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Jolene Keen Joins AAG Staff as Research Associate

August 28, 2015

The AAG is pleased to announce that Jolene Keen has joined the AAG staff as a research associate at the association’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. She has a Bachelor’s of Science in anthropology and geography from Middle Tennessee State University and a Master’s of Science in geographic and cartographic science from George Mason University. Her Master’s thesis utilized geographic information systems (GIS) to analyze historic records from a spatial perspective in order to identify the location of ancient Maya sites. Her work experience includes land cover/land use change analysis, energy resource assessment, cultural resource management (CRM), museum collections management, environmental impact studies and geodatabase development and maintenance. Her research focus is on the application of GIS and remote sensing technologies for the documentation and analysis of archaeological resources.

When not working, she enjoys exploring the variety of outdoor activities available throughout Virginia and the DC region with her husband and her dogs. She also enjoys remodeling old furniture, as well as other hands-on projects.

Annual Meeting

A Movement Lab in New Orleans

August 26, 2015

The evening of Wednesday, May 20, was a night like any other  in a town that, despite its near-demise a decade ago, persists as this country’s beating heart of creative chaos. By 6:30, the bars on Frenchmen Street were clinking to life. Around the city, Walter “Wolfman” Washington, the TBC Brass Band, and Delfeayo Marsalis were among the world-class musicians preparing for weekly gigs. Tourists were already filling the strip clubs and daiquiri shops of Bourbon Street and the trendy restaurants of the recently gentrified Bywater neighborhood. And in Mid-City, in front of the First Grace United Methodist Church, a couple of women stood beside tables selling tacos and mondongo (pork-belly soup) to an intergenerational mix of Latino families.

The families were on their way to the church for the weekly gathering of the Congress of Day Laborers. El Congreso, as it’s called for short, fights for equal treatment for the city’s recent Latino immigrants, and every Wednesday as many as 400 members come together to discuss ways to solve problems as varied as wage theft and deportation. As they settled into the pews, Leticia Casildo kicked off the meeting with a fiery call to action: “¡Fuera la migra de Louisiana!”—or, “Kick the immigration-enforcement agents out of Louisiana!”

There was no chanting at the BreakOUT meeting just over a mile away, in a former produce warehouse that is now a collection of artists’ studios and offices, but there was laughter. BreakOUT is an LGBTQ criminal-justice reform organization, and on this evening, a dozen transgender and gender-nonconforming young people were working and gossiping, creating a safe space behind a door with a welcome mat that read: come back with a warrant. The room felt like a mix of social club and office. A meeting started with a countdown exercise that looked like a free-form dance party, but soon those gathered got down to the business of assigning tasks for an event on the coming weekend. “Sometimes, I’ll just be so blown away to see how strong these youth are and how they constantly just keep fighting,” says Milan Nicole Sherry, 24, one of BreakOUT’s founding members and now a staffer. “They don’t take no for an answer.”

The rebel spirit continued about half an hour later and a few miles uptown, as roughly 100 people sat in a wide circle inside a Unitarian Church. The multiracial group, called Gulf South Rising, had come together to discuss grassroots responses to the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Its members were frustrated with the official commemorations, which are designed to highlight the city’s resilience and which, critics say, work to obscure and conceal the systemic injustices at play.

That’s a theme that was picked up, like a relay baton, at another meeting back in Mid-City, of a group of mostly young white activists from an antiracist organization called European Dissent. Founded in the 1990s, when Klansman David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana, the group has more active members now than at any point in its history. Many of its members moved here in the past few months and are concerned about their contribution to the displacement that’s defined the city since Katrina. On the evening’s agenda: strategies to fight gentrification.

This is New Orleans 10 years after Hurricane Katrina—a town of ferment and possibility, open wounds and agitation. It is whiter, wealthier, and smaller than it was on August 28, 2005. Around 100,000 black residents are still displaced, scattered to places unknown; housing prices continue to rise rapidly, pushing out those trying to get by on jobs in the city’s low-paying tourism economy. But despite the violence represented by these changes, or perhaps because of them, New Orleans has also seen a rise in coordinated resistance. More people have been organizing, taking to the streets, and risking arrest than at any other time in recent history.

Continue reading at TheNation.com

Activism, Hurricane Katrina

Annual Meeting

Why the Lower Ninth Ward Looks Like the Hurricane Just Hit

August 24, 2015

A block and a half separate Henry Irvin’s  house from the bayou that serves as the northern border of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. Modest single-family homes used to line both sides of the street, before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Today, it’s all but empty. Irvin, a 79-year-old widower with two bad knees, has no neighbors between him and the bayou. Facing in the other direction, Irvin stares into a similar solitude: There’s a falling-down house two lots away and a small Baptist church at the end of his block, but otherwise Irvin—a man often called the “mayor of the Lower Ninth Ward,” even by the city’s current mayor—lives here alone. One block over, on Tricou Street, there are six occupied homes, a veritable metropolis in this corner of the community. In whatever direction Irvin points his red truck, he traverses entire blocks choked with vegetation, devoid of both houses and people.

