in Geography, University of the Philippines, Diliman

Past Experiences: GIS Analyst, Ecological Determinants Lab at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa; Cartographer, An Atlas of West Maui; Technical Staff, National Anti-Poverty Commission, Republic of the Philippines

Researching Unique Spatialities

Victor Gregor Limon got his start in data analysis, after graduating from his undergraduate degree in the Philippines. Working with the country’s National Anti-Poverty Commission, he helped inform poverty reduction policies, measures, and strategies at the national level. Throughout his master’s program at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Limon worked in the Ecological Determinants Lab as a GIS Analyst to evaluate the County of Honolulu’s “Housing First” program. His work evaluating data informed the organization to identify opportunities which “allowed homeless individuals to receive housing without requiring them to go through honors, like requirements or processes, and just housing them first because that’s what they need.” Now Limon’s research in the lab encompasses evaluating social and built environments, local policies, and cultural influences on the health and well-being of adolescents and adults.

His experience working with the city and county offered Limon experience in municipal government, which opened up an opportunity for him to join the Office of Climate Change, Sustainability, and Resiliency of the City and County of Honolulu as a data analyst. He now provides support to Honolulu’s energy, adaptation, hazard mitigation, and policy programs, while maintaining its Annual Sustainability Report, greenhouse gas inventory, tree plantings map, and other data resources.

Climate change’s impacts vary by place and neighborhood, says Limon. In Hawaii, especially, there are many microclimates, and spatial variations can be very marked, with wild contrasts: “It’s important to figure out that the climate impacts vary by place and the people who live in those places.”

Finding Oneself in Geography

Whether working with climate or health data, Limon’s work acknowledges how “not all places and not all groups of people are the same.” His master’s thesis examined the spatial variation of COVID-19 prevalence and infection rates, focused on the pandemic’s impact on Native Hawaiians and residents of Honolulu. Historical, long-standing inequalities have disrupted the ability to obtain reliable and targeted public health data on Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, but “geography was very useful in figuring out why certain places, certain groups of people are more vulnerable than others. Geography was really the perfect tool to answer that question.”

When considering what else his future could hold, Limon doesn’t know what he would have been if he hadn’t discovered geography. “I would have been a totally different person with totally different skills, and I would have qualified for a totally different job,” he said. “Geography was instrumental in giving me the skills to figure out why there are changes. Why places are different. Why people are different and figuring out what causes those differences.”

Learn more about what a degree in geography can do for you by reading more AAG Career Profiles and discover the resources we offer for your professional development journey.

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Philip W. Porter

We mourn the passing of, but also celebrate the life of, Philip (Phil) Wayland Porter, a stalwart member of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography between 1958 and 2000. Phil died in Hanover, New Hampshire on April 24, 2024, just two miles from the place of his birth, surrounded by his family (predeceased by his lifelong life partner Patricia Garrigus Porter in December 2021).

Phil was born on July 9, 1928, in Hanover, the son of Wayland R. and Bertha (La Plante) Porter. He graduated from Kimball Union Academy in 1946, where his father taught mathematics and physics and his mother was a librarian. He then earned his A.B. in Geography at Middlebury College in 1950 (where he also was on the ski-jumping team), his M.A. at Syracuse University in 1955 (after two years in the U.S. Army, 1952-4), and his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics in 1956 (“Population Distribution and Land-use in Liberia”). He immediately joined the University of Minnesota department as an instructor, then assistant professor, advancing to associate professor in 1964 and professor in 1966. He chaired the Department of Geography (1969-71), directed the University’s Office of International Programs (1979-83), served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Space Programs for Earth Observations (1967-1971) and was a liaison officer for Midwest Universities Consortium for International Activities (1979-1983).

Phil’s first and enduring scholarly commitment was to understanding Indigenous agricultural practices in east Africa, undertaking career-long ethnographic fieldwork, initially with anthropologists, that began with Walter Goldschmidt’s Culture and Ecology in East Africa Project (1961-2). He taught at the University of Dar Es Salaam for two years (1971-73), overlapping with members of the influential The Dar es Salaam School of African History, introducing his daughters to rural African life through many trips in their Land Rover. This scholarship was summarized in two monographs: Food and Development in the Semi-arid Zone of East Africa (Syracuse: 1979) and Challenging Nature: Local Knowledge, Agroscience, and Food Security in Tanga Region, Tanzania (Chicago: 2006). In recognition, he received the inaugural Robert McC. Netting Award from the AAG Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group in 1999. His quiet but firm personal and intellectual support was vital for those students seeking to make a better world.

