Geographic research has improved the human condition, enhanced long-term environmental sustainability, strengthened the economy, fostered human understanding of the planet, and facilitated learning of those students engaged in the knowledge production process. While some research is funded by the private sector to specific ends, the bulk of scientific inquiry is a public good that benefits the larger society and is supported by governments whose citizenry ideally understand the long-term benefits of scientific research. While what I have presented above is the ideal, it actually works in many cases. Unfortunately, the public funding of scientific research in the United States has been willingly dismantled over the past nine months to the detriment of the academy, geography, and American society.

In 2010, the National Research Council published Understanding the changing planet: Strategic directions for the geographical sciences (written by a committee chaired by former AAG president Alec Murphy). This report set out an ambitious research agenda for the discipline, articulating big questions for geographers to tackle with significant societal impacts. Geographers in the US and around the world have aggressively worked on those questions over the past 15 years (relating to the environment, population, health, food, and migration to name a few) and arguably made the world a better place. I truly believe that a society that supports scholarly research is investing in the future and acting on the belief that we can do better. To arbitrarily defund research is to not look forward, to not have hope for a better world, and to doubt our capacity to enhance human understanding.

A society that supports scholarly research is investing in the future and acting on the belief that we can do better.”

As a fundamentally field-based discipline, geographers often need external funding to do the work we do. For example, in July I was fortunate to be in rural Tanzania with three research students and local university partners trying to better understand the food and nutrition security implications of primary schools that employ agroecological practices on their farms to produce food for their lunch programs. While our findings will hopefully have implications for the way we understand environmental sustainability, agroecology and nutrition security, just as important was the development of future scholars and international scientific exchange that was a byproduct of this process. This was a pilot project supported by seed money from my university and for which I had intended to seek external support, a prospect that now feels increasingly unlikely as the current administration has bludgeoned the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other federal agencies that support scientific research. My story is just one of many that have rippled across our discipline, cutting short the knowledge production process, the training of future scholars, and transnational scientific collaboration.

Cuts to scientific research funding in recent months have been devastating. The White House’s proposed budget for FY26 for the National Science Foundation (NSF) would reduce the agency’s budget by 55 percent, bringing its annual budget down to $3.6 billion from the $9 billion appropriated in FY2024, and a similar range of funds available in 2025. This latest proposed cut was preceded by the termination of hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding that had previously been awarded.

• In February, the AAG published an open letter decrying the devastating cuts to the NSF’s Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences (HEGS) Program (while geographers have been successful obtaining grants from a number of NSF programs, this is the flagship program for the discipline). Then in early March, the AAG was one of 48 learned societies signing an open letter asking congress to protect science.
• Proposed cuts to the U.S. State Department’s Fulbright Program will entirely eliminate it and in June the oversight board of this prestigious program resigned after political appointees cancelled the awards of almost 200 American professors who were scheduled to go oversees to undertake research and teaching, and put in jeopardy those of another 1200 foreign scholars who were to receive support for academic exchanges in the US.
• The U.S. Department of Education has cancelled this year’s Fulbright-Hays Program that has supported the international research of U.S. professors and students for over 60 years. The loss of this program was part of a larger executive action to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, with the AAG signing on to a joint statement against such actions in March 2025.

These are just some of the cuts to federal programs that support geographic scholarship. Of course, research costs money, and some research projects are more impactful than others, but to indiscriminately cut research funding across the broad undermines the prospect of a better future. Important advances in science are often generational in nature. Rarely do the biggest breakthroughs come in a single year, decade, or even career. Research funding is the fundamental connector that sustains research across generations. It’s not just a feel-good activity to use research funding for training future scholars: it is the lifeline of discovery, innovation, and progress.