Ten years have passed since a series of catastrophic  levee breaches caused the Lower Ninth Ward, along with most of New Orleans, to flood. The city, state, and federal governments have invested more than $600 million in the Lower Ninth, a relatively compact community that measures 20 by 25 blocks. Foundations have contributed tens of millions of dollars to the area. Brad Pitt alone has raised nearly $50 million through the Make It Right Foundation. Tens of thousands of volunteers have done work in the community. All of which raises the question: Why do large stretches of the Lower Ninth still look as if the levees failed only a year ago?

Simple economics has played a big part. Prior to Katrina, the Lower Ninth—a community sometimes referred to as “Backatown”—was home to many of the housekeepers, kitchen workers, and others who kept the tourism industry going in New Orleans. Another large share of its people were retirees who, like Irvin, lived on a fixed income. The average resident survived on $16,000 a year, and more than one in every three residents lived below the poverty line.

But more than economics is at play in the stalled recovery of this community, which was more than 98 percent black at the time of Katrina. The Lower Ninth has always been a place apart from the rest of New Orleans, a small village rather than one neighborhood among many. Much of that is geography. The community is downriver from Uptown and the French Quarter—as downriver as it is possible to be while remaining in New Orleans. The only way to get there is by bridge. The community’s personality before the storm felt more Mississippi Delta than big-city jazz. Residents raised chickens in the yard. They grew vegetables and fished for dinner. They tended to be country folks who went to bed a lot earlier than their city kin. “Before Katrina,” Irvin says, “I could tell you the name of everyone all the way from the bridge on down.”

While this separation made the Lower Nine, as residents tend to call their neighborhood, a distinct and vibrant place, it also left it vulnerable when disaster struck. The shame is that a mix of misperceptions and racially informed myths about the Lower Ninth Ward set the stage for one misguided policy choice after another, at all levels of government. Despite the well-meaning efforts of thousands of volunteers and hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations and public aid, the desolation of Henry Irvin’s community today is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Continue reading at TheNation.com

Hurricane Katrina, inequality

Annual Meeting

Ten Years Since: A Meditation on New Orleans

August 20, 2015

This anniversary is a crossroads, a time  to decide what to run toward and what to cast aside for a lighter burden. Ten years ago, I was a “refugee” from an American city. The consequence of that label has been a chaos of circumstances and quick decisions. The first 10 years, all a scramble to reconstruct oneself. The truth is, I am one of the lucky ones. One of the luckiest. I am home. I am sane. I am alive to speak for myself. I mourn for those lost and struggle with the gratitude and guilt of being spared. Survival is an animal instinct that moves us all toward good and bad, and I am doing my best with its weight. In these 10 years, I’ve learned to use this realization to heat and cool my anxiety, to forgive myself and propel my body into motion. There is so much about the last 10 years that I would rather forget, experiences I would remake. But it is not possible to go backward. There is only what is, and right now the stakes are high. New Orleans changes for good, a little bit at a time, every day. Houses in my neighborhood flip at sometimes three times their pre-Katrina “worth.” For white families in the new New Orleans, the median income has grown at triple the rate of black families’ income. It’s no wonder many are insistent that New Orleans is back and better than ever. There are roughly 100,000 fewer black people in the metro area. Old people out; new people in. It is critical not to cede the story at its crossroads.

Raised black in New Orleans and having made it to this side of these 10 years, I remember that with living comes the sacred responsibility of recalling. New Orleans has always been a place of many peoples. The Chata (Choctaw) named the city Bulbancha, “Many Languages Spoken There,” and the Ishak call it Nun Ush, “The Big Village.” Many of the places and locations known to tourists and travelers worldwide, such as the Port of New Orleans, the French Market, and Congo Square, served as thoroughfares for trade and culture long before the arrival of whites. Born and raised black in New Orleans, I speak an English marked by its African and Native vocabularies and patterns of speech. I like my short adjectives repeated two and three times each. The food is good-good and the picture might be pretty-pretty-pretty. I grew up with a distinct awareness of our longstanding ties to this land and the people who originally inhabited it. New Orleans is our place, a place with a syncretic and independent culture and a multilayered relationship to the diaspora—a relationship not of theory, but of practice.