Phil’s interests in geography ranged far and wide. He was intrigued with John K. Wright and the geography of ideas. He was a passionate and innovative cartographer. Among his many published articles, he wrote on economic potentials, the point of minimum aggregate travel, the impact of climate on human activity, human ecology and agro-ecological modeling. During the last three decades of his career, he became particularly interested in critical development studies. This began with an AAG Resource Paper with Anthony de Souza, “The Underdevelopment and Modernization of the Third World” (AAG: 1974), was deepened through his annual undergraduate course on development, and culminated in the textbook A World of Difference (Guilford: 1998, 2008, with Eric Sheppard, Richa Nagar and David Faust). Former colleagues and advisors have described him as a “towering scholar”, “one of the most amazing polymaths and ‘renaissance men’ I’ve ever met”, “incredibly gracious”, and “genuinely curious rather than threatened by new ideas.”

Phil was a quietly reliable anchor of the department, with the capacity to talk with anyone and a puckish sense of humor. His students adored him, graduate and undergraduate alike, queueing outside his office to seek out his wisdom and bathe in his invariable support. He developed an innovative introductory course, in which students were asked to rotate the globe to a new north pole of their own choosing and tasked as teams to produce and rationalize an atlas reconstructing its human and physical geography of this hypothetical globe. The course on “Third World Underdevelopment and Modernization” was similarly made unforgettable by Phil’s extraordinary teaching style. David Faust, who had a chance to serve as a TA and co-instructor for this course, recalls:

“One day Phil would walk into the classroom and remark, ‘I want to show you something from one of my ancestors. Pay careful attention, because this is from one of your ancestors, too.’ He would hold out what appeared to be an ordinary rock. ‘This is a hand axe. You hold it like this. Try it.’ And he would pass it around. Another day he would enter the class carrying a rickety wooden turntable and a couple of bricks. He would ask for a volunteer to stand on the turntable, take a brick in each hand and be spun, extending their arms to make the spinning slow, and bringing them close to their chest to speed up the spinning, just as a figure skater does. This was to demonstrate conservation of angular momentum as part of a lesson about atmospheric circulation.”

Regents Professor Emeritus Eric Sheppard, lead author of this memorial, recalls:

“I first met Phil when I interviewed for the position at Minnesota in 1976. I had no idea who he was when I arrived; a young, overconfident quantitative turk. The only names familiar to me were Fred Lukermann, John Adams and Yifu Tuan, I was here to transform the department. Prior to my talk, the graduate students took me out for a liquid lunch at what was then Bulwinkles, after which I was put in the chair’s office to prep my presentation on geographic potentials (the topic of my Ph.D.). Idly leafing through old copies of the Annals, I was shocked & disconcerted to find a paper authored by Phil and Fred on … geographic potentials. Needless to say, this was a bit embarrassing. I managed to get through the talk with both Phil or Fred being nice enough not to mention their paper (which I had not read; my article on this topic also appeared in the Annals a couple of years later, after it had been rejected and my advisor had prevailed on the editor, John C. Hudson, to change his mind). In the end it was the department that transformed me, and Phil played a key role. I spent the last decade of my career doing the same kind of qualitative research that characterized his lifelong scholarship.”

Former Ph.D. advisee Richa Nagar notes: “Phil played a major role in molding me as a learner, an educator, and a human, and he taught me to better appreciate the unpredictable poetry of the world we live in.” She recalls a moving incident from Fall 1990:

“Phil’s class on ‘Geography of Africa’ inspired me to undertake a directed study with him on the history of Asian communities in East Africa. That same quarter, I also committed to a two-quarter long course sequence in ‘Historical Sociology’ with Ron Aminzade and Barbara Laslett, who required the students to study primary research documents during the second quarter. I came across an article with a footnote which stated that Robert Gregory, a retired professor at Syracuse University, had boxes full of interviews that his students had conducted with Asians in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania in the 1970s. I shared my wish with Phil in our directed study meeting, ‘I would’ve loved to examine those interviews for my Historical Sociology assignment.’ A week later I found a check from him in my department mailbox. It had a Post-it note: ‘Go book your plane ticket to Syracuse and read those interviews.’ I went to Phil in disbelief and asked why he had given me the check. He said, ‘I have some research money but your research is more important at this time. This is your Christmas present.’”

The annual Christmas parties, hosted by Phil and his wife Pat, were the major departmental social event of the year drawing almost everyone to feast and even sing carols, irrespective of their religious affiliations. His annual party invitations were also legendary; each year he would pick a letter of the alphabet, plumb his well-thumbed dictionary, and write a page-long invite using words only beginning with that letter.

