Newsletters

Newsletter – May 2019

PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

Geography, Green Resolutions, and Graduation

By Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach

“Complex organizations have complex interests and responsibilities, especially in the 21st century… Together, we Geographers have worked diligently over the last several years to shine a light on equity and banish harassment and bullying from our meetings, our places of work, and our lives. We have more work to do, but we do have a heightened awareness, and a strong, renewed resolve to move forward with justice.”

Continue Reading.

ANNUAL MEETING

Revisit  #aagDC with Photos and Videos

The 2019 AAG Annual Meeting hosted 8,500 students and professionals in Washington, DC. Approximately 30% of attendees came from 78 different countries to share the latest in research, policy, and applications in geography, sustainability, and GIScience. View our online gallery of photos to revisit the featured themes, special guest speakers and events, and the 120+ awards presented at the conference. Videos of several special sessions including the Opening Session and Presidential Plenary, Eric Holder’s Keynote, Atlas Awardee Carla Hayden, AAG Executive Director Doug Richardson’s Retirement Remarks, the Past President’s Address, and Recalling Gilbert White are available on the AAG YouTube Channel.

View photos of the 2019 Annual Meeting Highlights.

Watch videos of #aagDC special events.

MAD Takes Back-to-Back World Geography Bowl Titles

The 2019 World Geography Bowl was held during the AAG Annual Meeting on Thursday, April 4 at 7 PM. The 30th annual round robin quiz competition concluded with student teams from the Mid-Atlantic AAG Division and the Southeast Division of the AAG competing head to head, with team MAD pulling out the victory. MAD’s victory marks back to back championships for the division. The World Geography Bowl supports close to 60 students to help offset the costs of attending the AAG Annual Meeting.

Learn more about the World Geography Bowl.

Save the Date for AAG Denver!

 

Join us for the mile high meeting. Mark your calendar for the AAG Annual Meeting in Denver on April 6-10, 2020. We invite you to organize and participate in sessions, workshops, field trips, special events, and activities. Look for the call for papers in July 2019. We look forward to seeing you in the Rocky Mountains!

Learn more about #aagDENVER.

PUBLICATIONS

NEW Annals of the American Association of Geographers Issue Alert: Articles with topics ranging from mining to climate change, health to mobility

The most recent issue of Annals of the American Association of Geographers has been published online (Volume 109, Issue 3, May 2019) focusing on current geographic research. This issue of the Annals also includes an In Memoriam to Marvin W. Mikesell. Topics in this issue include dam failures, time-space prisms, smart cities, communicable disease, heat waves, world city networks, walkability, urban road networks, neighborhood effects on human health, and high-speed rail. Regional areas of interest include the Global North, the Bale Mountains, and Pittsburgh. Authors are from a variety of research institutions including: Uppsala University, King’s College London, the Arctic Institute, and University of Maryland.

All AAG members have full online access to all issues of the Annals through the Members Only page. Each issue, the Editors choose one article to make freely available. In this issue you can read Measuring the Geometric and Semantic Similarity of Space–Time Prisms Using Temporal Signatures by Harvey J. Miller, Young Jaegal and Martin Raubal for free for the next two months.

Questions about the Annals? Contact annals [at] aag [dot] org.

NEW The Professional Geographer Issue Alert: Research featuring book reviews to beer, education to hydroelectricity

The latest issue of The Professional Geographer is now available (Vol 71, Issue 2, May 2019) with 16 new research articles in geography that emphasize applied studies. Topics include beer, behavioral effects of GPS use, Geospatial literacy, place spoofing, sea level rise, uber and urban transportation, population center measurements, early career academic mobility, achieving racial justice in geography, and the impacts of book reviews. Study areas include the American West, Salt Lake County, Utah, and Sweden. Authors are from a variety of global institutions including: Beijing Normal University, University of Alabama, Michigan State University, and University of Oxford.

All AAG members have full online access to all issues of The Professional Geographer through the Members Only page. In every issue, the editors choose one article to make freely available. In this issue you can read Identifying American Beer Geographies: A Multiscale Core-Cluster Analysis of U.S. Breweries by Jake K. Carr, Shaun A. Fontanella, and Calvin P. Tribby for free for the next 3 months.for free for the next three months.

Questions about The PG? Contact profgeog [at] aag [dot] org.

In addition to the most recently published journal, read the latest issue of the other AAG journals online:

• Annals of the American Association of Geographers
• The Professional Geographer
• GeoHumanities
• The AAG Review of Books

NEW Spring Issue of the AAG Review of Books Published

AAG-RoB-spring-7-2-cvr-babyThe latest issue of The AAG Review of Books is now available (Volume 7, Issue 2, Spring 2019) with 11 book reviews on recent books related to geography, public policy and international affairs. The Spring 2019 issue also includes four book review discussions. The Spring 2019 Issue features a review by Stanley D. Brunn of the International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology in which Douglas Richardson served as Editor-in-Chief.

Questions about The AAG Review of Books? Contact aagreview [at] aag [dot] org.

ASSOCIATION NEWS

AAG seeks two editors for the Annals of the American Association of Geographers

The flagship journal of the AAG, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, has two upcoming editor vacancies to start January 2020. The open positions are in the subject areas of Human Geography and Nature & Society. Applications for the four year term will be accepted until September 6, 2019, with appointments being made in the fall of 2019.

More information about the editorial positions.

Deadline Extended to List Your Geography Program in The Guide

Guidecover1718baby-1The AAG is continuing to accept entries from geography programs for the 2019 edition of the Guide to Geography Programs in the Americas. The deadline for submitting a listing has been extended to June 1, 2019.

The 2019 edition of the Guide will be available exclusively online. The Guide lists undergraduate and graduate programs in all areas of geography and includes an interactive map that students can use to explore and discover geography programs, with easy-to-use search tools to find programs by degree type, region, and program specialization. It has long been an invaluable reference for faculty, prospective students, government agencies, and private firms in the United States, Canada, and throughout the world.

For more information and to list your program, please contact Mark Revell at guide [at] aag [dot] org.

Geography.org: A Resource for Promoting our Discipline and Recruiting Students

GeographyDotCom300-300x90Geography.org is a collaboration between the AAG and Esri to create an accessible platform and launching point for different audiences to discover the discipline of geography. Launched in the fall of 2018 as part of Geography Awareness Week, the site is useful year-round as an outreach tool for site visitors to learn more about what geography is, what geography offers, and career opportunities available in the field. Geography.org is part of the ongoing efforts of the AAG and other organizations to introduce students and the general public to a discipline that offers multiple career paths, as well as information to better understand the world.

Learn more about what the site has to offer.

AAG’s Harassment-Free AAG Survey

One of the goals of the AAG is to host an annual meeting that is inclusive and promotes a harassment-free environment for all attendees. To support this goal, we are conducting a survey about conference participants’ experiences over the past five years (since 2015). This survey is a vital and relevant assessment of the annual meeting and the results will inform policy and practice and will drive change for future annual meetings. If you have attended the AAG Annual Meeting during the past five years, we hope that you will take a few minutes of your time to help us improve as an organization.

Click here to take the survey until May 26.

MEMBER NEWS

Profiles of Professional Geographers

Do you ever wonder what it is like to be the only GIS analyst at a company? This month learn more about being the primary GIS analyst with Daniel McGlone, Senior GIS Analyst and Cicero Data Manager, at Azavea. Daniel explains his multifaceted career, one of the reasons why he wanted to work in geography, and some of the moments along his path to his current employment.

Learn more about Geography Careers.

May Member Updates

The latest news about AAG Members.

Ten students from around the nation will soon be coming to the University of South Florida for an intensive 9-week research experience on the NSF-funded Weather, Climate, and Society REU hosted by Dr. Jennifer Collins and Dr. Robin Ersing (PIs). Students participating this year: Kehinde Adekoya (Hillsborough Community College), Morgan Alexander (University of Georgia), Sydney Hampton (University of South Carolina), Malikiya Hayes (Florida A&M University), Petra Jasper (Occidental College), Conor Krystad (Willamette University), Bradley Smith (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University), Jordan Stewart (Cornell University), Allison Foster (Auburn University), and Samantha Williams (University of South Florida). Learn more about the program.

Amy Polen, LSU Masters student in the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, was recently selected for the University Corporation of Atmospheric Research Capitol Hill Scholars Program where she will work on Environmental Policy. Watch her video submission.