Continue reading at TheNation.com

Ethnicity, Hurricane Katrina, race

Gary S. Dunbar

Gary Dunbar, Professor Emeritus of the University of California at Los Angeles, who made notable contributions in the history of geography, passed away on August 16, 2015, at the age of 84.

Gary Seamans Dunbar was born on June 8, 1931 in Clifton Springs, New York. By 1948 he was valedictorian of Avon Central School graduating class. Further academic credentials came from the University of Virginia where he earned a bachelor’s degree with distinction (1952) and a master’s degree (1953).

In 1956 he completed his doctorate at Louisiana State University with a thesis entitled “Cultural Geography of the North Carolina Outer Banks.” This was later published as a book: Historical Geography of the North Carolina Outer Banks (1958).

After a year teaching at Longwood College in Farmville, VA, he returned to the University of Virginia where he remained from 1957 to 1967. He began as assistant professor, later becoming chairman of the geography department. During this time he also taught at the University of Dacca in East Pakistan (now Dhaka in Bangladesh) as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar (1962-1963), and spent two years at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria (1965-1967). In the summers he taught at various Canadian universities: University of Manitoba (1961), Queen’s University (1962), McMaster University (1963), and York University (1968). In 1967 he joined the department of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, remaining there until retirement in 1988.

Dunbar published considerably with special reference to intellectual history. He was particularly interested in the history of both U.S. and French geography. His books included: Elisée Reclus, Historian of Nature (1978), The History of Geography: Translations of Some French and German Essays (1983), The History of Modern Geography: An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Works (1985), Modern Geography: An Encyclopedic Survey (1991), A Biographical Dictionary of American Geography in the Twentieth Century (1992; second edition 1996), and Geography, Discipline, Profession and Subject since 1870: An International Survey (2001).

Additionally, he published a number of articles relating to the history of geography, including essays published in Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies. Other articles related to historical geography, history of exploration, and cultural geography. He also gave a number of lectures in both the U.S. and abroad, and provided notes and reviews in several geographical periodicals.

He was a member of several professional societies including the Association of American Geographers, which he joined in 1953. From 1981 to 1992 he served as President of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers. He also served on several editorial boards.

During his career, Dunbar traveled through North and South America, the West Indies, Europe, Africa, and Asia, often involving his wife and children in his adventures.

On early retirement at the age of 58, he moved to Cooperstown, NY, an area he had first visited in 1952 as a graduate student. While researching the cultivation of hops for his Master’s thesis, he was captivated by the village, Otsego Lake and the surrounding countryside. It became his home for the last 27 years of his life and he much appreciated the quietude of offered by the Cooperstown environment, where he was involved in various local community organizations.

Gary Dunbar was a kindly person, quite given to helping others, and happily productive in the genre of the history of geography. He leaves behind his beloved wife of 62 years, Elizabeth, their three children, Emily, Elihu, and Esther, and four grandchildren.

Contributed by Geoffrey Martin, and with thanks to the Dunbar family for the photograph

See All Memorials

Julian Bond

Julian Bond, renowned civil rights activist and recipient of the AAG’s prestigious Atlas Award, passed away on August 15, 2015, aged 75.

Horace Julian Bond was born on January 14, 1940, in Nashville. Both parents were academics: his father an administrator at historically black colleges and his mother a librarian. The family moved to Pennsylvania when he was five after his father was appointed the first African-American president of Lincoln University. Bond was expected to follow in his footsteps as an educator but the young man was more attracted by journalism and political activism.

Aged 12, Bond was sent to George School near Philadelphia, a private Quaker-run establishment. There he first encountered racial resentment when he began dating a white girl, incurring the disapproval of white students and the school authorities.

Another five years later, his father was appointed as Dean of Education at Atlanta University and the family moved south again. Bond was enrolled at the prestigious Morehouse College where he attended a class taught by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. However, extracurricular activities drew his attention more than academic studies.

In 1960 he co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a student activist group that gave young black Americans a revolutionary loudspeaker during the civil rights movement and executed some of the movement’s most dangerous work in the Deep South. Dozens of his friends went to jail during his time with SNCC but he was arrested only once when he led a sit-in at the City Hall cafeteria in Atlanta, part of a wave of protests across the South against segregated public facilities.

In 1961, Bond dropped out of college to focus exclusively on civil rights efforts. He served as the SNCC’s communications director for five years and deftly guided the national news media toward stories of violence and discrimination. He organized campaigns to register black voters, and led student protests against segregation and Jim Crow throughout Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas.

On the strength of his personality and quick intellect, he moved to the center of the civil rights action in Atlanta, the unofficial capital of the movement, at the height of the struggle for racial equality in the early 1960s.