Phil’s other abiding passion was music, particularly choral music by J.S. Bach. He regularly sang and performed with Pat, organist and choir director at Minneapolis’ First Congregational Church (1957-1971) and then Grace University Lutheran Church (1976-2000). In choirs, the other basses competed to sit nearby so that they could rely on his ability to read music and sing the right notes. After retirement, Phil and Pat returned to New Hampshire, where their lives alternated between scholarly senior living near Dartmouth College, and summers in the sprawling family cottage on Lake Sunapee. He is survived by three daughters, Janet E. Holmén, Sara L. Porter, and Alice C. Porter, as well as five grandchildren and two great grandchildren.

This memorial was contributed by Eric Sheppard, Richa Nagar, and Abdi Samatar on behalf of the Department of Geography, Environment, & Society, University of Minnesota.

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Arvind Bhuta

By Emily Frisan

Education and Certificates: B.S. Zoology, B.S. Environmental Science, B.A. Geography from Auburn University; M.S. Geography, Ph.D. Geospatial and Environmental Analysis from Virginia Tech; Postdoctoral Fellowship in Forestry at Clemson University; Certified GIS Professional (GISP) and a certified Senior Ecologist through the Ecological Society of America.

At the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Arvind Bhuta works in the State, Private, and Tribal Forestry program to enhance and maintain healthy ecosystems and watersheds. His specific work in the Cooperative Forestry unit is to address landscapes that are outside of what he refers to as “The Green:” the national forests managed by the Forest Service. He specifically works in rural landscapes under the Landowner Assistance department, assisting program managers with geospatial and tabular reporting and data analysis. Bhuta’s training as a geographer brings a valuable perspective to this work: “Thinking about space and place and how different states operate in maintaining those forests is important from a geographical perspective because it helps bring context.”

“I accidentally fell into GIS and then from [there], that was a Pandora’s box into learning about the discipline.”

Geographic Inquiry

The discipline of geography was not immediately obvious or available to Bhuta, but luckily, he happened to be in the right place, at the right time. “When I was a biology major, I found out about GIS. This was the late 90s, and I was very intrigued about what GIS had to offer because obviously biology or ecology wasn’t really doing any of those things.”

Throughout his wide-ranging educational experiences, this inquiry instantly hooked him “to what geography had to offer as a discipline and not really [previously] knowing that it was a major, I could pursue as a career opportunity.” Bringing together biology with elements of human and physical geography helped Bhuta shape and share his professional worldview, future interests, and successes.

Early Opportunities and Exposure

Aligning with the U.S. Forest Service’s mission to protect, balance, and manage natural resources, Bhuta emphasizes how his education in geography has allowed him to think critically and take a holistic approach to the work he does when working with people and programs. In addition to his extensive education, he has gained skills on–the–job through training in past and current positions that he’s held. Whether working in the public, private, or nonprofit sector, Bhuta says, “there will always be challenges to a job that academic training will not prepare you for. More than likely, you’ll get to experience it when and after you get hired.”

Early opportunities exposed Bhuta to a vast array of professional experiences. Early on, he lived in the Everglades National Park as a GIS technician field mapping the endangered Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow. For two years after, he chased gopher tortoises in the field using GPS, radio telemetry units, and cameras to track their population and interactions across different habitats. His first experience as a federal employee as a summer intern at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and later as an intern with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, exposed him to the world of careers within these agencies.

For those interested in working within the federal government, various opportunities such as internships to fellowships can give young geographers an opportunity to advance their professional journeys. Within the Forest Service, the Research Assistant program allows individuals to come into the agency noncompetitively, which enables some of them to be appointed to federal positions without competing with the general public. Bhuta also suggests networking with people within these agencies who have backgrounds in geography, which can open doors for students. For example, at the 2023 Annual Meeting, Bhuta met with students and young professionals to discuss techniques and answers questions on how to navigate the federal career path: “That’s a great opportunity to network with people who work in the federal government and ask questions like, ‘what do I need to do’ in terms of course work, internships, or other jobs to get my foot in the door to work in the [sector].”

Learn more about what a degree in geography can do for you by reading more AAG Career Profiles and discover the resources we offer for your professional development journey.

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Brooke Hatcher

By Emily Frisan

Since childhood, Brooke Hatcher has been fascinated with climatology. Growing up on a horse farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains shaped her love for earth, nature, and weather. Now as a geospatial/remote sensing lead, she measures changes on Earth and brings visualizations from data to life. From her job as a senior geospatial analyst at New Light Technologies to her volunteer storytelling work with URISA as vice chair of outreach, or her recognition by Geospatial World as a Young Geospatial Professional to Watch in 2024, Hatcher credits her positive experience in the industry to the examples of powerful women in the field, including her first professional mentors at MAXAR Catherine Ipsan and Amanda Monse, who showed her that she, too, can “become a master in this field.”