RESOURCES AND OPPORTUNITIES

NSF Research Opportunity on Coastlines and People

NSF_logo2sThe NSF has recently circulated a Dear Colleagues Letter seeking those interested in establishing Research Coordination Networks for the Coastlines and People (CoPe) Project first explored in September 2018. One page summaries of projects and programs related to CoPe are being accepted until May 31, 2019 with a full proposal deadline of June 28, 2019.

Learn more.

Take Time Out This Summer for Professional Development

The AAG’s Geography Faculty Development Alliance (GFDA) will once again offer a valuable in-depth opportunity for early career professionals and department leaders in Geography to learn and engage during its annual workshops June 23-29, 2019, at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The shorter four-day workshop for department leaders (June 26-29) will overlap with the week-long conference for early career attendees providing a full career spectrum of exercises and activities.

Register today!

Editor-in-Chief Sought for Physical Geography

The journal Physical Geography is currently seeking applicants for the position of editor-in-chief or two applicants to be joint co-editor-in-chiefs. The three year term formally starts in January 2020, with a transitional period between July and December of 2019. Applications are being accepted until May 20, 2019.

Find out more about the position.

FEATURED ARTICLES

Beyond Compactness: A New Measure to Evaluate Congressional Districts

 

Redrawing congressional district boundaries, an activity that happens every ten years following the decennial census, may be the most consequential application of geography in the United States. As congressional elections have become less competitive, many are raising questions about the current boundaries of congressional districts… Esri’s Policy Maps team formed the research question: How much are current congressional boundaries defined by physical features (mountains and rivers), infrastructure (highways and railroads), or other existing administrative boundaries (county and place boundaries)?

Continue reading.

GEOGRAPHERS IN THE NEWS
VENTS CALENDAR
    Share
Changing Human Populations Planning and Development
AAG Staff
AAG Staff
President's Column

Harassment-Free AAG: Moving Forward

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” 

Attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In civil society, we measure our words and deeds, and listen to others’ ideas and opinions. We set our expectations for civil discourse not necessarily based on a minimum expectation of the law, but based on our humanity, because we set high standards for ourselves and feel empathy for others.

We, too, can be thoughtful in word and deed. We, too, can have each other’s best interests at heart. Sometimes, however, we can be too stunned by words or deeds to move, frozen in shock. We can be frozen by the fear of the powerful, or the shock of the unexpected. And, we can become frustrated when the wheels of justice turn too slowly or silently. We applaud those who do speak up for justice.

I am writing to assure our community that Harassment-Free AAG does not end at the boarding gate for the flight home from the Annual Meeting. In fact, avoiding workplace discrimination and harassment all weeks of the year is the first concern in AAG’s current Statement of Professional Ethics (see section II and II.A.).

The AAG launched Harassment-Free AAG at the 2019 Annual Meeting, which members did use. I am again grateful to all the individuals, AAG Staff Members, and committee members who worked hard on the policy and on the logistics, enactment, launch, and post-meeting follow through of this new program. This program builds upon the 2017 Council Resolution creating the Standing Committee on AAG Annual Meeting Attendee Disciplinary Matters. Meanwhile, AAG members will be receiving a post-Annual Meeting survey created by the Harassment-Free AAG task force, due out in early May, to assess their experiences as a benchmark for the beginning of this program, so please watch for it and respond.

And, justice moves at a judicial pace. Several incidents did occur and were reported, and the AAG is processing them. Please do not misinterpret silence as inaction or not caring. In order for AAG sanctions to be enforceable, there must be due process. This is in fairness to those seeking justice, to complainants, witnesses, and to respondents, until all evidence is presented and considered, and decisions are rendered in the formal process. If there is no due process, it undermines AAG’s ability to enforce sanctions when warranted. So rest assured that the meeting Advocate, Ombudsperson, and AAG Staff, AAG legal counsel, and officers have been working hard behind the scenes both during and after the meeting to process and respond to reports.

That said, some incidents have been discussed in the wider social media, which of course cannot be un-seen. One recent incident is made more troubling because of the lack of response of bystanders in real time. It is certainly our collective duty to call out bullying: peer pressure is another check on misbehavior in civil society, in addition to formal proceedings. Again, we turn to Dr. King for introspection:

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.“

Every one of us has a responsibility to speak out against mistreatment and misbehavior. While it is up to the justice system to investigate their severity and pervasiveness, and to determine consequences, this is also about our humanity and doing the right thing. AAG has released the following statement with the hopes that it will ease members’ concerns about the status of pending cases:

Statement by AAG regarding Harassment Free Meetings and Recent Incidents

“ The AAG is fully committed to having harassment free meetings. We have recently implemented a new wide-ranging Harassment Free AAG meetings policy (see AAG Event Conduct Policy http://annualmeeting.aag.org/conduct) that was rolled out at the Washington, DC meeting, and it has already made a positive contribution. The AAG is now compiling all the information currently available on each of the five harassment incidents which have been reported at the recent Annual Meeting. We have presented this information to our attorney, and will be undertaking formal investigations of each of the incidents as promptly as legally possible. The AAG also has a legally-reviewed policy in place on how to proceed regarding such incidents, and a special AAG Committee to handle these cases. That process is moving forward now on each of these incidents as rapidly as possible, and each will be thoroughly investigated, and enforceable sanctions will be forthcoming as warranted.”

Waiting for findings is painful, especially because we are sometimes at the mercy of University processes and timelines. So, again, I am grateful that AAG has a clear and enhanced anti-harassment policy and a process to address misbehavior by our members. I am grateful for our AAG Members’ concern and attention to this topic, and for the AAG Staff’s prompt and thorough actions to respond. AAG Council has asked the Harassment-Free Task Force to work on more specific topics that have arisen, including suggestions from our members, as we move into year 2 of this program. We will continue to review and update the new policy as unanticipated circumstances arise, and as the post-meeting survey provides input. Our work is far from done.

Thank you for allowing me into your mailboxes each month to discuss important issues that affect us all and thank you all for moving AAG into the 21st century in our expectations for courteous, thoughtful, and professional discourse, for healthy debates among ourselves, and for respect for one another.

Please share your ideas with me at: slbeach (at) austin (dot) utexas (dot) edu

— Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, President, AAG
Professor, Geography and the Environment, The University of Texas at Austin

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0053

Harassment-Free AAG
    Share
Changing Human Populations Networks and Connections Planning and Development
Sheryl Luzzadder
Sheryl Luzzadder
New Books for Geographers

New Books: April 2019

Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related areas. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books.

Publishers are welcome to send new volumes to the Editor-in-Chief (Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803).

Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should also contact the Editor-in-Chief.

PLEASE NOTE: Due to current public health policies which have prompted the closing of most offices, we are unable to access incoming books at this time. We are working on a solution during this transition and will continue our new books processing as soon as we can. In the meantime, please feel free to peruse previous books from our archived lists.

April 2019

American Hemp: How Growing Our Newest Cash Crop Can Improve Our Health, Clean Our Environment, and Slow Climate Change by Jen Hobbs (Skyhorse Publishing 2019)

Anarchist Cuba: Countercultural Politics in the Early Twentieth Century by Kirwin Shaffer (PM Press 2019)

Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader by Mark Bray and Robert H. Haworth, eds. (PM Press 2018)

The Anarchist Imagination: Anarchism Encounters the Humanities and Social Sciences by Carl Levy and Saul Newman (Routledge 2019)

Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language by Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater (PM Press 2019)

The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojavaby Thomas Schmidinger (PM Press 2019)

Carbon Markets in a Climate-Changing Capitalism by Gareth Bryant (Cambridge University Press 2019)

Contested Territory: Ðien Biên Phu and the Making of Northwest Vietnam by Christian C. Lentz (Yale University Press 2019)

Dictator’s Dreamscape: How Architecture and Vision Built Machado’s Cuba and Invented Modern Havana by Joseph R. Hartman (University of Pittsburgh Press 2019)

The Economic Geographies of Organized Crime by Tim Hall (Guilford Press 2018)

Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics by Jessica Dempsey (Wiley-Blackwell 2016)

A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic by Peter Wadhams (Oxford University Press 2017)

Frontier Road: Power, History, and the Everyday State in the Colombian Amazon by Simón Uribe (Wiley-Blackwell 2017)

Georg Forster: Voyager, Naturalist, Revolutionary by Jürgen Goldstein (University of Chicago Press 2019)

Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy (Actar 2018)

