Ashok Wadwani

Ashok and Ishu Wadwani came to the U.S. in 1970 with two bags and $200. Today, the couple own and operate Applied Field Data Systems (AFDS), a company specializing in field-based GPS, GIS, and mapping services, consulting, and training.

After obtaining his master’s degree in physics from the University of Lucknow in 1963, Ashok landed his first jobs in marketing at the Indian partner offices of U.S. companies such as Perkin Elmer, Hewlett-Packard and Honeywell. After he and his wife got visas based on their educational backgrounds and obtained green cards, they relocated to Chicago, where Ashok was employed at Central Scientific, a company specializing in lab equipment. While working full-time, both Ashok and Ishu continued to attend school. After Ashok obtained his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, he moved among locations and jobs for several years, finally ending up in Houston. By 1984, he had started his own business designing handheld computers for the forestry industry – one of the forerunners of modern GPS.

Because GPS technology was still in its infancy in the mid-1980s, Ashok’s entrance into the field came by complete accident. “Early on, I had no clue what GPS even was,” he says. Provisions of the Clean Air Act moved him into the realm of fugitive emissions monitoring by 1986, when his company began supplying rugged handheld computers to refineries and petrochemical companies. His clients soon began requesting geospatial information for their emissions data points. “It was a customer-driven process,” he explains. “GPS technology was developed elsewhere, but AFDS developed the interface not only for petrochemical industries but others.” As the company grew, Ishu decided to join the business, giving up her lucrative job in the health care industry.

Ashok and Ishu stress that their success did not come easily. While they were able to find jobs quickly upon their arrival to the U.S., Ashok notes that the transition can pose a challenge to immigrants not accustomed to American culture. “Asian and European cultures are quite different from American culture, although Americans tend to regard all cultures as similar,” he observes.

In 27 years of running their own business, Ashok and Ishu take pride in the fact that they never had to fire a single employee and have remained debt-free. They strongly believe in encouraging and mentoring students and new graduates, and they continue to hire student interns and offer them flex time so they are able to attend classes. Perhaps most importantly, Ashok and Ishu look for people they can trust. Because running a small business means that often both of them are traveling and are frequently away from the office, they must be able to trust employees to get the job done under minimal supervision.

Small businesses operate with fewer financial resources than a large company, and the burden of accountability ultimately rests on the owners’ shoulders. However, there is also a great deal of personal freedom and flexibility. “You’re the boss – you make a commitment, and that’s it,” Ashok says. For anyone hoping to start his or her own business, he offers some advice: be open to working many hours, be prepared for failures and financial hardships, and be prepared to do odd jobs or “wear different hats” within the company. “We firmly believe there are skills we can teach,” say Ashok and Ishu, “but we can’t teach attitude.”

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New Books for Geographers

New Books: November 2012

November 15, 2012

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.

November, 2012

Alkon, Alison Hope. Black, White, and Green. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012. 206 and 7 pp., $69.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4390-7.
Bridge, Gavin and Billon, Philippe Le. Oil. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. 256 and 8 pp., $49.95, ISBN 978-0-7456-4926-9.
Cionnaith, Finnian O. Mapping, Measurement and Metropolis: How Land Surveyors Shaped Eighteenth-Century Dublin. Portland: Four Courts Press, 2012. 246 and 24 pp., €45.00, ISBN 978-1-84682-348-0.
Clarke, Colin and Clarke, Gillian. Post-Colonial Trinidad: An Ethnographic Journal. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 246 and 22 pp., $89.00, ISBN 978-0-230-62200-5.
Danielsson, Sarah K. The Explorer’s Roadmap to National-Socialism: Sven Hedin, Geography, and the Path to Genocide. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. 304 and 6 pp., $119.95, ISBN 9781-4094-3212-8.
Davies, Damian Walford. Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012. 271 and 16 pp., £29.99, ISBN 978-0-7083-2476-9.
Foote, Stephanie and Mazzolini, Elizabeth ed. Histories of the Dustheap: Waste, Material Cultures, Social Justice. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012. 291 and 6 pp., $50.00, ISBN 978-0-2625-1782-9.
Garfield, Simon. On the Map: A Mind Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks. New York: Gotham Books, 2013. 464 pp., $27.50, ISBN 978-1-59240779-8.
Ioris, Antonio Augusto Rossotto. Tropical Wetland Management: The South American Pantanal and the International Experience. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. 351 and 19 pp., $124.95, ISBN 978-1-4094-1878-8.
Janowski, Monica and Ingold, Tim, ed. Imagining Landscapes: Past, Present and Future. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. 169 and 12 pp., $99.95, ISBN 978-11-4094-2971-5.
Lave, Rebecca. Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012. 170 and 8 pp., $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4392-1.
Light, Duncan. The Dracula Dilemma: Tourism, Identity and the State of Romania. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. 196 and 10 pp., $99.95, ISBN 978-1-4094-4021-5.
Loyd, Jenna M. Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012. 372 and 11 pp., $69.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4412-6.
Mithen, Steven. Thrist: Water and Power in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. 347 and 17 pp., $25.95, ISBN 978-0-674-06693-9.
Motoyama, Yasuyuki. Global Companies, Local Innovations: Why the Engineering Aspects of Innovation Making Require Co-location. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. 163 and 5 pp., $99.95, ISBN 978-1-4094-2146-7.
Rehder, John B. Tennessee Log Buildings: A Folk Tradition. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2012. 192 pp., $29.95, ISBN 978-1-57233-874-6.
Talbert, Richard J.A., ed. Ancient Perspectives: Maps and Their Place in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. 264 and 9 pp., $65.00, ISBN 978-0-226-78973-8.0