Hatcher discovered her passion for geospatial information systems in an undergraduate geography course. “Being able to visualize patterns and spatial analysis, like seeing the charts over time of rain gauges, was seeing nature in a new way,” she says.

Educational journey in and beyond the classroom

Hatcher received her undergraduate degree in geography from the University of Mary Washington. Like many geographers, she stumbled upon the discipline almost by coincidence. She excelled in history during high school but hesitated to pursue a career in the subject because she was unsure about potential job prospects. She began her undergraduate degree as a biology major but soon realized a career in the lab wasn’t suitable, either.

Hatcher began her professional career creating digital nautical charts for Leidos, which opened the world to features humans can’t see with our eyes, like hydrolines and ocean depth. Following her experience at Leidos, an opportunity opened at MAXAR where Hatcher would go on to create global products for clients, such as the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. This was the first time she began to gain experience in Landsat and Sentinel 2.

“You’re seeing the ocean in a whole new way,” Hatcher explained. “It was really beautiful to have my first job working on digital nautical charts, then working at MAXAR with land cover and creating remote sensing products with five-meter resolution.”

After gaining a few years of professional experience, Hatcher decided to pursue her master’s degree in geography. After considering her options, she got her degree online at North Carolina State.

As a geospatial engineering consultant, Hatcher continues to learn and keeps up with the latest news and information in the industry. In her professional career, she continues to read peer-reviewed papers and professional blogs and consult tutorials on platforms like YouTube and Udemy.

From Local to Global: How Geography and Opportunities Expands Horizons

Hatcher’s career is focused on developing geospatial solutions and products for disaster response with FEMA and World Bank, working on predictive damage assessments, assessing the potential impact on communities and critical infrastructure, and sharing disaster geospatial data through interagency communication efforts. As a geospatial analyst and a geographer, Hatcher’s jobs involve collaborating with other experts in many other areas, including glaciology, meteorology, paleotempestology (the study of hurricanes), and specialization in biohazards.

The resulting collaborations are mutually beneficial. Geographers “need to know that information… [and] we help work with them to make their vision come to life. We’re translating for them by creating maps,” Hatcher states.

Specifically, FEMA hired Hatcher for remote sensing and image processing, creating products to assist during disasters. Remote sensing techniques can penetrate hurricanes or wildfire smoke to extract information about structures that have been damaged.

“It was so rad,” Hatcher recalls. “It reflects geography in a beautiful way.”

In her latest role at New Light Technologies, Hatcher frequently works with user interfaces (UI) and user experience (UX) to build web applications that help clients understand the community’s profile, such as which areas are going to be most vulnerable, and who are at the most risk of disasters. She explains, “We need to really make sure that the final product is visualized to a specific community, playing into the history and culture, so that it respects the community, and they understand it enough to feel comfortable giving feedback.”

Beyond the Map: Community Impact

Beyond technical skills, important geographic skills include being able to conduct and analyze qualitative and quantitative data. “We don’t always need maps,” she states. “The reason why we need some maps is because we can’t see anything when people are dying, or buildings are being destroyed.”

Therefore, even when making predictive risk products, qualitative skills are important to understand the ability to organize various types of data, understand the importance of scales, whether there are invisible boundaries, which ones take priority, and how this affects the results of the map or product. It’s essential to have a deep understanding of community demographics and vulnerability.

“After doing this for five or six years, I am convinced more than ever, the most effective data is at the community level. We can work globally, but it just strips so much quality and quantity of data. Also, when reporting or responding to a disaster at the community level, there is passion associated with it because that’s your home.”

Being a geographer, Hatcher finds it fascinating to understand why certain geographies are so unique in the world, and how they have shaped rare communities throughout history. “It is important to preserve these unique geographic properties, even outside of my job. I am passionate about creative traveling and exploring these unique places.”

From the Pacific Northwest, Cascades, or the nation’s capital, Hatcher hopes to use her geospatial and web design skills to inspire women to take risks, explore the world, and “make geography hip.” Although her goals are constantly changing, she is dedicated to finding her purpose, and path, and is passionate about capturing the stories, art, culture, problems, and risks of the small and unique communities.

Learn more about what a degree in geography can do for you by reading more AAG Career Profiles and discover the resources we offer for your professional development journey.

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Gary Manson

Dr. Gary Manson, age 86, of Haslett, Michigan, passed away peacefully on Thursday, December 14, 2023.