Global Corruption from a Geographic Perspective by Barney Warf (Springer 2019)

A History of the Czech Lands (Second Edition) by Jaroslav Pánek, Oldřich Tůma, et al., eds. (Karolinum Press 2019)

Horizon by Barry Lopez (Penguin Random House 2019)

Landscape and Power in Geographical Space as a Social-Aesthetic Construct by Olaf Kühne (Springer 2018)

Life Takes Place: Phenomenology, Lifeworlds, and Place Making by David Seamon (Routledge 2018)

The Long Honduran Night: Resistance , Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup by Dana Frank (Haymarket Books 2018)

Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place by Tim Cresswell (University of Chicago Press 2019)

The Meanings of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Environment and Justice by Kenneth R. Olwig (Routledge 2019)

Native American Log Cabins in the Southeast by Gregory A. Waselkov, ed. (University of Tennessee Press 2019)

The Northeast: A Fire Survey by Stephen J. Pyne (University of Arizona Press 2019)

Offshore: Exploring the Worlds of Global Outsourcing by Jamie Peck (Oxford University Press 2017)

Other Geographies: The Influences of Michael Watts by Sharad Chari, Susanne Freidberg, Vinay Gidwani, Jesse Ribot, and Wendy Wolford, eds. (Wiley 2017)

Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter by Caitlin Frances Bruce (Temple University Press 2019)

Plate Tectonics and Great Earthquakes: 50 Years of Earth-Shaking Events by Lynn R. Sykes (Columbia University Press 2019)

Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America by Brett Story (University of Minnesota Press 2019)

Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons by Silvia Federici (PM Press 2018)

Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning by Rafia Zafar (University of Georgia 2019)

The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World by John Davies and Alexander J. Kent (University of Chicago Press 2017)

Reimagining Livelihoods: Life beyond Economy, Society, and Environment by Ethan Miller (University of Minnesota Press 2019)

Scarcity in the Modern World: History, Politics, Society and Sustainability, 1800-2075 by John Brewer, Neil Fromer, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, and Frank Trentmann, eds. (Bloomsbury Academic 2019)

In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power by Alfred W. McCoy (Haymarket Books 2017)

Social Imaginaries of Space: Concepts and Cases by Bernard Debarbieux (Edward Elgar Publishing 2019)

The Science of Breaking Bad by Dave Trumbore and Donna J. Nelson (The MIT Press 2019)

Into the Tempest: Essays on the New Global Capitalism by William I. Robinson (Haymarket Books 2019)

Topoi/Graphein: Mapping the Middle in Spatial Thought by Christian Abrahamsson (University of Nebraska Press 2018)

The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann (Penguin Random House 2019)

World in Crisis: Marxist Perspectives on Crash & Crisis by Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts (eds.) (Haymarket Books 2018)

    Share
Changing Human Populations Governance and Policy Sharing Knowledge
AAG Staff
AAG Staff
Post

Social Media at #aagDC

We’re getting closer to the 2019 AAG Annual Meeting! Whether you will be attending the meeting all week, for a few days, or looking to follow the action from afar, there are plenty of ways to get involved using social media. Social media is a great way for seasoned conference goers and newcomers alike to network, report on new research, engage in lively debate with those inside and outside of the discipline, and find out what’s going on during the largest geography conference in the world! Start planning your #aagDC social media strategy today with these helpful guidelines!

Twitter

One of the most frequently used social media sites for live events, Twitter is a great place to start scoping out the annual meeting. Twitter is used by geographers to discuss and share research ideas or connect with others, often leading to face to face meet-ups at the annual meeting. As the main social media channel, the AAG annual meeting has had active Twitter users since at least 2011 in Seattle. The hashtag #AAG followed by the year of the event used to be the standard AAG Annual Meeting tag. However, this year we decided to switch it up! Due to increased traffic from other events who are already using #AAG2019 (hat tip to the ASEAN Autism Games) and the fact that as geographers we are always thinking about place and space, we will now use the hashtag #aag followed by the location of the conference. This year the official conference hashtag will be #aagDC! Start using and following #aagDC; posts are already being compiled in anticipation of the meeting! If you are new to Twitter, try these tips to benefit most from the network:

  • Follow @theAAG on Twitter! The official AAG Twitter account will be active throughout the meeting with important announcements, live tweets of events, and fun photos throughout the conference hotels. Due to popularity, the AAG will continue to conduct a Twitter poll once a day for members to choose a session they would like to see live-Tweeted!
  • Use #aagDC on all your meeting related communications. Sometimes it is difficult to fit your thoughts into the (now expanded!) 280 character count, but try to include the hashtag #aagDC in each of your tweets. This will ensure that your tweets are being seen by others both at the conference and following along offsite. If you are new to hashtags, a hashtag is a way to organize a specific topic into one feed. Click on the hashtag to see the conversations happening related to that topic.
  • Whenever possible, try to include Twitter handles. If you are tweeting about a paper, panel, or poster, be sure to attribute the research to the right person by using their Twitter handle. Presenters and panelists should consider including their handles on an opening slide or in a poster corner. Conversely, if you do not want your research to be tweeted, please state that information upfront so the audience is aware of your desires.
  • Unable to attend the meeting this year? Follow the hashtag and join the conversation!

Facebook

Do you prefer Facebook over Twitter as your social media site of choice? While there will be less live coverage of specific sessions, Facebook is a great way to share photos, videos, and news about the annual meeting with your friends, family, and colleagues.

  • Make sure you like the AAG Facebook page (www.facebook.com/geographers) and set the page so that you see it first in your News Feed by clicking on the “Following” dropdown menu on the AAG Facebook page itself. This will ensure that you receive the latest meeting related announcements as soon as you open the Facebook app or website.
  • Be on the lookout for Facebook Live videos from some of the major events like the Exhibition Hall opening and the World Geography Bowl finals!
  • Check on the page each morning for reminders of the day’s schedule of events.

Instagram

The AAG’s newest social media channel, Instagram is a fun place to share your photos of activities at the annual meeting and your daily life as a geographer!

  • Follow @theAAG on Instagram for photos of the annual meeting as well as behind the scenes looks at the work that goes into planning the conference on a yearly basis!
  • Share your photos of the meeting with other attendees using the conference hashtag #aagDC and look for an Instagram collage of #aagDC photos after the meeting ends.
  • Want to be featured in our new Instagram Campaign to meet members of the AAG, #MeettheAAG? Look for AAG Staff throughout the meeting who will be taking photos and collecting information about AAG members that will be showcased during the summer.

General Communications

Because the AAG social media channels will be busy during the annual meeting, AAG staff may not be able to provide a timely reply through these mediums. The AAG Annual Meeting App is a good place to start for conference information with regards to floor plans, session times and locations, and abstracts. If you have questions or concerns and need to contact a staff member, the best option is to find a conference volunteer (wearing a neon yellow t-shirt) or to stop by the AAG Meridian or Registration area in the Atrium of the Marriott Hotel.

    Share
Changing Human Populations Planning and Development Spatial Narratives
Emily Fekete
Emily Fekete

Bruce Mitchell

Education: B.A. in Philosophy and Religion (Eckerd College), Ph.D. in Geography and Environmental Science and Policy (University of South Florida)

Describe your job/position and some of the primary tasks and duties for which you’re responsible.
We’re a Washington, D.C. based nonprofit organization engaged in advocacy, research, and policy analysis centered on the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. NCRC looks at investment activity within US cities, particularly mortgage and small business lending, and access to financial services. We’re very interested in the issue of equity and wealth building for low and moderate income Americans, so we focus on evaluating how banks are providing financial access for individuals in cities and rural areas. Our work is not enforcement, but we point-out where banks can do better in their performance and make recommendations to improve policy decisions and regulation.

Where do you draw your data from, and how do you use the data in your work?
We primarily use publically available datasets. For instance, to look at mortgage activity, we use data gathered as part of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA). Additionally, under the Community Reinvestment Act, banks are obligated to report data regarding their small business lending, so we use both of these datasets to study lending activity. Data on bank branch locations and deposits are available from the FDIC. We also use U.S. Census data quite a bit to define low to moderate income areas and determine where minority communities are located and what sort of financial access and access to capital these groups have. We’ve also done some interesting studies using historic sources, like the HOLC residential security maps, commonly referred to as “redlining maps” which identified lending risk by neighborhood using theories from Homer Hoyt and the Chicago School of urban geography. We looked at the HOLC classifications of neighborhoods done in the 1930’s to compare the demographics and economic status of the neighborhoods today. It is startling how little demographic and economic change there has been in these neighborhoods. Eighty years later and they are still mostly minority and low income. Also, we are releasing a report on gentrification and displacement and their impact on capital flow and neighborhood change.