During this period, Bond and some fellow black students visited the Georgia House of Representatives. Having deliberately sat in the whites-only visitors’ section, they were escorted out by Capitol police, but he was destined to return to the House.

Following the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Bond was part of the inaugural group of seven African-Americans elected to Georgia’s House of Representatives. However, furious white members of the Legislature blocked him from taking his seat, accusing him of disloyalty, primarily because of his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War. It took a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1966 for him to finally take his seat.

Bond went on to serve in the state Legislature for four terms, mostly in conspicuous isolation from white colleagues who saw him as an interloper and a rabble-rouser. As a lawmaker, he sponsored bills to establish a sickle cell anemia testing program and to provide low-interest home loans to low-income Georgians. He also helped create a majority-black congressional district in Atlanta.

In 1968 he attended the Democratic National Convention, where he was a co-chairman of a racially integrated challenge delegation from Georgia. His public profile shot up when he gave a rousing speech in favor of peace candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy and his name was even placed into nomination for vice president. He declined to pursue a serious candidacy because he was too young to meet the constitutional age requirement, but from that moment on he was a national figure.

In 1971, Bond was a co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a legal advocacy organization in Montgomery, AL, serving as its first president until 1979 and remaining on the board for the rest of his life.

Bond was also elected six times to the state Senate. In 1986 he ran for a seat in the US House of Representatives, standing against his old friend John Lewis, a fellow founder of the student committee and its longtime chairman. When he lost, he resigned from the Senate, spending the next two decades focused on education and media work. He was a favorite on the college lecture circuit, teaching at universities throughout the north and south.

His wit, cool personality, youthful face, dashing looks and natty dress sense lent themselves to media exposure. He became a regular commentator in print and on television, including as host of “America’s Black Forum,” then the oldest black-owned television program in syndication, and his face became familiar to millions of television viewers. His most unusual television appearance was in April 1977, when he hosted an episode of “Saturday Night Live.” He also appeared in a handful of movies, including as himself in the Ray Charles biopic “Ray” (2004).

In addition, Bond was also a writer. From a book of essays published in 1972 entitled “A Time to Speak, a Time to Act”, to poetry on the pained point of view of a repressed minority. He also wrote articles for publications as varied as The Nation, Negro Digest and Playboy.

In 1998, he was chosen as the chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at a time when the organization was mired in debt and seemed woefully dated. He continued in the role until his resignation in 2010.

Despite dropping out of college in the early 1960s, Bond returned a decade later to complete his English degree. He became a celebrated educator, holding appointments at several leading institutions including Harvard University, Williams College, Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania. In later years, he was based in Washington, DC, serving as a distinguished scholar in residence at American University in Washington, and a professor of history at the University of Virginia, where he was co-director of the oral history project “Explorations in Black Leadership.” He was awarded more than 20 honorary degrees throughout his career.

In 2014, Bond was awarded the Association of American Geographers’ prestigious Atlas Award, designed to recognize and celebrate outstanding accomplishments that advance world understanding in exceptional ways, whether in science, politics, scholarship, the arts, or in war and peace. At the Annual Meeting in Tampa, he delivered a presentation on “Race Around the World,” focusing on how civil rights figures and organizations shaped and changed American foreign policy, before being presented with his award by AAG President, Julie Winkler. Watch video

Julian Bond played a central role in America’s civil rights movement, spanning student protest and activist politics to institutional leadership and academia. Although his fight for social justice was focused on race, he also campaigned for peace, gay rights and the environment, among other issues. He was a charismatic figure with a reputation for charm alongside his persistent opponent of the stubborn remnants of white supremacy. In the few days before his death, after he was suddenly taken ill, his wife reported that he remained ever the optimist, finding reasons to laugh.

Following the announcement of his death, President Obama said: “Justice and equality was the mission that spanned his life – from his leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to his founding role with the Southern Poverty Law Center, to his pioneering service in the Georgia legislature and his steady hand at the helm of the NAACP… Julian Bond helped change this country for the better. And what better way to be remembered than that.”

Bond leaves behind his second wife, Pamela Horowitz, a former lawyer whom he met at the Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as five children and eight grandchildren. He is also survived by a brother and sister.

Main sources

Links

Southern Poverty Law Center

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Explorations in Black Leadership

See All Memorials

New Books for Geographers

New Books: August 2015

August 15, 2015

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.