Gary received his undergraduate degrees from the University of Montana and his master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1969. Upon graduation, Gary spent 36 years teaching and holding several academic leadership positions at Michigan State University’s Department of Geography, including chairing the Department during most of the 1980s. In the 1990s, he held various leadership roles, including director of the Landscape Architecture Program, and in 2000, was appointed associate dean for academic and student affairs at the College of Social Science.

Later in his career, his research focused on internal migration within the United States. He explored patterns, causes, and consequences of population movement within the country, publishing in journals such as The Professional Geographer, the Journal of Geography, and The Social Science Journal. Among his academic accolades, he received numerous awards for his contributions and mentorship, including MSU’s William J. Beal Outstanding Faculty Award, Teacher-Scholar Award, and Distinguished Academic Staff Award. Dr. Manson retired in 2006 as the acting dean of Social Science after a distinguished career at MSU.

Gary Manson was born on August 5, 1937, in Monona, Iowa. At the age of 19, he married his high school sweetheart, Patrosenia (Pat) Nonog, and they were happily married for 62 years until her death in 2018. They enjoyed each other’s company while traveling, fishing, cooking, entertaining friends, and loved MSU football and basketball.

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Joseph L. Scarpaci

Joseph L. Scarpaci, professor emeritus at Virginia Tech, died December 30, 2023 after a brief illness. A Pittsburgh native and longtime AAG member, Scarpaci was honored in 2020 with the AAG Kauffman Award for Best Paper in Geography & Entrepreneurship.

At Virginia Tech, he taught in a remarkable range of fields, including geography, urban planning, historic preservation, landscape architecture, and Latin American studies. He was also the Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Cuban Culture + Economy.

Scarpaci earned his bachelor’s degree at Rutgers, a master’s degree from Penn State, and his Ph.D. from The University of Florida. His colleague and former student Sara Beth Keough remembered him this way in a tribute in The Geographical Review: “Joe was a prolific writer and speaker. He published numerous books and was one of those academics who had to include only ‘selected articles and presentations’ on his website because the entire list was so long.” He was a repeat recipient of Fulbright Fellowships, and his work was recognized by organizations such as the AAG, the Conference of Latin American Geography, and the Library of Congress.

Scarpaci’s research focused on the urban and social geographies of international development in Latin America, with a specialization in Cuba. Among his publications is Havana: Two Faces of the Antillean Metropolis, to which the American Library Association awarded the Choice Outstanding Book Award. Scarpaci also opened up new horizons of understanding for students through his 20-year career at Virginia Tech, taking them abroad and introducing many of them to Cuba and Latin America over the years.

Scarpaci also represented the discipline closer to home in the United States: In 2008, the Virginia Social Science Association named him their Geography-Scholar. He was also elected the vice chair of the AAG Latin American Specialty Group from 2008-2011.

He was an enthusiastic traveler and also “curated a milieu of passions and hobbies,” according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “including cycling, yoga, tennis, bird watching, ESL and Spanish instruction, [and] conservation.” Even after moving to Blacksburg, he remained faithful to his Pittsburgh roots, helping to organize high school class reunions and fundraising for the Pittsburgh-based women’s health research, in memory of his mother Josephine. He was devoted to his family, and doted on his first grandchild, Josephine “Josie” Collier.

Scarpaci is survived by his wife of 47 years, Gilda Machin-Scarpaci; children Cristina Scarpaci (Christopher Collier), Michael Scarpaci (Katie Scarpaci); granddaughters Josephine Collier and Remy Collier (who was born only a month after he passed); and siblings, Darlene Violetta (Bradley Violetta), Josette Scarpaci and Sam Scarpaci.

Sources:

Fleming, Virginia Tech News, 11 Jan. 2024; Obituary, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 7 Jan. 2024

Keogh, S. Geographical Review 114, 2.

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Journals

Inwood, Christou Named Editors for GeoHumanities

January 9, 2024

In January 2024, the AAG welcomes Anastasia Christou as the new GeoHumanities editor, joining Joshua Inwood, whose term as GeoHumanities editor began in January 2023. Inwood and Christou are replacing outgoing and founding GeoHumanities editors Deborah P. Dixon and Tim Cresswell.

Christou is professor of Sociology and Social Justice at Middlesex University, London, UK. Her work is immersed in the critical geography, humanities, social sciences, and the arts, seeking to create “a public sociology which is relevant, meaningful and transformative,” she says. She has published widely on issues of migration and mobilities; citizenship and ethnicity; space and place; transnationalism and identity; culture and memory, gender and feminism; inequalities and austerity; postsocialism; home, belonging and exclusion; emotion and narrativity; youth and aging; sexualities; translocal geographies; affect, care and trauma; motherhood and mothering; women, men and masculinities; racisms and intersectionalities; gendered violence and social media; tourism mobilities; material culture; academic exclusion and solidarity; educational inequalities; embodiment. Christou is co-author with Eleonore Kofman of Gender & Migration (Springer, 2022), and co-author with Russell King of Counter-diaspora: The Greek Second Generation Returns ‘Home’ (Harvard University Press, 2015). She brings to her editorship significant experience editing book volumes and journal special issues, and serves on the international board of journals in the US and Europe. Her multi-sited, multi-method, and comparative ethnographic research in more than a dozen countries includes Narratives of the Greek Civil War: Memory and Political Identities as Public History; and the poem “Ruination,” anthologized in The Other Side of Hope.