How do you perceive the value and importance of geographic knowledge to perform the work that you just described?
A geographer brings a distinct perspective to this work. Our work at NCRC engages with the problems of urban geography, looking at neighborhood change, and how this corresponds with the spatial flow of capital within cities. We also examine capital access at different scales, from census tracts up to metro areas and states. A multi-scalar understanding of geography is critical to what we do. We use spatial statistics and spatial analysis to examine bank branch access and proximity to various communities. An economist might approach these issues in a non-spatial way and fail to see the relationship of neighborhood demographics on issues like proximity and financial access for communities. Much of our work involves mapping. Maps provides an immediate spatial awareness to people, helping them understand how lending and investment patterns differ between communities. When you combine maps with visualizations of statistical and other quantitative analysis, it is a very powerful way of providing information to advocates and policymakers.

Can you reflect and maybe give an example or two of some impacts that this work has had in the community?
What we’re engaged in is very close to critical cartography. We’re looking at inequitable access to capital, and using maps and data to encourage banks to meet their obligation to do a better job in underserved communities. This results in what are called “community benefit agreements”, involving community groups, banks, and federal agencies. The Community Reinvestment Act impacts banks when they are trying to achieve a merger and there’s a problem with their performance in low to moderate income and underserved communities. Often we are able to look at their performance and encourage increased commitments to lending and community development efforts. Some of these community benefit agreements amount to billions of dollars in commitments by banks. We’ve had a number of community benefit agreements in the past two years which have substantially increased the amount of investment in underserved communities by banks.

We also work on grants. For instance, working with the U.S. Dept. of the Treasury to assess the impact of their Bank Enterprise Award (BEA) program. Under a W.K. Kellogg Foundation grant, we’re currently looking at discrimination in small business lending. This involves rigorous testing of banks using prospective customers of different race and gender profiles to assess how customer service interactions take place. It’s a very innovative area of market research with civil rights implications. Our goal in all of these activities is to increase equity in financial access for all Americans.

How does your work connect to your aspirations, both as a private citizen and as a professional in your field? 
I enjoy both the quantitative work and the mapping work that we do. Additionally, seeing how issues in geography, that might seem theoretical, profoundly impact our communities. Redlining and the HOLC maps which arose partly out of early theories of urban geography like filtering and invasion/succession for instance. Today it is interesting to see how urban planning theories, like Richard Florida’s “creative class” are playing out through processes like neighborhood gentrification. It’s very rewarding to engage in policy issues that directly affect economic equity throughout the United States, and to be in a position that in a small way promotes greater equity for all Americans.

Based on your prior educational experiences, when did you discover geography? Can you think of a specific moment that changed your perspective about different issues, civic responsibilities, and the potential of geography to be of value in society?
The initial “hook” into geography for me was cartography. I was interested in the revolution in cartographic science that was taking place with applications like ArcGIS, enabling more people to engage in mapmaking. Beyond that, the theoretical aspects of geography matched well with my previous education in philosophy and the social sciences. Unifying the quantitative aspects of spatial analysis with my social sciences orientation has been rewarding and interesting. Outside of my job, I have done research and publications on environmental justice issues with Jayajit Chakraborty. I’ve looked at areas where there is inequitable exposure to urban heat, which I describe as an issue of thermal inequity within US cities, and also cities around the world, like in India. I use spatial statistics to determine whether there is a relationship between socially vulnerable communities and greater exposure to the urban heat island effect and climate change.

See All Profiles
    Share
New Books for Geographers

New Books: March 2019

Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related areas. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books.

Publishers are welcome to send new volumes to the Editor-in-Chief (Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803).

Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should also contact the Editor-in-Chief.

PLEASE NOTE: Due to current public health policies which have prompted the closing of most offices, we are unable to access incoming books at this time. We are working on a solution during this transition and will continue our new books processing as soon as we can. In the meantime, please feel free to peruse previous books from our archived lists.

March 2019

Adventures in Modernism: Thinking with Marshall Berman by Jennifer Corby (ed.) (Urban Research 2019)

The Alps: An Environmental History by Jon Mathieu (Polity 2019)

The Caribbean: A Brief History (3rd Edition) by Gad Heuman (Bloomsbury 2018)

Circulation and Urbanization by Ross Exo Adams (Sage Publishing 2019)

Civilization Critical: Energy, Food, Nature, and the Future by Darrin Qualman (Fernwood Publishing 2019)

The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain by Lori Boornazian Diel (University of Texas Press 2018)

Detain and Deport: The Chaotic U.S. Immigration Enforcement Regime by Nancy Hiemstra (University of Georgia Press 2019)

Digital Geographies by James Ash, Rob Kitchin, and Agnieszka Leszczynski (eds.) (Sage Publishing 2018)

Dream City: Creation, Destruction, and Reinvention in Downtown Detroit by Conrad Kickert (The MIT Press 2019)

Governing Gifts: Faith, Charity, and the Security State by Erica Caple James (ed.) (University of New Mexico Press 2019)

At Home on the Waves: Human Habitation of the Sea from the Mesolithic to Today by Tanya J. King and Gary Robinson (eds.) (Berghahn Books 2019)

Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World by Benjamin Schmidt (University of Pennsylvania Press 2019)

Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland: Changing Social Landscapes in Middle America by Linda Allegro and Andrew Grant Wood (eds.) (University of Illinois Press 2018)

Law as Refuge of Anarchy: Societies without Hegemony or State by Hermann Amborn (The MIT Press 2019)

Lisbon, City of the Sea: A History by Malcolm Jack (I.B. Tauris 2019)

Making Climate Change History: Documents from Global Warming’s Past by Joshua P. Howe (University of Washington Press 2017)

Making History – Creating a Landscape: The Portuguese American Community of Southeastern New England by James W. Fonseca (CreateSpace 2018)

Postwar Emigration to South America from Japan and the Ryukyu Islands by Pedro Iacobelli (Bloomsbury Academic 2019)

São Paulo: A Graphic Biography by Felipe Correa (University of Texas Press 2018)

The Second Coming by Franco Berardi (Polity Books 2019)

Subaltern Geographies by Tariq Jazeel and Stephen Legg (eds.) (University of Georgia Press 2019)

Water Resources Planning: Fundamentals for an Integrated Framework (Fourth Edition) by Andrew A. Dzurik, Tara Shenoy Kulkarni, and Bonnie Kranzer Boland (Rowman and Littlefield 2018)

    Share
Changing Human Populations Networks and Connections Planning and Development
AAG Staff
AAG Staff
Post

Rights of Nature: The New Paradigm

Rights of Nature is a short-hand term for a form of ecological governance that both provides for and prioritizes Nature’s right to flourish. It also provides for various subsidiary rights, such as the right to restoration, the right to its natural processes, and the right to ecosystem functioning without interference. The term “Rights of Nature” gives the impression that the primary focus is defending Nature’s rights in courts of law. However, the Rights of Nature paradigm aims for a more fundamental shift in governance than only defending rights: placing Nature and its needs before human needs, so that human needs are reconfigured within Nature’s limits. Providing Nature with legal personhood and the guardians to defend its rights in court helps change the framework to a form of ecological governance, rather than laws that provide only for human needs. Currently, American law merely regulates human uses of the natural environment and provides for minimal curbs on overuse by such means as fines for pollution or, more rarely, refusal to grant permits for projects deemed too ecologically damaging.

What is Rights of Nature Governance?

The upsurge in interest in ecological governance is driven by the clear signals worldwide of increasing ecological degradation at systemic levels, ranging from climate change to greatly accelerated species loss across ecosystems. It is clear to many thinkers and advocates that the current industrial paradigm is now threatening ecological integrity worldwide and with it the ability of human communities to live sustainably and support critical needs for food, fresh water, decent shelter and ways of making a living.

Rights of Nature is less a specific template than an overarching ideal of ecological governance, the details of which are fashioned in unique ways in each culture that is seeking to enhance or restore sustainable living within Nature’s limits. This requires that Nature be granted the same rights to flourish and maintain itself as humans grant themselves in their legal structures. But underlying the need for legal protections is the concept that humans and Nature are in a relationship, rather than Nature merely providing a hoard of natural resources for indiscriminate human use. The legal structures discussed in Rights of Nature literature codifies the details of this restored relationship, rather than actually creating it.