Martin R. Kaatz

Martin Richard Kaatz, a long-time geography professor at Central Washington University, died on November 24, 2012, from complications following heart surgery. He was 88.

Following service in U.S. Army Signal Corps from 1943-46 in the Phillippines and Japan, Kaatz earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in geography from the University of Michigan. In 1952, he joined the faculty at Central Washington University where his career spanned more than 40 years. He was a 1965-66 Fulbright scholar while teaching at Trinity College in Dublin. Kaatz served 15 years as chair of CWU’s Geography and Land Studies Department.

In addition to his academic service, Kaatz was involved in several organizations, boards, and committees, helping shape land use planning in Ellensburg, Wash., Kittitas County, and the Yakima River Basin. CWU honored him for his service naming him a Distinguished University Professor of Public Service in 1980. The Cascade Land Conservancy recognized his lifetime achievements in conservation in 2006. In 2011, He was honored by the City of Ellensburg for his many years of service to the city.

A memorial service was held on Mar. 23 in Ellensburg, Wash., at the Hal Holmes Center. The Martin Kaatz Geography Scholarship Fund has been established in his honor.

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President's Column

Geography’s Cultures of Publication

November 1, 2012

Eric Sheppard

In many ways, Geography mirrors the western academy as a whole, which is why we often seem like misfits within the disciplinary boxes used to organize this academy. How we publish is one of those ways. Our cultures of scholarly publication range from multi-authored highly abbreviated articles summarizing scientific results (particularly physical geographers), to conference proceedings (particularly in GIScience), longer sole- or joint-authored articles, and books of various kinds. Each approach makes perfect sense for the sub-culture involved, also as a way to communicate geographical scholarship effectively to cognate disciplinary clusters (physical science, computer science, social sciences and humanities). Yet what seems natural to some of us puzzles others. Further, geographers’ choices of how to publish are shaped and incentivized by a multitude of forces over which we have limited control. This can pose problems for individual geographers, and the discipline

Consider, for example, the National Research Council’s (NRC) decision about what constitutes geographical scholarship, when it ranked U.S. graduate Geography programs in 2010. The only geographical publications that counted for the NRC were refereed journal articles for which Web of Science citation data are collected—and for which each author gained full credit on every co-authored article. Of course this favored departments with a multi-authored journal publishing culture, ceteris paribus, disadvantaging departments with a more cultural focus. (These controversial rankings were revised, but this decision was not.) Behind this was not only a blinkered view of the nature of Geography (as an earth and social science), but also the limitations of Web of Science as the selected publications database. Only recently has ISI Thomson extended their database to include books and conference proceedings, and their rules about what to include differ from others such as Scopus and Google Scholar.

The publishing industry has its own priorities, incentivizing publication cultures in other ways. New journals have proliferated, as journals with modest circulation numbers are now profitable. Publishers also offer inducements to edit survey books, encyclopedias, companions, handbooks, etc., also currently deemed profitable. Geography thus has put significant effort into boutique journals (great for energizing a newly emergent scholarly community, albeit at the risk of balkanizing larger-scale communications networks), and state-of-the-art edited collections (helpful for students, but sapping scholarly energy from original research and often duplicating one another). Yet scholarly monographs, particularly by less well-known and marketable geographers, are increasingly difficult to publish. University presses, under market-oriented pressure to become financially self-sufficient, increasingly find themselves thinking and acting like the for-profit industry.