“In assuming editorship of GeoHumanities, I am inspired by a commitment to ensuring critical and interdisciplinary advances in knowledge production,” says Christou. “I would also like to attract and encourage more global scholarship in the journal.”

Joshua Inwood Inwood is a professor in the Department of Geography and The Rock Ethics Institute at the Pennsylvania State University. His research and teaching are focused on the social, political, and economic structures that perpetuate exploitation and injustice with a specific focus on the US South. His work explores racial capitalism and the broad trajectories of white supremacy. In addition, his work has engaged with the U.S. civil rights struggle and a broad understanding of the geography of the American Civil Rights struggle. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and his work has been recognized with several AAG honors including the Glenda Laws Award and the AAG’s media achievement award. He has authored or co-authored over fifty peer-reviewed journal articles and is co-editor of the volume Non-Killing Geographies: Violence, Space, and the Search for a More Humane Geography (Center for Global Non-Killing, 2011) and has a forthcoming co-edited book on Geographies of Justice (Bristol University Press 2024). He brings to his editorship at GeoHumanities an awareness of the intersection of geography, humanist value systems and human rights, politics, and history.

“At no point in the last 50 years have the humanities been more central to a series of unfolding political crises across the globe,” Inwood says, citing recent high-profile debates about public monuments, education about historic and contemporary acts of oppression, and the need to counteract anti-democratic forces that have mobilized in many nations. “I will strive to build on the last decade of significant scholarship in the journal and engage in this contemporary moment.”

The AAG would like to express its appreciation for the work of cultural geographer Tim Cresswell and feminist political geographer Deborah P. Dixon to establish GeoHumanities and develop its articles and readership since 2015.

Cresswell is Ogilvie Professor of Human Geography in the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on geographies of place and mobility and their role in the constitution of social and cultural life. He is the author or editor of a dozen books and over 100 articles on the role of space, place, and mobility in social and cultural life. Cresswell is also a widely published poet with three collections – most recently Plastiglomerate (Penned in the Margins, 2020). His most recent academic book, Muybridge and Mobility (co-authored with John Ott) was published by the University of California Press in 2022.

Deborah Dixon is Professor of Geography at the University of Glasgow. Dixon’s internationally recognized work in feminist geopolitics was instrumental to the emergence of geohumanities as an inter-disciplinary field of research and practice. Her work cuts across scientific, artistic, and cultural categories to examine and imagine the ecological and social presence and futures of landscapes and places. Her collaborations include Sustainable Extractive Landscape Futures, working with earth scientists and artists on the conceptual and practical work of ‘fast geology’ in the Anthropocene, specifically in extractive landscapes. Dixon specializes in researching aesthetic, technological, political, and cultural responses to environmental problematics (including toxic landscapes, loss of biodiversity, and climate change) in Europe, the US, Australia and Asia. Her book Feminist Geopolitics: Material States (2016, Routledge) set the tone for investigations of feminist geopolitics and ecologies. A follow-up monograph will interrogate possible futures for the Earth created by viral and drone phenomena, geoengineering, and toxic exposures. She is also engaged in collaborative work that juxtaposes and recomposes citizen science, humanitarian technologies, and ethics in Malawi.

GeoHumanities has published 18 issues since its beginnings in 2015. As Dixon recalls, the journal was “broadly conceived … as a venue wherein the diverse and proliferating engagements between the geographical sciences and the arts and humanities could be showcased.” GeoHumanities has highlighted research from “environmental humanities; the body and well-being; place and performativity; big data and neogeographies; history and memory; creativity, experimentation, and innovation; media and film studies; religion, belief, and the cosmos; and landscape and architecture.” While most of these have been articles, GeoHumanities has welcomed experimentations with form, combined media, and creative collaborations. Dixon recalls that the journal’s ‘Practices and Curations’ section has been the most innovative area of the publication, featuring research based on creative practice, as well as work produced during inquiry.