Fully implementing a Rights of Nature or similar form of ecological governance, is the only way to reach true sustainability, because it places human activities within the framework of Nature’s laws and limitations, as other forms of governance do not. The problem, however, is how to define “sustainability,” as this overused term has lost both its mooring and meaning. Four criteria need to guide an understanding of the sustainability that a Rights of Nature paradigm aims for: (a) true sustainability prohibits mitigation or substitution for monetary or political gain; (b) sustainable projects create sustainable levels of human use, rather than encouraging continued over-consumption; (c) sustainable use shrinks the human footprint on the earth, not expands it; (d) true sustainability is a flexible and continuous process, as populations, technologies, and needs change, but it always maintains Nature’s biophysical integrity throughout, despite the dynamic changes inherent in ecological processes.

The History of the Rights of Nature Paradigm

The idea of granting Nature legal rights originated in a court case decided in 1972 by the United States Supreme Court, Sierra Club versus Morton. The Forest Service had issued permits for Disney Enterprises to build a complex of recreation and lodging facilities in Mineral King Valley in the Sierra Nevada of California. The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund sued to stop the project, but the lower court held that the Fund would not be adversely affected by the project and thus had no legal standing to sue. The United States Supreme Court decided to hear the case. As the case was pending, Christopher Stone, a professor at the University of California School of Law, authored a law review article arguing that natural areas and objects should have legal rights to defend their ecological integrity from harms that would damage them.

Mineral King Valley, now part of Sequoia National Park, California. Photo courtesy of National Park Service.

The country of Ecuador was the first to place Rights of Nature in its governing laws. Section 7 of the new Constitution of Ecuador adopted in 2008 says, “Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.” The Constitution also grants Nature the right to be restored and requires the government to prevent or restrict activities leading to species extinction, ecosystem destruction, and permanent alteration of natural cycles. Significantly, the Ecuadoran Constitution also protects its people’s rights to food sovereignty, and the right, especially of indigenous peoples, to remain on their ancestral lands, protecting their rights to develop ancestral traditions and societies and retain ownership of their community lands.This article, entitled “Should Trees Have Standing?” caught the attention of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The Court ruled against the Sierra Club, but Justice Douglas wrote a now-famous dissent in which he said, “Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.” Ultimately, the Sierra Club was able to prevent the destruction of Mineral King Valley, which is now part of Sequoia National Park. Professor Stone’s provocative article, suggesting that Nature be granted legal personhood to protect its own integrity, slowly began to attract more attention.

This new Constitutional provision on Nature’s Rights is slowly changing the face of Ecuadoran law. The very first lawsuit using the Rights of Nature provision was decided in Ecuador in 2011. It concerned a new road built along the Vilcabamba River in Loja Province and the dumping of construction rubble into the river. The Provincial Justice Court of Loja ruled in favor of the river, noting that damage to nature is generational in extent and that therefore the “precautionary principle” should guide development projects. The court required the government to take immediate corrective actions and appointed a delegation to oversee the cleanup.

Evo Morales Ayma, President of Bolivia and Rights of Nature advocate, holding up a manual of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth during a press conference at UN Headquarters on May 7, 2010. United Nations photograph by Eskinder Debebe.

Other recent efforts include a state court in India granting legal personhood to the heavily polluted Ganges and Yamuna Rivers, and local Rights of Nature legislation in various regions of the United States. Most recently (in February 2019), the people of Toledo, Ohio passed a Bill of Community Rights and Nature’s Rights to protect Lake Erie, subject to nearly annual toxic algal blooms, mainly as a result of industrial agricultural practices in the lake’s watershed. The legislation passed with 61% of the vote, but is already subject to a lawsuit, as nearly all other such local attempts in the United States have been.Bolivia subsequently, in 2010, enacted a comprehensive Rights of Nature statute, and also hosted an international gathering of concerned organizations from around the world, which led to the founding of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. Advocates and governments worldwide are also experimenting with innovative ways to approach ecosystem protection that reach past the current human-centered legal paradigm. One of the most successful is in New Zealand, where a fusion of Western legal concepts and Maori traditions of the Whanganui River’s importance as an ancestor, and Maori responsibilities to protect and conserve it, led to a formal agreement, finalized in 2012, to grant the river a legal identity. The implementing legislation passed in 2017. The definition of the river is adopted from the Whanganui iwi, the Maori group whose entire history is tied to the river. The river is defined as a living and integral whole, whose life is inseparable from the Whanganui iwi. Appointed guardians from the Whanganui iwi and the New Zealand government now protect the river. This successful project is considered a model for other efforts to blend indigenous law and tradition with Western legal structures for the protection of Nature.

The reason is not hard to seek: a Rights of Nature legal structure, if implemented nationwide, would constitute a monumental shift in the way Americans approach Nature, with relationship to Nature as the foremost goal, and the protection and flourishing of Nature given primacy over natural resources extraction and use. It would change the basis and thrust of the economy. Thus far, all attempts at Rights of Nature legislation in the United States have been local. These locally-approved laws clash with the hierarchical structure of American governance, which pre-empts most natural resources regulation to state or federal levels.

Questions and Challenges for a Rights of Nature Paradigm

Clearly, major changes in human use of the environment must take place; the ecological signals are unmistakable that current levels are unsustainable. The question is how best to move forward. There are many unanswered questions about ecological governance. How would Rights of Nature laws be implemented? What level of Nature would be granted the right to flourish: a watershed, an entire ecosystem, a single river, a valley, the climate of the world? Who would determine whether a given use interferes with Nature’s well-being and how would it be measured? If there are damages, how would they be measured, what would the remedy be, and how would it be implemented? How would human communities reconfigure themselves to live sustainably and stably, without instability, poverty and excessive resource use? How would human needs and Nature’s need to flourish without interference be balanced to create wholeness for both parties?

These questions and many more are being explored in a growing trickle of papers, articles, and books. CRC Press published the first book surveying Rights of Nature activity worldwide since an environmental philosophy work by Roderick Nash in 1989. The new book, released in 2017, begins the conversation on changes needed in human land use patterns (in the United States). It is titled Sustainability and the Rights of Nature: An Introduction, by Cameron La Follette and Chris Maser. The authors recognize that implementing ecological governance and deep sustainability models is something that must be done locally, place by place, region by region. Therefore, they are working on a second book, Sustainability and the Rights of Nature in Practice, in which advocates, scholars, and government officials from around the world discuss the path ahead, and the challenges and opportunities they face, from places as diverse as Germany and Kiribati, Bhutan and Scotland, Nigeria and Venezuela.

The problems humans now face around the world, ranging from marine plastics to climate change to severe soil erosion and ecosystem depletion, require communities and nations to apply every creative means to restore the human relationship with Nature. This requires the best scientific information on ecosystems, geography, hydrology and many other fields. But it also requires collaboration between people of differing traditions who share a landscape and region, to forge new partnerships and models that can govern humans’ return to a relationship with Nature, which sustains all.

Some cultures have retained much of their traditional relationship with Nature, and the customs and laws governing it, especially indigenous peoples in many regions. But the industrial paradigm of extraction and use without limits – or very minimal limits – is commonplace worldwide, and wreaking havoc on ecosystems, income inequality, and environmental health and resilience. It is clear that the existing legal framework, which favors human use and restricts use only to maintain, at best, minimal levels of ecosystem function, must change. Rights of Nature, and other potential forms of ecological governance now being explored, provide the path to a new and vital relationship between humans and Nature.

Cameron La Follette has a Masters in Psychology from New York University, and a Law degree from Columbia University. She is the lead author on Sustainability and the Rights of Nature: An Introduction, and lead editor on the forthcoming book Sustainability and the Rights of Nature in Practice.

    Share
Changing Human Populations Spatial Narratives
Cameron La Follette
Cameron La Follette
President's Column

Harassment-Free AAG: What to expect at the Washington D.C. Meeting

I am excited to write that there are four weeks to go in our countdown to the AAG Annual Meetings in Washington DC (April 3-7, 2019). I welcome guest columnist Dr. Lorraine Dowler, who has been a prior contributor to this space, and this month we highlight Climate Change to which we can all contribute positively for the AAG Meetings.