Judiciously allocated public funding is critical to the advancement of scientific understanding, to the careers of geographers and to the training of their students. Over the course of my career, for example, I have benefitted from four federal research grants, two from the NSF and two from the Fulbright-Hays Program (likely placing me somewhere in the middle of what is typical for an academic geographer). When I was younger, these grants helped launch my career and as I grew older, they helped me train future scholars. The competitive application process helped me refine my research questions and methodology, and subsequent service on several NSF panels allowed me to better understanad the care and thought that went into prioritizing which type of research to support with scarce public dollars. From my time on such panels, I still remember Tom Baerwald (former NSF Program Director and AAG past president) and colleagues showing us the research innovation S curve (or the Isserman curve), slowly starting with basic research and the trial and error search for good questions (A and B), to the steep climb and rapid innovation phase (C), to the tapering off and research saturation plateau (D and E) (see figure 1). Our task, as a scientific panel, was to identify sound projects situated at the start of the rapid innovation phase. It was an extremely rigorous process, led by panels of faculty working on a mostly pro-bono basis, and with many more good projects on offer than NSF would be able to fund.

Geography needs to more strongly make a case for government support of knowledge production as central to a better future. Communicating the value of scientific research to broader publics is important as scholarship and universities have become targets in the US culture wars. Part of this will be about articulating a geographic research agenda for the future. What are the key questions moving forward that geographers are particularly well equipped to answer and how will geographical perspectives on those challenges help everyday people and the environment? It has been 15 years since the NRC published Understanding the changing planet. Despite the strong anti-intellectual political currents of our time, now is the moment to more forcefully articulate the value of geographic inquiry and a research agenda for a better a better future.

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at [email protected] to enable a constructive discussion.

Some 283,000 students took the Advanced Placement Human Geography (APHG) exam this year, according to the College Board. Imagine if we could persuade even five percent of those students to major in geography at the college level. That would be 14,500 students a year, a number that is over 3.5 times the current number of students who graduate with a major in geography each year in the United States. This is untapped potential waiting to be leveraged at a time when many geography departments in the US are facing serious, if not existential, threats. We can and must do more to build better connections between high school and college geography.

In order to survive and thrive, any discipline needs at least two ingredients. The first is dynamic and cutting-edge research. A discipline makes a mark in the intellectual marketplace if it contributes to a better understanding of the world. Geography has arguably done well in this regard, and the AAG supports the scientific enterprise via its annual and regional meetings as well as its journals.

A discipline makes a mark in the intellectual marketplace if it contributes to a better understanding of the world.

The second ingredient is a robust student body, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. While US graduate programs in geography attract students from around the world, our undergraduate programs are relatively small and increasingly under threat. This is a problem at both a practical and philosophical level. At a practical level, undergraduate numbers are increasingly seen by administrators as a key indicator of long-term viability, and it is this pool of students that feeds, at least in part, graduate programs and the ranks of professional geographers. At a more philosophical level, many would argue that our population is better equipped to navigate the world and be responsible citizens when they have geographical training. The problem is that the number of undergraduate geography majors has fallen in the US by some 20% since 2011 (see Figure 1). How do we reverse this trend and rebuild and expand the undergraduate geography population in the US?  The AAG is exploring this challenge very seriously and I am pleased to be part of an AAG taskforce on geography undergraduate education.

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This past June I spent two weeks in Cleveland, Ohio preparing for and then grading AP Human Geography (APHG) exams (along with hundreds of other college and high school geographers). The irony is that I don’t like grading, but this is not why I have attended these events for over ten years. I go for the community, the opportunity to connect with high school and college geographers who teach the courses that introduce students to our discipline. These teachers are the foot soldiers of geography and it is their work that powers the long-term viability of our discipline as a field of study. I wish more university geographers and graduate students would participate in this event and, if you have not already done so, I would encourage you to consider attending in-person in the future.

The APHG story is a remarkable one. Starting with the first exam in 2001, at the behest of a small group of dedicated high school and college geography teachers, and supported by the AAG, the number of APHG exam takers has grown by leaps and bounds over the past 25 years (see Figure 2). The program is not perfect. For example, some 70 percent of high school students take the exam when they are freshmen, a stage when many believe young people are not ready for college level material. But the year-long course is comprehensive and rigorous, often representing the only exposure an American student will have to geography during their high school career.