From the beginning, GeoHumanities was conceived to have a team of two co-editors. The founding team of Dixon and Cresswell drew Dixon’s experience in combining art and science, in particular her work with geo- and environmental scientists; and Cresswell’s humanities experience in the history of geography and his work as a poet. The range of work this team wished to attract to GeoHumanities—from Anthropocene geographies to spatial histories— called on further expertise from associate editors Sarah De Leeuw, Harriet Hawkins, Chris Lukinbeal, and Matt Zook, as well as an interdisciplinary editorial board and attentive reviewers.

In their first editorial for GeoHumanities in 2015, Cresswell and Dixon noted that the birth of the journal was emblematic of the long history of interdisciplinary, humanist work in geography, “endeavors that saw cultural geography become both a mainstay of the discipline and an arena where dialogue with other disciplines was encouraged and facilitated.” Cresswell dedicated the journal to “grasp the opportunity provided by the array of creative writers, artists, performers, and musicians who engage with geographical ideas in their work…That, to me, would be a fine thing for a confident and outward-looking radically interdisciplinary discipline such as ours.”

AAG thanks Tim Cresswell and Deborah Dixon for their vision and leadership during the founding and subsequent eight years of editorship and commends Anastasia Christou and Joshua Inwood for their willingness to continue the tradition established by the founding editors.

Find out more about GeoHumanities and other AAG journals.

Journals

Chen Named Editor for The Professional Geographer

January 9, 2024

Guo Chen has been named the first Human Geography/Nature and Society editor for The Professional Geographer, inaugurating a new position at the journal. Chen will join current editor Heejun Chang, who will continue in his second term as editor, focusing on articles related to Geographic Methods/Physical Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Chen is an associate professor of Geography and Global Urban Studies in the College of Social Science, a core faculty member of the Asian Pacific American (APA) Studies Program, and an affiliated faculty member of the Asian Studies Center and Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University. A human geographer with broad interests in urban, economic, crititical, and environmental areas, she is also a teacher scholar and public intellectual who has authored and co-authored over 50 publications with a focus on inequality, urban poverty, housing rights for the poor, slums, migrants, urbanization and land use, urban governance, and social and environmental justice, including articles in The Professional Geographer and other leading geography journals. She is co-editor of Locating Right to the City in the Global South (Routledge 2013) and “Interrogating unequal rights to the Chinese city” (Environment and Planning A Special Issue based on her initiated sessions at the AAG meeting), as well as initiator and editor of a Focus Section for The Professional Geographer titled “Hidden Geographies: Migration, Intersectionality, and Social Justice in a Global Contemporaneous Space” (2023) featuring research articles on race, gender, ethnicity, class, nationality, citizenship, and social justice, by ten diverse scholars around the world. Her public scholarship includes many op-eds for key policy forums and her professional society, TV interview, and webinars. She has served on geography/urban studies flagship journals’ editorial boards (The Professional Geographer and Journal of Urban Affairs), serving as ad hoc reviewer for close to 50 journals, many programs and book publishers, and over a hundred organized professional sessions, invited talks, and conference presentations. Guo is a recipient of many prestigious awards in research, teaching, leadership, and service, including a Wilson Center Fellowship, university-wide teaching and women’s professional achievement awards, and an AAG specialty group outstanding service award.

Chen got a glimpse of the editorial role at Professional Geographer as a guest editor of a Focus section in 2023 and 2024/25 issues of the journal on the theme of Hidden Geographies. Her experiences have strengthened her vision for helping the journal to achieve valuable dialogue between the Global South and the Global North, and for attracting and publishing underrepresented authors in geography. “As I learned from editing our recent PG Focus section, the highest-impact articles increasingly need to speak to a diverse and international geography readership and the communities beyond,” says Chen. “My vision for the journal is to continue to bring in a diverse scholarship and to continue to stimulate communication, awareness, and exchange.”

Find out more about The Professional Geographer and other AAG journals.

Journals

Adams, King Named Editors for Annals of the American Association of Geographers

January 9, 2024

Paul Adams is the new editor for Human Geography, and Brian King is the new Nature & Society editor at the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, effective January 2024. They will replace Kendra Strauss and Katie Meehan, respectively.

Paul Adams Adams is the longtime director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Texas, first in the UT Department of Geography and the Environment now in the Department of American Studies. His service to AAG includes founding the Media Geography Specialty Group (now Media and Communication). From 2015 to 2020, he served as associate professor II at the University of Bergen, funded by the Research Council of Norway. In 2001, he was a Fulbright fellow at McGill University and University of Montreal, Quebec. His current research focuses on sociospatial and political aspects of digital media, digital humanities, and culturally specific understandings of environmental risk and climate change.