Harassing behavior by powerful individuals towards those more vulnerable has given rise to recent social movements including #MeToo, #UsToo and, Idle No More to name a few. These social movements are also influencing the academy as countless numbers of academic associations are currently examining how safe and inclusive their academic meetings are for those members who do not represent the majority of meeting attendees. These associations are gathering data about harassment through surveys, updating professional codes of conduct and hiring consultants to develop programs that directly address harassment and the creation of safe and inclusive spaces at academic meetings. Relatedly, the AAG charged a task force in Spring 2018 to gather information and recommend programmatic changes in order to envision a safer and more inclusive national meeting. The Council approved the task’s force proposal for the 2019 meeting, and this column will furnish a preliminary overview of resources that will be available to attendees at the Washington meeting.

The Harassment-Free AAG task force is committed to addressing sexual harassment in the Academy and at the national meeting. However, sexual harassment is only one form of harassment experienced at national meetings, and the task force is wary of addressing sexual harassment only, as that singular focus will allow for other forms of harassment, such as racism, transphobia and religious intolerance, to name just a few, to remain in the shadows. Therefore, the goal of this proposed program is to work towards a Harassment-Free AAG so that all of our members can benefit equally from attending the national meeting. This approach places the AAG as an institutional leader in addressing diverging and intersectional forms of potential harassment at a national meeting.

The task force took its lead from NSF’s ADVANCE Program Guidelines for the development of anti-harassment programs in academic societies and meetings. According to these guidelines, every anti-harassment program should adopt, at least, four fundamental elements. These elements are widely recognized as a “Standard of Care” for harassment prevention and remediation. They are:

  • A worded, widely disseminated, written anti-harassment policy;
  • Accessible and flexible complaint procedures designed to encourage people to come forward;
  • Prompt, thorough, and impartial investigative procedures implemented by appropriately trained investigators; and
  • Prompt and appropriate follow-up actions designed to stop harassment, discipline offenders, and protect complainants from any adverse effects of reporting

Keeping these guidelines in mind, we are implementing the following Harassment-Free AAG program at this year’s meeting. We are at the start of this process, and we encourage ideas and interventions from the membership on how to achieve an Harassment-Free AAG. You can find updated information about the program at http://annualmeeting.aag.org/conduct

At the registration desk at the D.C. meeting, you will receive information and links to our new Harassment-Free AAG policy and our newly expanded Statement of Professional Ethics. These statements reinforce that professional ideas and information are exchanged most effectively at the AAG meeting in an atmosphere free of discrimination or harassment and characterized by courtesy and respect. The AAG prohibits any form of harassment, sexual or in other forms, as outlined in these statements. We ask that you familiarize yourself with these statements as any violation of the Harassment-Free AAG policy will be reviewed by the Standing Committee on AAG Annual Meeting Attendee Disciplinary Matters and if warranted disciplinary action will be taken.

Resources for Attendees 

On-Site Independent and Confidential AAG Advocate

Advocates are professionals trained to provide confidential support victims of crime as they offer individuals information, emotional support, and help in finding resources and filling out paperwork, such as filing a complaint with an ombudsperson.

The AAG Advocate is a licensed social worker, and all interactions with the advocate will remain confidential. The advocate will be available to meet with conference attendees if:

  1. An attendee feels they were harassed or assaulted at the meeting and needs emotional support and/or access to victim services as well as reporting information.
  2. An attendee who has been harassed or assaulted at their home university and needs help in understanding what resources are available to them at their home institution.
  3. An attendee who is interested in creating or strengthening policies at their home institutions. The advocate is well-versed in Title IX accommodations and will have some sample policies on-hand for informational purposes.

<!–Contact information, bio and advocacy philosophy statement for the advocate can be found at http://annualmeeting.aag.org/conduct.–>

Workshop: Coordinated Department Response to Online Harassment

A 90-minute workshop will address how as technology improves our access towards instant communication with colleagues and rapid information sharing increases, we have also seen an increase in the use of technology to perpetuate harassment and harm. The workshop leaders Dana Cuomo and Natalie Dolci are members of the Seattle-based Technology-Enabled Coercive Control Working Group. Their research focuses on the role of technology in domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, and harassment situations and how systems can better respond. In this workshop, attendees will learn how your department can better assist faculty, students and staff who are experiencing online harassment. Whether a department member is being targeted by a former intimate partner or someone who is ideologically opposed to their scholarship, workplaces have a responsibility to respond to the best of their ability. This workshop will give scenario-based practical tips for protecting your online privacy and best practice workplace policies to engage your institution in supporting its employees.

Look for further information about the workshop soon.

Off-Site Independent Ombudsperson

An independent ombudsperson will serve as the first point of contact for someone wanting to file a harassment complaint. The ombudsperson will work with AAG staff and the Standing Committee for handling incident reports. The ombudsperson will interact with complainants and alleged harassers and investigate the alleged incident. The ombudsperson will then supply the Standing Committee with incident reports.

Support A Harassment-Free AAG

Linked Sessions

The Harassment-Free AAG task force is sponsoring 27 sessions that make interventions into The Academy around issues of identity. The panel Enough! leads off the linked sessions on 3 April 2019, followed by other sessions and panels, including Sexual Harassment and Bullying Policies in Academia on 4 April. Other sponsored panels may be found on the AAG Session Gallery by searching for “Harassment-Free AAG Initiative” sponsorship. The task force wants to acknowledge the important and critical work that the organizers of these sessions are doing in making interventions into the academy around issues of mental health, all forms of harassment, physical health, and or identity in the discipline. The task force hopes this linking will promote attendance and will also serve as a powerful act of solidarity for a Harassment-Free AAG.

New Photography Policy

In parallel with photography policies at other professional meetings, AAG will provide information cards for presentations, to enable and support presenters who do not wish to have photos taken of themselves or their presentations without their permission. While some may consider photography a professional compliment, others have been harassed by photographers. In addition, some presenters may wish not to have their photos or embargoed research posted on social media or geotagged.

Please note that official AAG photographers and videographers are authorized to take photos and videos of all AAG-sponsored or AAG-organized events. However, the official AAG photographers and videographers are instructed to respect individual presenters’ preferences regarding permission to record them or their presentations.

Harassment-Free AAG survey

Attendees from the Washington D.C. meeting and past meetings will receive an email link to the Harassment-Free AAG survey. The survey will open shortly after the close of the D.C. meeting. The survey addresses multiple forms of harassment, including harassment based on disability, gender identity and/or gender expression, cultural expression, sexuality, racial identity, ethnic identity, and sexual harassment. This survey asks about the harassment you have witnessed or heard about, as well as harassment that you have directly experienced. Even if you do not believe that you have witnessed or experienced harassment, your responses are valuable, and you are encouraged to take this survey. The survey will be conducted by a research consultant who is independent of the AAG, and all responses will be confidential.

Visibly Support Your Colleagues for a Harassment-Free AAG

There will be Harassment-Free AAG lapel buttons available at different locations at the conference, including the registration and information desks. We ask that you wear these buttons as a statement of solidarity and a personal statement that as a meeting attendee will not tolerate any form of harassment at the national meeting. Information fliers will also be distributed with AAG Meeting materials.

We Need Your Patience!

Harassment at academic meetings will not be eradicated overnight. Academic meetings have a long history of complex social interactions where the vulnerability of junior scholars increases when they are put in close contact with influential scholars in an atmosphere that blurs the lines between work and play. It would be uncaring to those who have experienced harassment at the hands of influential actors to assume that this new program will mitigate their sense of precarity at the national meeting. Still, the fastest growing sector of our membership is students, and the task force feels immediate and innovative action is required to protect a new generation of scholars. For this reason, the task force intends to go beyond the simple updating of policies around sexual harassment only. Although this is a critical step for any academic association, as stated earlier the task force is committed to engaging with multiple forms of harassment directly at the meeting. As a result, we may be the first academic organization to host an independent on-site advocate, as well as an independent ombudsperson to engage with care any attendees who feel they are the victim of harassment. It is also important to mention that the Harassment-Free AAG task are your colleagues and are volunteers. They worked on this program in the evenings, over the weekends and traveled to multiple locations for work sessions and the AAG is most grateful for their important work. We also want to acknowledge that this program has increased the already high workload of the AAG staff, and we are appreciative of their labor and insight in implementing the program. For these reasons, we ask for your patience over the next month as we continually update the forthcoming Harassment-Free AAG site, as the program will be a work in progress until the first day of the meeting.