In my informal conversations with many APHG teachers, I have learned that there are a number of things we could do to better capitalize on the increasingly large number of students who take the APHG exam each year.  Here are some preliminary suggestions for consideration.

First, even if they deeply enjoy geography as a subject, many high school students and their parents simply don’t know what one might do with a geography degree in terms of a potential career. This is a significant roadblock because it prevents students (and their parents) from seriously considering geography when they apply to college. While the AAG provides information on geography-related careers, we could do more to offer information that is accessible and tailored to high schoolers.

Second, many high school social studies teachers have limited university training in geography. As such, one of the key ways they learn how to teach the APHG curriculum is via AP summer institutes (AP sponsored summer training courses offered by certified, veteran high school instructors and college faculty). These courses could also provide teachers with more geography career-related information and tips on how to integrate it into their courses. For example, what types of professions are available to those who specialize in urban geography, GIS and cartography, or environmental geography? I would encourage APSI instructors to start doing more of this on their own accord, but they could also use more support from the College Board and the AAG.

Third, I believe that college geography departments and individual geographers have a responsibility to make connections with high school geography teachers near and far as a critical form of service to the discipline.  As discussed previously, the way I have done this is through my engagement with the annual reading (or scoring) of the APHG exam, but others do this by becoming involved with their state level geography alliances (where they exist) or by reaching out to local high schools. In my case, these connections have led to guest lectures in high school classrooms, the co-authoring of articles with high school teachers and countless informal discussions about geography material. College geography students, perhaps coordinated and facilitated by local chapters of Gamma Theta Upsilon (GTU), the geography honor society, could also connect with local high school geography teachers to speak in their classrooms and share their experiences as geography majors. Let’s be honest, for an audience of high schoolers, college students are likely to be far more persuasive in terms of marketing our discipline.

If we are to survive and thrive as a discipline, geography needs to grow its base of undergraduate geography majors. We would be foolish to not build stronger connections with a rapidly expanding APHG program that represents an enormous pool of potential future students. A strong house needs a solid foundation. Please join me in helping to strengthen ours.

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at [email protected] to enable a constructive discussion.

In an increasingly multi-polar world, rife with resurgent ethno-nationalist and isolationist tendencies, geography needs to emphasize its international perspectives and connections, not pull back from them or play them down. While geography may be a relatively small discipline in the United States, its strength is its grounded understanding of our intensely interconnected world and its global reach as a field of study.

The U.S. has a long history of isolationist tendencies, based in part on the fiction that we can wall ourselves off from the rest of the world (Figure 1). What this ignores are the myriad of ways in which we are connected to other parts of the planet, both historically and in the present. Geographers are exceptionally good at explaining and theorizing these connections and this must remain a bedrock of geographic scholarship and teaching.

The view that countries can exist in isolation is problematic and counterproductive. It contributes to zero-sum game thinking, the idea that one group or country loses if another wins. A nuanced geographic understanding of the world challenges this view by highlighting the many ways one place on the planet is connected to others in terms of material and cultural flows, as well as shared environmental phenomena. In many cases, the world is a global commons. In seeking to maximize our own return, we often undermine our collective well-being.

I would argue, and researchers have shown, that publics educated in geographic perspectives better understand the inter-connected nature of the world and that we have a shared interest in working together. This has policy implications from the local to the global scale, be it SNAP (formerly known as Food Stamp) benefits for the hungry person next door or emergency food assistance for someone on the other side of the planet. We help our neighbors not just because it is the right thing to do, but ultimately because it is also in our shared self-interest. As the late Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone used to say: “We all do better when we all do better.”

We help our neighbors not just because it is the right thing to do, but ultimately because it is also in our shared self-interest.

American geography has been constantly nourished and re-invigorated by its international connections. International geography faculty and students who come to the United States to work and study contribute to the dynamism of our discipline on so many levels. In my graduate school days, for example, three of the five members of my dissertation committee and half of my student cohort were international. In my liberal arts college geography department today, roughly 30 percent of the faculty and 20 percent of the undergraduate students were born and raised in other parts of the world. Their talents, insights and energy make our discipline a cutting-edge science. This is why the actions of the current U.S. administration vis à vis international students and faculty are so deeply problematic. By harassing our colleagues and students, denying visa applications, deporting people and policing contrarian views, the current U.S. administration is undermining science writ large and especially disciplines like geography that have deep international connections. This is why the AAG signed on to a letter condemning the targeting of foreign scholars in April 2025.