August, 2015

Ashoka in Ancient India by Nayanjot Lahiri (Harvard University Press 2015, http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674057777)
Border Disputes: A Global Encyclopedia (3 volumes) by Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly ed. (ABC-CLIO 2015, http://www.abc-clio.com/ABC-CLIOCorporate/product.aspx?pc=A3703C)
Changing Urban and Regional Relations in a Globalizing World: Europe as a Global Macro-Region by Kathy Pain and Gilles Van Hamme (eds.) (Edward Elgar Publishing 2014, http://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781782544647.xml)
Community, Commons and Natural Resource Management in Asia by Haruka Yanagisawa (NUS Press 2015, http://nuspress.nus.edu.sg/products/community-commons-and-natural-resource-management-in-asia?variant=1245118612)
Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala, Fourth Edition: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatán Highlands, 1500-1821 by W. George Lovell (McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015, http://www.mqup.ca/conquest-and-survival-in-colonial-guatemala–fourth-edition-products-9780773545274.php)
Deepening Neoliberalism, Austerity, and Crisis: Europe’s Treasure Ireland by Julien Mercille and Enda Murphy (Palgrave Macmillan 2015, http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/deepening-neoliberalism-austerity-and-crisis-julien-mercille/?isb=9781137468758)
The Design of Frontier Spaces: Control and Ambiguity by Carolyn Loeb and Andreas Luescher (eds.) (Ashgate 2015, http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472419767)
Down and Out in Los Angeles and Berlin: The Sociospatial Exclusion of Homeless People by Jürgen von Mahs (Temple University Press 2015, http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2195_reg.html)
Environmental Transformations: A Geography of the Anthropocene by Whitehead, Mark (Routledge 2014, http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415809849/)
Essential Earth Imaging for GIS by Lawrence Fox III (ESRI Press 2015, http://esripress.esri.com/bookresources/index.cfm?event=catalog.book&id=15)
Foods That Changed History: How Foods Shaped Civilization from the Ancient World to the Present by Christopher Cumo (ABC-CLIO 2015, http://www.abc-clio.com/ABC-CLIOGreenwood/product.aspx?pc=A4667C)
The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1: Franz Boas as Public Intellectual—Theory, Ethnography, Activism by Regna Darnell, Michelle Hamilton, Robert L. A. Hancock and Joshua Smith (eds.) (University of Nebraska Press 2015, http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Franz-Boas-as-Public-Intellectual-Volume-1,676241.aspx)
Global Warming: The Complete Briefing (5th Edition) by John Houghton (Cambridge University Press 2015, http://www.cambridge.org/US/academic/subjects/earth-and-environmental-science/climatology-and-climate-change/global-warming-complete-briefing-5th-edition?format=PB)
Handbook on the Globalisation of Agriculture by Guy M. Robinson and Doris A. Carson (eds.) (Edward Elgar Publishing 2015, http://www.e-elgar.com/shop/handbook-on-the-globalisation-of-agriculture)
Historical Geographies of Prisons: Unlocking the Usable Carceral Past by Karen M. Morin, Dominique Moran (eds.) (Routledge 2015, http://tandf.net/books/details/9781315724997/)
Jaffa: Shared and Shattered by Daniel Monterescu (Indiana University Press 2015, http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=807546)
Killer Apes, Naked Apes, and Just Plain Nasty People: The Misuse and Abuse of Science in Political Discourse by Richard J. Perry (John Hopkins University Press 2015, https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/killer-apes-naked-apes-and-just-plain-nasty-people)
Landscapes for the People: George Alexander Grant, First Chief Photographer of the National Park Service by Ren and Helen Davis (University of Georgia Press 2015, http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/landscapes_for_the_people)
Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers, Updated Paperback Version by Anabel Hernández (Verso Books 2013 (2014), http://www.versobooks.com/books/1709-narcoland)
On Schmitt and Space by Claudio Minca and Rory Rowan (Routledge 2015, https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138000742)
Orange is the New Black and Philosophy: Last Exit from Litchfield by Richard Greene (ed.) and Rachel Robison-Greene (ed.) (Open Court Publishing Company 2015, http://www.opencourtbooks.com/books_n/orange.htm)
Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age by Eric Gidal (University of Virginia Press 2015, http://books.upress.virginia.edu/title/4821)
Rethinking Creative Cities Policy: Invisible Agents and Hidden Protagonists by Allan Watson, Calvin Taylor (eds.) (Routledge 2015, http://www.tandf.net/books/details/9781138890084/)
The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies: Lessons from San Francisco and Los Angeles by Michael Storper, Thomas Kemeny, Naji P. Makarem and Taner Osman (Stanford University Press 2015, http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=22080)
Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise by Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox (Cornell University Press 2015, http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100865490)
Roots of Our Renewal: Ethnobotany and Cherokee Environmental Governance by Clint Carroll (Minnesota University Press 2015, https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/roots-of-our-renewal)
The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology by Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge and James McCarthy (eds.) (Routledge 2015, https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138794337)
Security in the Bubble: Navigating Crime in Urban South Africa by Christine Hentschel (Minnesota University Press 2015, https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/security-in-the-bubble)
Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas by Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason and Michael Watts (eds.) (Cornell University Press 2015, http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100370980)
Transportation and Revolt: Pigeons, Mules, Canals, and the Vanishing Geographies of Subversive Mobility by Jacob Shell (MIT Press 2015, https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/transportation-and-revolt)
Unity of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt and the Americas by Gabriela Rangel (ed.) (Kerber 2015, http://www.artbook.com/9783866789395.html)