Such pressures concatenate through departmental and disciplinary cultures, as we try and game the ranking systems we increasingly are subjected to and evaluated by. I hear from faculty about chairs suggesting they desist from publishing books, and from authors with papers under review in a journal where the editor asks them to add more citations to that journal (boosting its ISI-defined “impact factor”).

The popularity of journal articles aligns with a contemporary merit evaluation culture that incentivizes short-termism: “fast” scholarship (more frequent, shorter publications, in journals with high citation counts) rather than the “slow geography” of major monographs. The Annals has followed this trend. Its book review editor Kent Mathewson calculates that the number of books reviewed annually in the Annals has fallen from 60 to 25 since 2008, as the backlog of accepted articles lengthened.

Book publishing must remain central to maintaining the diversity of scholarly excellence that is Geography’s hallmark. Indeed, those geographers who have had the greatest impact beyond the discipline frequently achieved this through their books. Within the contemporary academy, much is made of the fact that journals utilize double-blind reviews to ensure quality control. Yet the refereeing process is far from perfect, as some spectacular faux pas in the sciences remind us, and the different vetting process for books can be just as effective. Book editors, with their reputations at stake, can be more exacting than an over-worked journal reviewer. Academic publishers, before investing in a scholarly monograph, solicit multiple anonymous reviews from top scholars prior to issuing a contract (ten in all, for my recent book prospectus).

The AAG is undertaking a new initiative to reinvigorate Geography’s book publishing culture. Working with Taylor & Francis, in spring 2013 the Association plans to begin publishing the quarterly AAG Review of Books (ARB), an online journal free to members. Like Contemporary Sociology and Reviews in Anthropology, the ARB will be devoted to reviewing and debating books of interest to geographers and fellow-travellers. If geographers can induce the NRC to value the diversity of publishing essential to our discipline, bring more attention to geographical monographs from in and beyond the discipline, push the citation counting industry to broaden its remit, and reinvigorate respect for academic book publishing in all areas of Geography, these will be steps in the right direction.

Let me know what you think.

Eric Sheppard

DOI: 10.14433/2012.0004

Neil Smith

Neil Smith died of liver and kidney failure at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York on September 29, 2012, at the age of 58. He was Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), where he founded and for a number of years directed the interdisciplinary Center for Place, Culture, and Politics.

Smith was born and raised in Leith, Edinburgh, Scotland. He attended the University of St. Andrews (with a year spent at the University of Pennsylvania, 1974-1975), taking a B.Sc. degree in 1977, to be followed by a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 1982, where his advisor was David Harvey. He taught in the geography department at Columbia University from 1982-90 before moving to Rutgers.

Smith was a revolutionary force in the academic discipline of geography and beyond. A polarizing figure, his sharp wit and direct style could be taken harshly by those whose work was the aim of his critiques, while others recognized him as a role model for politically committed scholars. He influenced a generation of critical geographers and was one of the early organizers of the International Critical Geography Group. Smith’s work was widely read outside the discipline of geography, including in such fields as sociology, urban studies, anthropology and cultural studies and contributed to the “spatial turn” in the social sciences and humanities.

Entering a field often considered an intellectual backwater, Smith’s insightful scholarship and cogent arguments would imbue geography with an intellectual – and political – importance it had rarely before possessed. Originally on track to become a glacial geomorphologist (based on his love of Scottish landscapes), Smith’s interests gravitated toward the dynamics of urban change under the influence of St. Andrews lecturer Joe Doherty. Smith’s widely accepted “rent-gap” thesis, first published in a landmark article in the Journal of the American Planning Association in 1979 (based on his undergraduate thesis at St. Andrews), made clear that gentrification was a new strategy of capital accumulation actively restructuring urban space. Extended study of gentrification in New York City led to Smith’s influential book, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (1982), in which he argued that the dynamics of gentrification was rooted as much in culture (“revanchism” or class revenge, as the bourgeoisie sought to take back “their” city) as it was in economics. He linked the rise of zero-tolerance policing and the other “quality of life” initiatives of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to social changes taking place around the globe, jumping scales from a “localized urban anomaly” to a globalized “urban strategy.”

Smith’s arguments about gentrification were part of a much larger project examining the production of both nature and geographical space within capitalism. In Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (1984), Smith shows that nature is not simply transformed but actually produced, an insight foundational for the whole field of political ecology. He argued that to understand the workings of capitalism, we have to understand the way capitalism produces the very spaces that make its existence possible, a concept now central to much geographical work. Together his theories of the production of nature, space, and scale can be said to add up to a new, remarkably cogent theory of uneven capitalist development.