Meet the Harassment-Free AAG Task Force:

  • Dana Cuomo, University of Western Kentucky
  • Debanuj Dasgupta, University of Connecticut
  • Dydia DeLyser, California State University, Fullerton
  • Lorraine Dowler, Penn State University
  • Latoya E. Eaves, Middle Tennessee State University
  • Candida Mannozzi, American Association of Geographers
  • Carrie Mott, University of Louisville,
  • Beverley Mullings, Queens University
  • Marianna Pavlovskaya, Hunter College and Graduate Center – CUNY
  • Erin Royals, Rutgers University
  • Rashad Shabazz, Arizona State University
  • Erica Smithwick, Penn State University
  • Deborah Thomas, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
  • Rebecca M Torres, University of Texas, Austin

Closing Comments

As President I am grateful to the Task Force’s efforts, led by Dr. Lorraine Dowler. I ask that we all recognize Dr. Dowler’s vision and again the efforts of the AAG Staff and AAG Directors, the AAG Council, the Executive Committee, and Past Presidents on whose shoulders we stand, and you, our Members, in supporting and launching this new policy for a more welcoming and safe space for our AAG Annual Meetings. Thank you everyone for your contributions to usher in this new era for the AAG. Together, we are making a difference now and for the future. Please share your thoughts with us and your AAG Councilors and other leaders who work hard on behalf our members. We look forward to seeing you all in Washington DC next month!

— Dr. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, AAG President
University of Texas at Austin
Email: slbeach [at] austin [dot] utexas [dot] edu

— Dr. Lorraine Dowler, AAG National Councilor
Pennsylvania State University
Email: lxd17 [at] psu [dot] edu

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0052

Please share your ideas with me at: slbeach(at)austin(dot)utexas(dot)edu

To register for the annual meeting, click here.

Harassment-Free AAG, safe spaces
    Share
Changing Human Populations Governance and Policy Networks and Connections
Sheryl Luzzadder
Sheryl Luzzadder
New Books for Geographers

New Books: February 2019

Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related areas. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books.

Publishers are welcome to send new volumes to the Editor-in-Chief (Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803).

Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should also contact the Editor-in-Chief.

PLEASE NOTE: Due to current public health policies which have prompted the closing of most offices, we are unable to access incoming books at this time. We are working on a solution during this transition and will continue our new books processing as soon as we can. In the meantime, please feel free to peruse previous books from our archived lists.

February 2019

Agent-Based Modelling and Geographical Information Systems: A Practical Primer by Andrew Crooks, Nicolas Malleson, Ed Manley, and Alison Heppenstall (Sage Publishing 2019)

All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas (Fourth Edition) by Geoffrey J. Martin (Oxford University Press 2005)

Borders, Mobility and Belonging in the Era of Brexit and Trump by Mary Gilmartin, Patricia Wood and Cian O’Callaghan (Policy Press 2018)

Citizens in Motion: Emigration, Immigration, and Re-migration Across China’s Borders by Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho (Stanford University Press 2018)

Conversations with Gary Snyder by David Stephen Calonne (ed.) (University Press of Mississippi 2019)

The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception by David Beer (Sage Publishing 2019)

Digital Economies at Global Margins by Mark Graham (ed.) (The MIT Press 2019)

Downward Spiral: El Helicoide’s Descent from Mall to Prison by Celeste Olalquiaga and Lisa Blackmore (eds.) (UR Books 2019)

The Environment and International History by Scott Kaufman (Bloomsbury Academic 2018)

Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal by Marixa Lasso (Harvard University Press 2019)

Evergreen Ash: Ecology and Catastrophe in Old Norse Myth and Literature by Christopher Abram (University of Virginia Press 2019)

Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, Volume 37 by Elizabeth Baigent & André Reyes Novaes (eds.) (Bloomsbury 2018)

Golden Years?: Social Inequality in Later Life by Deborah Carr (Russell Sage Foundation 2019)

The Indian Caribbean: Migration and Identity in the Diaspora by Lomarsh Roopnarine (University Press of Mississippi 2019)

Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene by Kregg Hetherington (ed.) (Duke University Press 2019)

The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent by Dilip da Cunha (University of Pennsylvania Press 2019)

Latina/o Studies by Ronald L. Mize (Polity 2018)

Location Covering Models: History, Applications and Advancements by Richard L. Church and Alan Murray (Springer 2018)

Memorials Matter: Emotion, Environment and Public Memory at American Historical Sites by Jennifer K. Ladino (University of Nevada Press 2019)

North Pole: Nature and Culture by Michael Bravo (Reaktion Books 2018)

The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Central Banking by David G. Mayes, Pierre L. Siklos, and Jan-Egbert Sturm (eds.) (Oxford University Press 2019)

Planet of the Grapes: A Geography of Wine by Robert Sechrist (Praeger 2017)

Rebranding China: Contested Status Signaling in the Changing Global Order by Xiaoyu Pu (Stanford University Press 2019)

Rupture: The Crisis of Liberal Democracy by Manuel Castells (Polity Books 2018)

Rural People and Communities in the 21st Century: Resilience and Transformation, 2nd Edition by David L. Brown, Kai A. Schafft (Wiley-Blackwell 2018)

The Spanish Craze: America’s Fascination with the Hispanic World, 1779–1939 by Richard L. Kagan (University of Nebraska Press 2019)

Switching to ArcGIS Pro from ArcMap by Maribeth H. Price (Esri Press 2019)

Tom Petty and Philosophy: We Need to Know by Randall E. Auxier and Megan Volpert (eds.) (Open Court 2018)

Ukraine and the Art of Strategy by Lawrence Freedman (Oxford University Press 2019)

Uncertain Citizenship: Everyday Practices of Bolivian Migrants in Chile by Megan Ryburn (University of California Press 2018)

Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual by Lauren Coodley (University of Nebraska Press 2019)

Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans by Helen Rozwadowski (Reaktion Books 2018)

Water Resources Planning: Fundamentals for an Integrated Framework (Fourth Edition) by Andrew A. Dzurik, Tara Shenoy Kulkarni, and Bonnie Kranzer Boland (Rowman and Littlefield 2018)

    Share
Changing Human Populations Spatial Narratives
AAG Staff
AAG Staff
Awardees

AAG Announces 2019 AAG Award Recipients

The American Association of Geographers congratulates the individuals and entities named to receive an AAG Award. The awardees represent outstanding contributions to and accomplishments in the geographic field. Formal recognition of the awardees will occur at the 2019 AAG Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. during the AAG Awards Luncheon on Sunday, April 7, 2019.

2019 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.

Alex Papadopoulos, DePaul University

Dr. Alex Papadopoulos is Professor of Geography at DePaul University. He was recognized with DePaul’s Excellence in Teaching award in 1996 and the Cortelyou-Lowery Award for Teaching, Service and Excellence in 2011. Papadopoulos teaches a variety of undergraduate courses including Earth’s Cultural Landscape, Urban Geography, Geopolitics and Topics in Architecture and Urbanism. His teaching accomplishments include initiating DePaul’s first experiential learning geography class, leading multiple study abroad experiences in Europe and North Africa, and mentoring numerous colleagues in their teaching. Students describe him as an instructor who is knowledgeable, inclusive, and caring. Multiple students stated that Dr. Papadopoulos helped spark their academic interests, with alumni noting that his teaching has resulted in life-long learning for them. Dr. Papadopoulos has established himself as an extraordinary, and extraordinarily committed, teacher at this institution that values teaching above all other academic responsibilities.

2019 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.

J. Clark Archer, University of Nebraska Lincoln

J. Clark Archer, University of Nebraska Lincoln, has led a career characterized by an outstanding record of sustained high-quality scholarship. Over more than four decades, he has made significant contributions to the fields of political geography (specifically the geography of United States politics), cartography, population geography, and demographics. He is a leading expert on the use of maps in political and electoral geography research, and has published many regarded atlases, monographs and more than 50 journal articles and book chapters. Moreover, Archer’s analyses and interpretations of American elections have been instrumental in consolidating a role for electoral geography in the study of American politics.  Such work underlines the traditional power of geography to inform problems that straddle multiple disciplines.

2019 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.