Newsletters

Newsletter – August 2015

August 6, 2015

PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

SWB_december-4

Survival in a Time of Disruption in Higher Education

By Sarah Witham Bednarz

This is a challenging time to be engaged in scholarship in higher education. Shrinking state budgets and rising tuition raise concerns about the affordability—and importance—of college. Support for scholarly organizations such as the Illinois State Museum are threatened in budget battles (update). Skepticism by some members of Congress about the value of social and behavioral sciences threaten research funding at the same time universities are placing increased importance on grantsmanship for promotion and tenure. A cornerstone of education, tenure, is under attack in both K-12 (the Vergara case is rippling across the country) and higher education (Wisconsin anyone?). Fundamental notions of shared governance and academic freedom are under reconsideration with numerous examples of faculty being censored for public statements (be careful what you tweet). Increasingly our status as individual scholars and collective departments is measured and benchmarked by external organizations such as Academic Analytics using criteria we may not even be aware of—or value. Continue Reading.

Recent columns from the President

AAG Harm J. de Blij Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Geography Teaching

Awards_luncheon_small This new annual award recognizes outstanding achievement in teaching undergraduate geography including the use of innovative teaching methods. The 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.

Eligibility: Individual faculty or instructors who are current members of the AAG and for whom teaching geography is a primary responsibility are eligible to receive the award.

Nominations: To make nominations for the AAG Harm J. de Blij Award, you must be a current member of the AAG. Please include the complete name, affiliation and address of the nominee(s), their curriculum vitae, and a concise (500 words maximum) yet specific description of the accomplishments that warrant their selection. Digital submissions are encouraged.

Deadline: December 31, annually

Learn More.

ANNUAL MEETING

Registration, Call for Papers are Open

Join Us in San Francisco

Join the AAG and your colleagues and friends in San Francisco for the 2016 AAG Annual Meeting. The registration and abstract management sites are open. Register Now.

Researchers, scholars, professionals, and students are welcome to present papers, posters, and panel discussions on all topics relevant to geography.

Abstracts are due by Oct. 29, 2015, but may be edited through February 18, 2016. Call for Papers.

For additional information about the AAG Annual Meeting, visit www.aag.org/annualmeeting.

Mona Domosh’s Past President’s Address on Genealogies of Race, Gender, and Place

In her Past President’s address at the 2016 AAG Annual Meeting, Mona Domosh will explore the interconnected historical geographies of race, gender, and place. She will consider how race and racisms have been entangled with spatial imaginaries and place-based materialities throughout much of American history and geography, and how these entanglements continue to shape raced lives today. Learn More.

MORE ANNUAL MEETING

FOCUS ON SAN FRANCISCO

gallery_The_Hetch_Hetchy_Valley_California_by_Albert_Bierstadt_undated_-_Museum_of_Fine_Arts_Springfield_MA_-_DSC03988-300x225-1. Landscape painter Albert Bierstadt visited the Sierra in the 1860s and 1870s and found Hetch Hetchy Valley smaller than the more famous Yosemite Valley but quite as beautiful.

San Francisco Water: Environmental Sensibilities v. Environmental History

San Franciscans pride themselves on their progressive environmental sensibilities, but there are tensions between these sensibilities and the city’s environmental history. The story of the city’s quest for water makes this clear.

As San Francisco grew on its narrow, hilly peninsula, the city quickly depleted its artesian aquifers. Once residents polluted the city’s creeks with industrial and domestic waste, the need for water imports was clear. In the early 1860s, the newly-chartered Spring Valley Water Company developed wells in two East Bay farm districts, dammed a coastal stream that drained a wooded watershed on the San Francisco peninsula, and built a 32-mile flume to deliver water northward to San Francisco. The system’s vulnerability was apparent in April 1906, when the earthquake severed the flume and 80% of the city burned. Learn More.

[Focus on Chicago is an on-going series curated by the Local Arrangements Committee to provide insight on and understanding of the geographies of Chicago]

ASSOCIATION NEWS

Upcoming AAG Award Applications and Nominations Due in September

Deadlines for a number of AAG awards are approaching in September. If you would like to nominate someone or apply on your own behalf, please follow the links highlighted in each award description below to the submission information on each award description page.