Smith’s later work examined powerful mid-twentieth century American geographer, university president, and advisor to presidents, Isaiah Bowman (a primary architect of Woodrow Wilson’s positions that led to the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations), and led eventually to the publication of American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (2003), for which he received the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography in 2004 and the AAG’s Globe Book Award for Public Understanding of Geography, also in 2004. Drawing together his various insights and a lifetime of Marxist scholarship, his final book was The Endgame of Globalization (2005).

Smith was also very active in organizing or co-organizing conferences and symposia, especially those of CUNY. He was frequently invited to give lectures both in the U.S. and abroad. He recently served as Visiting Professor at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), and in August 2012 he gave the keynote address, “For (Political) Climate Change” at the Geographing the Future Conference, hosted by the National University of Ireland, Galway. Smith was co-editor of the influential journal Society and Space and served on the editorial boards of Social Text and Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, among others.

Neil Smith received distinguished scholarship honors from the AAG in 2000.

Neil Smith (Necrology). 2012. AAG Newsletter 47(10): 22.

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Gary Peters

Gary Peters was born in Marysville, California on March 20, 1941. After serving as a radio operator in the U.S. Navy he attended Yuba Junior College and then transferred to Chico State University, where he majored in Geography. He then obtained his Master’s Degree and PhD in Geography from Pennsylvania State University. Following the completion of his studies, Gary taught in the geography department at California State University Long Beach before finishing his career at Chico State University. Throughout his career Gary published ten books—including Population Geography: Problems, Concepts, and Prospects and American Winescapes: The Cultural Landscapes of America’s Wine Country—and numerous academic articles.

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Thelma Glass

Civil rights pioneer and longtime geography professor Thelma Glass has died at the age of 96.

Glass was a professor of geography at Alabama State University, where she taught for over 40 years. She was the last surviving member of the Women’s Political Council, which helped organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56, a key event in the civil rights movement.

Glass graduated with honors from the Alabama State Teachers College in 1941. She later attended the Teachers College at Columbia University, where she earned an M.A. in 1947.

John Knight, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Alabama State University, was one of Glass’s students. “She had such a pleasing personality, you felt welcome. You felt a sense of warmth. And she always challenged you academically to be the very best,” Knight was quoted as saying.[i]

Glass was the focus of a chapter written by Jan Monk and Sunita George with Juanita George, “Teachers and Their Times: Thelma Glass and Juanita Gaston,” published in The South’s Role in the Making of AmericanGeography: Centennial of the AAG, 2004, edited by J.O. Wheeler and Stanley Brunn.

Glass’s main interests in geography included local and regional research in economic, cultural, and physical geography; excellence in education to prepare students for careers in teaching, government, and industry; and the introduction of geography into senior high schools in Alabama. She was well known on campus as a teacher-activist willing to put the values she espoused into action. Glass was deeply committed to the development and future success of her students and sought to introduce them to a broad-based education through the contextualization provided by geography education.

In 2011, Glass received ASU’s Black and Gold Standard Award, a non-annual award that is given to the school’s most notable alumni. She received many teaching awards throughout her career. An auditorium is named for Glass on the Alabama State University campus.

[i] Johnson, Scott. “Civil Rights Pioneer Glass Dies.” Montgomery Advertiser, July 25, 2012. www.montgomeryadvertiser.com. Accessed August 1, 2012.

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President's Column

Geography Outside-in

July 2, 2012

Eric Sheppard I am honored and delighted that you have given me the opportunity to act as your Association president for 2012-13. In these columns—a new experience for me—I seek to provoke us all to think critically and creatively about the relationship between Geography as a discipline and the multifaceted socionatural geographies that occupy and shape our planet. I approach these columns in the passionate belief that geography flourishes when its practitioners are willing to critically engage with one another. When we take others’ knowledge and beliefs as seriously as our own, consensus need not be our goal. As Helen Longino points out in her book The Fate of Knowledge, we can learn more through ongoing constructive disagreement, achieving excellence through diversity. Thus I invite you to respond to my columns throughout the year, in the spirit in which they are offered: esheppard [at] geog [dot] ucla [dot] edu.

We all simultaneously, paradoxically, occupy centers and margins. The Association of American Geographers occupies the institutional center of a discipline, plagued by its perceived marginalization in and beyond the academy. The academy is an acknowledged center of learning and knowledge production, but regarded with skepticism— marginalized—by the majority of those beyond its “Ivory Tower.” Ours is an Anglophone organization, whose discourses are shaped by powerfully positioned (too often, like myself, white and male) practitioners worried about how to improve livelihoods for the disadvantaged that they rarely encounter. Our Association’s members, without whom the AAG would cease to exist, wonder whether they have influence over its activities. What does it mean to approach such centers from their constituted margins, to turn Geography outside-in?