Farhana Sultana, Syracuse University

Farhana Sultana’s work is theoretical and applied, interdisciplinary, rigorous, critical, layered, intriguing, provocative and even uncomfortable at times. Dr. Sultana began her professional career in social justice and over time she has expanded her focus to colonialism, institutional racism, and related concerns. As a geographer from the global South, Dr. Sultana has worked for years to bring non-Eurocentric thinkers into our institutions and has asked that academics “de-colonize their pedagogy.” One of her most recognized bodies of work has forced us to recognize that academic freedom is not globally guaranteed. More recently, Dr. Sultana has brought her skills, knowledge, and talents to the increasingly vocal and visible problems of mental health that have emerged in academia. She has supervised more than forty Ph.D., Master’s, and Honor’s Student throughout her career and mentored many more. Her service to the discipline and profession, universities, international communities, conferences and workshops is impressive, far-reaching, and impossible to  summarize. She has been described as a scholar/activist and public intellectual, and also as someone with the courage and bravery to speak out, even when it may be uncomfortable to the status quo. The AAG is proud to award Dr. Farhana Sultana the 2019 AAG Glenda Laws Award.

2019 The AAG Harold M. Rose Award for Anti-Racism Research and Practice

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

Katherine McKittrick, Queen’s University

Dr. Katherine McKittrick of Queen’s University has not only contributed to the study of race and gender through her prodigious scholarly output, but she has been a consummate mentor to various students and faculty of color. She has also been one of the most high-profile advocates for the burgeoning field of Black Geographies. Through her work on numerous editorial boards, and as an associate editor of Antipode, she has worked to promote faculty and students of color and mentored junior scholars in writing and publishing in the discipline.

Her efforts were recognized when she was awarded the inaugural Ban Righ Mentorship Award at Queen’s University. Dr. McKittrick has also been instrumental in seeing scholarship that engages with the perspectives of underrepresented persons made more visible in the discipline and in bridging the views of Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and Geography.

The 2019 AAG Marcus Fund for Physical Geography Award

The objective of The Mel Marcus Fund for Physical Geography is to carry on the tradition of excellence and humanity in field work espoused by Dr. Melvin G. Marcus. Grants from the Mel Marcus Fund for Physical Geography will foster personally formative participation by students collaborating with faculty in field-based physical geography research in challenging outdoor environments.

Elizabeth Watson, Drexel University

Dr. Elizabeth Watson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biodiversity, Earth & Environmental Sciences at Drexel University.  She will take a PhD student and an undergraduate student to Bahía San Quintín, Baja California, México.  There they will be conducting seagrass mapping in an estuary using a combination of remote sensing and field-based methods. This pristine and highly productive estuary is a model system for study, due to its long-time stewardship by local NGOs.  Through a peer-mentoring approach, the undergraduate will be exposed to field methods for the first time, while the PhD student will gain leadership skills. The selected undergraduate, a first-generation college student, has been working in Dr. Watson’s laboratory and will be able to experience a different type of research environment while interacting with local scientists and students in Mexico.  The PhD student will be making important connections with local scientists and NGOs while making progress on his dissertation research.  The Marcus award funds will be used to cover the travel expenses for the two students and will support the award’s goal of fostering personally formative participation by students collaborating with faculty in field-based physical geography research.

2019 Meredith F. Burrill Award

The AAG Meredith F. Burrill Award honors work of exceptional merit and quality that lies at or near the intersection of basic research in geography on the one hand, and practical applications or policy implications on the other.The purpose of the award is to stimulate and reward talented individuals and groups whose accomplishments parallel the intellectual traditions Meredith F. Burrill pursued as a geographer, especially those concerned with fundamental geographical concepts and their practical applications, especially as relevant to local, national, and international policy arenas. The funds that underwrite the award come from a bequest by Burrill, a gift from his wife Betty, and donations in his memory from colleagues and friends. The award, consists of a certificate and cash honorarium, at the Association’s Annual Meeting.

Stephanie Pincetl, University of California Los Angeles

Stephanie Pincetl, University of California Los Angeles, has been an intellectual leader in the field of urban sustainability, known particularly for her extensive research on urban metabolism and effective resource management governance structures. Her academic success is unquestionable, with one monograph and some 90 peer-reviewed scholarly works in the leading journals of her field. More pertinent to the Burrill Award, however, are the myriad ways that she has coupled that academic success with real world problem-solving, using her large-scale datasets to analyze and answer critical policy questions regarding sustainability. This work has implications not only for the case of Los Angeles, where her California Center for Sustainable Communities is based, but is applicable more broadly in megacities around the globe.

2019 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.

Susan Cutter, University of South Carolina.

Dr. Cutter, Carolina Distinguished Professor of Geography and Director of the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute, has made transformative, far-reaching research contributions to geography and the broader interdisciplinary research communities that focus on hazards and disasters. Her work led to development of the Social Vulnerability Index, the first nationwide empirical representation of social vulnerability. The Index is used in FEMA’s National Risk Assessment toolkit and by many other nations.  She also pioneered the Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities, a county-level assessment of disaster resilience; the Hazards of Place model of vulnerability, which analyzes the contributions of physical and social vulnerability to overall place vulnerability; and the Disaster Resilience of Place model, which identify place-based differences and measures progress towards resilient goals and outcomes.

Alan MacEachren, the Pennsylvania State University

Dr. MacEachren, Professor of Geography and Director of the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute and Director of the GeoVISTA Center, has made transformative, far-reaching research contributions to geography, GIScience, and the broader interdisciplinary research communities that focus on information visualization and visual analytics.  In his seminal 1995 book, How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization and Design, he developed a cognitive-semiotic theoretical perspective for dynamic representation that fostered the next generation of cartography, conceptualizing map making and reading as a process of knowledge construction itself.  Dr. MacEachren’s recent work on geovisual analytics champions thinking about how humans can collaborate with computers to make sense of information needed to solve highly complex problems.  His research advances our fundamental understandings in geography, computer science and related fields and has been employed in a broad range of domains, such as public health, crisis management, and environmental science.

2019 AAG Award for MA/MS 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.

Western Michigan University has a clearly outlined commitment to shared governance and cultivates robust engagement with the East Lakes Division of the AAG. An annual curricular retreat regularly sets Departmental goals, and graduate students have a voice through formal regular meetings with the Chair and Graduate Director, and informal monthly lunches with Departmental faculty.

Western Michigan’s use of internal Departmental funding to prioritize graduate student participation in conferences, results in annually funding around 16 masters students, approximately half of its incoming masters cohort, to attend the AAG meeting. Not only are these graduate students well-resourced, they become successful. The Department of Geography offers a teaching assistantship training program for its graduate students and has seen recognition of this with on-campus awards for Graduate Teaching Excellence. Its graduate students move on to Ph.D. programs, successfully pursue internships, or move into careers with employers in the public sector such as the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) and various state and federal agencies, and the private sector.

One of the most impressive initiatives undertaken by Western Michigan University’s Department of Geography has been systematic outreach to K-12 and area community colleges. In a letter, Diana Casey of Muskegon Community College, an institution around 100 miles away from WMU, stated “The faculty at WMU have always maintained an open door for my undergraduate students to learn about opportunities so they can further their collegiate studies,” and notes that not only will the geographers at Western Michigan host her and her students, but these faculty also regularly travel to Muskegon Community College to meet faculty and students.

Finally, the Department offers a robust research profile, generating around $1.8m in external grants over the last five years, its faculty publishing “133 peer-reviewed articles, 7 books, and 20 book chapters” over the same period, in addition to presenting 165 papers at academic conferences and a further 97 invited lectures.

Honorable Mention:
California State University – Long Beach, has exhibited a very strong and successful commitment to enhancing faculty research in a teaching-intensive institution, strategic outreach to Latinx students to further diversify its already multicultural student body, and curricular development both in terms of specialized UAV courses and robust general education offerings. The integration of federally-supported Coverdell graduate student fellowships for returning Peace Corps volunteers was noted by the committee as an innovative recruitment strategy.

2019 Dissertation Research Grant recipients ($1,000/each)

Sophia Borgias, University of Arizona

Michael Desjardins, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Eric Goldfishcher, University of Minnesota

Robert Hobbins, Arizona State University

Megan Mills-Novoa, University of Arizona

2019 Research Grant recipients ($500/each):

Lynn Resler, Virginia Tech University

Sean Kennedy, UCLA

Jessie Speer, Queen Mary University of London

Marylynn Steckley, Carleton University

Kathryn Hannum, Kent State University

Lisa Tranel, Illinois State University

    Share
Changing Human Populations Planning and Development Sharing Knowledge
Staff
Staff