AAG Enhancing Diversity Award honors those geographers who have pioneered efforts toward or actively participated in efforts toward encouraging a more diverse discipline over the course of several years. Deadline for nominations is September 15, 2015.

The AAG Excellence in Mentoring Award is given annually to an individual geographer, group, or department who has demonstrated extraordinary leadership in building supportive academic and professional environments in their departments, associations, and institutions and guiding the academic and or professional growth of their students and junior colleagues. Deadline for nominations is September 15, 2015.

The AAG Honorary Geographer award recognizes excellence in research, teaching, or writing on geographic topics by non-geographers. Deadline for nominations is September 15, 2015.

The AAG Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography is given annually to an individual geographer or team that has demonstrated originality, creativity, and significant intellectual breakthroughs in geography. Deadline for nominations is September 20, 2015.

The J. Warren Nystrom Award supports an annual prize for a paper based upon a recent dissertation in geography. Deadline for applications is September 22, 2015.

FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES

2015-16 ACLS Fellowship Competitions Now Open

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce that the 2015-16 ACLS fellowship competitions are now open. ACLS offers fellowship programs that promote the full spectrum of humanities and humanistic social sciences research and support scholars at the advanced graduate student level through all stages of the academic career. Learn More.

Opportunity Available for Visiting Scholar in Latin American Studies

Columbus State University is seeking a distinguished visiting scholar to fill the Elena Diaz-Verson Amos Eminent Scholar Chair in Latin American Studies for spring semester 2016. The scholar must demonstrate expertise in Latin American studies. Applications in all fields of expertise will be carefully considered. The one semester appointment will begin January 2016. Learn More.

MEMBER & DEPARTMENT NEWS

Glen-MacDonald-Laurence-C.-Smith_thmb-300x210-1. UCLA professors Glen MacDonald (left) and Laurence C. Smith

MacDonald, Smith Elected Fellows of American Geophysical Union

Glen MacDonald, UCLA’s John Muir Memorial Endowed Chair in Geography, and Laurence C. Smith, professor and chair of the UCLA Department of Geography, have been elected to the Class of 2015 Fellows of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). AGU’s Class of 2015 Fellows will be “recognized for their breakthrough achievements and exceptional work” in an honors ceremony and banquet at the AGU fall meeting in San Francisco in December. Read More.

MORE MEMBER & DEPARTMENT NEWS

OP-ED

Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial By Night - Washington DC — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial By Night – Washington DC (Glyn Lowe via Compfight)

Make Civil Rights a Geography Awareness Week Theme

By Derek H. Alderman and Josh Inwood

We have thought for some time now that it would be educationally productive to have a Geography Awareness Week theme devoted to civil rights. Tragically, events over the summer…convince us that such an event is now socially and politically necessary. Across the country…racialized violence, discrimination, and white supremacy demonstrates the power racism has over the lives of our communities, including the students in our classrooms. We encourage the National Geographic Society (NGS) and other prominent disciplinary organizations such as Association of American Geographers (AAG), American Geographical Society (AGS), National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE), and Canadian Association of Geographers (CAG) to seize this moment and organize this initiative. Continued silence not only demonstrates tacit approval of inequity in U.S. society, but calls into question the very relevance of Geography to solve the most pressing social issues in U.S. society. Read More.

POLICY UPDATES

Progress Towards ESEA Reauthorization

The AAG has been working hard to encourage Senators to include dedicated funding for geography as part of any new education law and have had some success to this point. Geography is again included as a core academic subject within the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) bill and there is a new funding program that awards competitive grants “to promote innovative history, civic, and geography instruction, learning strategies, and professional development activities and programs.” Read More.

House Legislation Would Undermine NSF Merit Review Process

By John Wertman

A bill (H.R. 3293) just introduced by the chair of the U.S. House Science Committee would undermine the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) longstanding use of merit review for awarding grants. The Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) and several other organizations have expressed their opposition.

The legislation, which is similar to other bills that the AAG has alerted the geography community about, is portrayed by the Science Committee as helping to weed out grants that are unworthy of federal support. The Committee also asserts that nothing in the bill “shall be construed as altering the Foundation’s intellectual merit or broader impacts criteria for evaluating grant applications.” Read More.

POLICY UPDATES

Progress Towards ESEA Reauthorization

House Legislation Would Undermine NSF Merit Review Process

By John Wertman

PUBLICATIONS

Final Call for Applications: Section Editors of the Annals of the AAG

The AAG seeks applications and nominations for two section editors of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. The upcoming vacancies are for the Nature and Society section, and the People, Place, and Region section. The new section editors will be appointed for a four-year term that will commence on January 1, 2016.