I begin with the Association. When I became Vice President a year ago, reflecting if nothing else my disciplinary name-recognition, I nevertheless felt like an outsider. As a member for almost forty years, attending most of the national meetings and reading the Newsletter fairly regularly, I came to realize that I had little idea about what goes on at AAG’s Meridian Place headquarters. Beyond organizing annual meetings (surprisingly, not a money-maker), I learned that the AAG has devoted enormous effort during the last decade to promoting the margins of the discipline: enhancing demographic diversity, improving graduate education, providing advice and support to fragile departments, reducing membership fees for those with low incomes (here and abroad), promoting geography in Latin America, Africa and Asia, and prioritizing human rights. The vast majority of us, I believe, would see these as important priorities, with the potential to help turn geography outside-in. No doubt, we each also would have opinions and criticisms of how the Association is going about these—as we would for such initiatives wherever we find them. Critical engagement between views would be informative for all concerned, but can only happen when information networks effectively connect margins into centers.

Fortunately, we live in an age where information can flow in less-hierarchical ways. Digital divides persist, and social networking has both progressive and regressive possibilities (whose geographical processes and implications remain ill-understood), but there remains significant potential. As Executive Director Doug Richardson highlights in his July-August column, the AAG is enhancing efforts to use information technologies inclusively (without disadvantaging those relying on paper). Members can subscribe to SmartBrief, and communicate through knowledge communities. National elections will now occur online, which can only enhance low participation rates. The AAG Newsletter will mutate into an online communications strategy, as will the Guide to Geography Programs, and book reviews will move from the journals to an online AAG Review of Books.

Yet these can only be the first steps— not yet realizing the georepresentational potential of Web 2.0. Without careful communications planning, there also is the danger of information overload. What else should be considered: A state-of-the-art AAG website? The Newsletter via Facebook? A presidential blog (or twitter)? A portal highlighting geographic research? A website publicizing timely geographic research to influence policy and opinion formation and attract attention to what we do? New open access publication venues? Less, not more? Share your ideas.

Turning Geography outside-in means turning our diversity (substantive, epistemological, political, socio-spatial) into a unifying strength. Enhancing geographic excellence through diversity requires attending to power-differences, however, to fully empowering the participation of marginalized positionalities in core conversations. As I stated when nominated, this must remain a high priority for the Association. In North America, building on Audrey Kobayashi’s important efforts, renewed anti-racism initiatives are vital, aimed particularly at including the expertise and voices of Native Americans, Blacks and Hispanics (recognizing how these intersect with other aspects of difference: class, gender, sexuality, location, etc.). Globally, it should entail incorporating the expertise of geographers and fellow-travelers living and working outside the well-resourced Anglophone halls of geographic influence. Everywhere, it should incorporate the experience of those whose lives we study. I will elaborate next month.

Eric Sheppard

DOI: 10.14433/2012.0001

William Horbaly

Fifty-year AAG member William Horbaly, 91, of Charlottesville, North Carolina, has died.

Horbaly was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on January 24, 1920, the son of immigrants from the former Czechoslovakia. He earned a PhD in geography from the University of Chicago, and a portion of his graduate study was completed at Charles University in Prague.

During the Second World War, Horbaly served as a United States Army tank commander in the 749th Tank Battalion, which received a Presidential Unit Citation for meritorious service in France. Horbaly saw action in France and Germany and was awarded the Bronze Star.

After returning from the war, Horbaly spent his professional career in federal government service with the United States Department of Agriculture. During his time as an Agriculture Attaché‚ he was assigned to the State Department and was stationed in Moscow for five years and Beirut for four. Upon his retirement from federal service Horbaly was the Assistant Administrator to the Secretary of Agriculture and was in charge of United States Agriculture Attaches stationed overseas.

William Horbaly (Necrology). 2012. AAG Newsletter 47(3): 36.

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Ashok Wadwani

New Books: November 2012

Martin R. Kaatz

Geography’s Cultures of Publication

Neil Smith

Gary Peters

Thelma Glass

Geography Outside-in

Establishing an NIH-Wide Geospatial Infrastructure for Medical Research￼

William Horbaly

Establishing an NIH-Wide Geospatial Infrastructure for Medical Research