Beyond our colleges and universities, scholarly exchange across national borders is critical for advancing geographic knowledge. This means welcoming foreign scholars into the U.S. for conferences and research, as well as supporting U.S.-based scholars who attend conferences and undertake research abroad.

The AAG annual meeting has long been an important forum where geographers from all over the world gather to exchange ideas and advance geographic understanding. Despite the unwelcoming tone and problematic border procedures of the current administration, some 26 percent of the annual meeting attendees in Detroit came from institutions outside of the U.S. (and have averaged about 40 percent over the past 10 years). I want to personally thank those who came to the meeting and encourage you and others to come back next year. Science must transcend nationalist politics and we (the U.S. geographical community) really need your support and understanding in this difficult political moment. I also want to thank the AAG staff who worked diligently to facilitate the visits of international scholars to attend our annual meeting (by, for example, issuing letters in support of visa applications and monitoring international arrivals at the meeting). I am also proud that the AAG has programs that support international scholars, such as a discounted membership fee for those based in the Global South.

On the flipside, and acknowledging the federal funding cuts that have decimated research and travel budgets, U.S.-based scholars need to keep engaging in scientific forums outside of the U.S. One of the more obvious spaces to engage with the international geographic community is in various meetings organized under the auspices of the International Geographic Union (IGU), an international umbrella organization for national level geographic societies around the world. While the IGU holds big congresses every four years, with regional meetings in-between the congresses, I have found engagement with IGU commissions (akin to AAG specialty groups) to be especially rewarding. Many of these commissions organize smaller conferences where you really get to know other geographers and explore new regions.

Geography prospers when it leans into its international perspectives and connections. Geographers must continue to educate students and broader publics about the interconnected nature of our world. Furthermore, American geography’s secret weapon is its international linkages, from non-U.S. faculty and students, to conferences with diverse participation. The constant mixing of insights and life experiences from the across the U.S. and around the world fuels a formidable scholarly engine. We don’t build walls in geography, we reach across them.

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at [email protected] to enable a constructive discussion.

For the last President’s Column of her term, President Patricia Ehrkamp sits with incoming President William Moseley about his experiences within the discipline and his aspirations for her upcoming leadership at AAG. The following conversation offers insight into the new directions for the 2025-26 presidency.

PE: Thanks for making time to meet, Bill.

WM: Great to be here. Thank you.

PE: So a good place to start is maybe to ask you, what brought you to geography?

WM: Well, I was born and raised in the U.S. So like a lot of people who grew up in the U.S., I had very minimal geography in my K-12 education. Where I was an undergraduate, there was no geography department. Same thing where I got my master’s degrees: an M.S. in Environmental Policy and an M.P.P. in International Public Policy. The University of Michigan previously had a geography department, and there were some geographers around in different programs, but no department when I was there. That said, when I was master’s student in the school of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan, my master’s thesis was on Indigenous soil management in West Africa and I remember reading Piers Blakie’s Political Economy of Soil Erosion (a foundational text in political ecology). That was my first clue that geographers might do something more than maps and memorizing capitals.

Then I lived and worked in a variety of African countries as a development professional before I became an academic geographer. I worked for Save the Children UK, which is a British nonprofit. I was in Mali, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Lesotho, and when I was in Southern Africa there was a big hunger mapping project and a lot of the staff involved with that project were geographers who’d been trained in the UK. It was that group that started explaining to me what geography really was, which got me even more interested.

And then, I think, towards the end of a 10-year development career, I was having a bit of an existential crisis. I was wrestling with challenges in development. A big one was sort of the limits of bottom-up participatory development. Very good things could be happening at the grassroots level. But if they clashed with national-level policy or the programs of international institutions, they just couldn’t go very far.