Adams is the author of three monographs: The Boundless Self: Communication in Physical and Virtual Spaces (Syracuse University Press, 2005); Atlantic Reverberations: French Representations of an American Election (Ashgate Press, 2007); and Geographies of Media and Communication: A Critical Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), which received the 2009 James W. Carey Media Research Award from the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research, and has been translated into Chinese. He has also served as co-editor of four volumes: Textures of Place with Steven Hoelscher and Karen E. Till (University of Minnesota Press, 2001); the Ashgate Research Companion to Media Geography with Jim Craine and Jason Dittmer (Routledge, 2014); Disentangling: The Geographies of Digital Disconnection with André Jansson (Oxford University Press, 2021); and the Routledge Handbook on Media Geographies with Barney Warf (2021).

Adams will devote his editorship in Human Geography to illuminating “the synthetic potentials” of cross- and interdisciplinary explorations in geography: “Emerging geographical approaches, including feminist geography, decolonial geography, studies of affect and emotion, embodied theory, political ecology, and others are not so much ‘specializations’ as new encounters with central questions of the discipline, and as such they offer new ways to synthesize diverse perspectives on the world.” As AAG’s flagship journal, the Annals’s unique task of representing the full breadth of geography can be applied to embracing, rather than entrenching, the disciplinary and methodological differences in the field: “Geography is growing but not necessarily growing apart,” says Adams. “The Annals is key to promoting this process.”

Brian King King is professor and head of the Department of Geography at the Pennsylvania State University. His affiliations range across the university, as a faculty research associate with the Population Research Institute, research affiliate with the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, and faculty affiliate with the School of International Affairs and Consortium on Substance Use and Addiction. King is an honorary research associate with the African Climate and Development Initiative at the University of Cape Town and was selected as a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow in 2017. He previously served from 2021 to 2023 as co-editor of Human Geography and Nature & Society for the Annals. King’s research, teaching, and outreach focuses on livelihoods, conservation and development, environmental change, and human health, centering in Southern Africa. King’s laboratory group (HELIX: Health and Environment Landscapes for Interdisciplinary eXchange) is examining how COVID-19 is transforming the US opioid epidemic. His book, States of Disease: Political Environments and Human Health University of California Press, 2017), received the Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award.

King’s goals as editor include making sure the review process is timely and efficient, acting from his knowledge of the process as a reviewer and as an editorial board member of African Geographical Review, Geoforum and Health & Place. He also seeks to expand the range of the publication to include even more work in emerging directions, and to address underrepresented content areas that can advance the future of nature and society geography.

Related to this commitment is King’s interest in broadening the scope of contributors’ disciplinary backgrounds. “One of the unexpected outcomes of my research in health and environment are the ways that I am increasingly engaging with other disciplines, particularly anthropology, sociology, rural sociology, and biobehavioral health,” he says. King plans to leverage his many commitments and professional contacts outside of geography to widely promote the Annals to potential contributors.

The AAG thanks outgoing editors Kendra Strauss, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology and associate member of the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University, as well as director of the Labour Studies Program and the SFU Morgan Centre for Labour Research; and Katie Meehan, Reader in Environment and Society in the Department of Geography at King’s College London and Co-Director of King’s Water Center, for their dedicated editorship.

Strauss brought to the role of editor their significant publications in economic and labor geographies, feminist theory, migration studies, legal geographies, environmental change, urban political ecology, and critical urban theory. With extensive publications in geography, social science, and law journals, Strauss has also served on six editorial boards and been a reviewer for many papers in and beyond geography. Strauss’s tenure with the Annals was characterized by encouragement of paper submissions from outside of North America and in diverse topics areas “that still evidence a commitment to engagement with geography and geographical debate.”

Meehan is a broadly trained human-environment geographer with expertise in urban political ecology, environmental justice, water policy, mixed methods, and science and technology studies. She is co-author of Water: A Critical Introduction (Wiley, 2023), with Naho Mirumachi, Alex Loftus, and Majed Akhter. She is co-editor with Kendra Strauss of Precarious Worlds: Contested Geographies of Social Reproduction (University of Georgia Press, 2015). In 2023 she won the European Research Council’s Consolidator Grant award to support her research on household water insecurity and water shutoffs in high-income countries. During her time at the Annals, Meehan sought to democratize knowledge and expand the audiences for the journal, beyond the geography discipline and beyond academia. She encouraged the use of Annals as a platform for key debates in the discipline and worked with the other editors to bring human-environment topics into the foreground, especially work that focused on racialized natures and environmental justice. “I have been thrilled to work with the editorial board, my co-editors, AAG staff, and the AAG Council to shepherd the very best geographic scholarship to the pages of the Annals,” Meehan says.

Find out more about the Annals of the American Association of Geographers and other AAG journals.