Documentation should be submitted by August 31, 2015. Read More.

MORE PUBLICATIONS

MORE HEADLINES

EVENTS CALENDER

Regional Studies Association Inaugural Australasian Conference 2015, Melbourne, Australia, August 31-September 2
GIS in Transit Conference, Washington, DC, September 1-3
2015 ILGISA Annual Conference, Springfield, IL, September 14-16
U.S. Board on Geographic Names 125th Anniversary Celebration, Washington, DC, September 18
Digital Earth 2015 Symposium, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, October 6-10
NESTVAL 2015, Bridgewater, MA, October 9-10

Submit News to the AAG Newsletter. To share your news, submit announcements to newsletter [at] aag [dot] org.

Post

San Francisco Water: Environmental Sensibilities v. Environmental History

August 5, 2015

SF State University geographers stand atop O’Shaughnessy Dam, 312 feet above the submerged riverbed, pondering the dam’s future. (Nancy Wilkinson is near the center of the photo, fourth from the left.)

O’Shaughnessy Dam, named after City Engineer Michael O’Shaughnessy, dams the main stem of the Tuolumne River, storing up to 360,400 acre-feet of water.

Landscape painter Albert Bierstadt visited the Sierra in the 1860s and 1870s and found Hetch Hetchy Valley smaller than the more famous Yosemite Valley but quite as beautiful.

San Francisco had already begun a search for more abundant and reliable water supplies, culminating in a decade-long battle for federal permission to dam the Tuolumne River in the Hetch Hetchy Valley, within the borders of Yosemite National Park. Congress approved the right-of-way in late 1913; the valley was flooded by 1923. The $100 million project delivered water to San Francisco, via 148 miles of tunnels and pipelines. It continues to serve over 2.5 million people in San Francisco and nearby communities, and to provide hydroelectric power for the city’s airport, hospitals, streetcars and other public utilities.

The Hetch Hetchy project was widely credited with hastening the death of John Muir, the Sierra Club’s founder and the project’s fiercest opponent. It is still contested to this day. In 1987, Secretary of the Interior Donald Hodel proposed decommissioning the dam and restoring Hetch Hetchy Valley to expand recreational opportunities for Yosemite’s visitors. Hodel’s proposal caught The Sierra Club and other longtime foes of the water project off guard; they suspected Hodel was trying to discredit the Left Coast City’s environmentalist opposition to the expansion of offshore oil drilling.

Twenty-five years later, in 2012, San Franciscans rejected by 3:1 a ballot measure compelling the city to replace Hetch Hetchy water and power. Opponents argued that the water, power and fiscal benefits were impossible to replace and that restoring the drowned valley would cost billions in public funding. A group called Restore Hetch Hetchy continues the fight and has filed suit, contending that San Francisco’s water diversions violate the California constitution and that the value of restoring the valley exceeds the cost of moving the city’s Tuolumne River diversion downstream of the park boundary.

The most severe drought in historic times, now in its fourth year, has also called San Francisco’s water use into question. Although per capita consumption is among the lowest in the nation, San Francisco is one of the last coastal cities to adopt wastewater reuse programs, preferring to irrigate lawns and flush toilets with virgin snowmelt and to discharge wastewater to the bay and ocean. This is changing: in 2012, the city adopted an ordinance encouraging non-potable wastewater reuse by commercial, multi-family and mixed-use developments.

Efforts to raze the dam at Hetch Hetchy are not the biggest threat to San Francisco’s water supply. The Hetch Hetchy project, like so much of the California water system, relies on the state’s largest above-ground reservoir: the Sierra snowpack. Yet climate change models predict the Sierra will continue to receive an increasing share of its precipitation as rain rather than as snow, and that snowpack will melt earlier. This will necessitate runoff-capture projects to stabilize supplies. Meanwhile, we should anticipate more frequent droughts.

San Francisco, like every city, remakes the countryside around it. The gold rush city owes its early growth and prosperity to resource extraction. Denuded Sierra landscapes, bay fill, mercury contamination and decimated redwood groves join the drowned Hetch Hetchy valley as legacies of the first century of city-building. While San Franciscans may cherish nature and promote environmental restoration, they curiously “naturalize” Hetch Hetchy water, appreciating its pristine purity and the hydroelectricity it generates en route to the city. The Hetch Hetchy project – controversial, unsustainable – is a complex manifestation of the city’s conflicting progressive environmental sensibilities and its environmental history.

—Nancy Wilkinson
San Francisco State University

DOI:10.14433/2015.0022

Nancy Wilkinson has been a Professor in the Department of Geography & Environment at San Francisco State University since 1986. Her teaching and research focus on California water resources and environmental perception.