So there was that challenge I was wrestling with. I had also worked for different development institutions in Washington, DC, like the World Bank and USAID. And there I was encountering people that were kind of out of touch with the grassroots. This was the 1990s. It was the heyday of neoliberal economic reform, and I was in the young professionals program at the World Bank, bright young people who meant well, but they didn’t really understand the grassroots consequences of the policies they were designing.

And so I think geography and its multi-scalar understanding of the world, became a way for me to think through those problems. I actually took my first geography course as a PhD student at the University of Georgia.

We had moved there because my wife got a job with Care International in Atlanta, and I didn’t really know what to do with myself. So why not get a PhD? And for the reasons I explained, I had been growing increasingly interested in geography and the University of Georgia had the only PhD. Program in geography in the whole state. So that’s what led me to geography.

PE: That’s interesting. It’s so opposite from my experience! I think I told you I started in fifth grade with geography classes [growing up in Germany]. So. But it’s fascinating. I had a class in college on development, geography, and some of the same issues that you just raised came up then as well.

So then, my next question is, knowing what you know about the field. Now, what would you tell, or what do you tell students about what makes geography so relevant to the questions and issues of the day?

WM: I think about how the policy making world in the Anglo-American context is really dominated by political scientists and economists. They’re the ones whose perspectives you often read or hear about in news programs. Geography has a really different angle to offer on issues. We need to speak up so that this perspective enters the public discourse.

There are often three aspects of this perspective that I highlight to students. Because I’m a nature-society geographer (my entryway into geography) one of the aspects I emphasize is the multi-scalar perspective. At the local level, a person interacting with the environment—It could be a farmer or anyone—we just can’t look at them in isolation. We need to think about their situated agency. They’re not just randomly deciding to grow cotton or corn. But they’re influenced by government policies and regional trading relationships, and the programs of international institutions.

The second piece that I really appreciate is that it’s not just the biophysical dimensions of environmental questions we examine, but the political, social, and economic aspects. And I think I’m especially taken with the work of scholars like Michael Watts, coming out of the political ecology tradition, and showing us that the way a community and society is organized deeply influences how we experience environmental fluxes, from drought to climate change. These things are deeply interconnected, so you can’t talk about the environment as an exogenous force. It’s more relational.

And then the third aspect I emphasize reflects the influence of post-structuralism, and thinking about the influence of discourse and narratives, and how our dominant paradigms and worldviews shape how we perceive the world. I experienced this firsthand as a development worker. Certain received wisdoms or things that I had learned in school (such as ideas about population growth, deforestation and desertification), influenced how I viewed the landscape. Then subsequently, in grad school, I had to deconstruct these ideas. It was kind of a mind-blowing experience to read scholars (such as Fairhead and Leach’s Misreading the African Landscape) who were interrogating the ideas that had shaped my thinking as a development worker

I think those three things, the multi-scalar approach to thinking about the human-environment interface, the biophysical and the social dimensions of environmental questions, as well as post-structuralism’s attention to discourse: These are the unique aspects of the geographic lens that I emphasize when talking to students.

PE: I agree, it’s getting past conventions. and the things we are used to hearing, and thinking differently and coming up differently with solutions also.

So let’s shift gears a little bit. What prompted you to run for office in AAG?

WM: I think part of it was seeing other people I knew run for office. Kavita Pandit was on my dissertation committee at the University of Georgia, and seeing her, and what she did as AAG President, was important.

I also know Past AAG President Alec Murphy pretty well, and I really respected the work that he did on public scholarship ,and he was a great mentor to me. AAG Past President Derek Alderman was a grad school friend and I actually worked for him as a teaching assistant, Seeing the work Derek did with the AAG was inspiring and he was also very supportive of public scholarship (something I value). These folks made me realize that one could do this and that it was important work.

Also, I think there’s this idea of giving back. So many people have helped me out and been good mentors to me. There’s so much good work that gets done that isn’t recognized. And so, as a community, we need senior scholars who can step up and help those who are coming up. Obviously, this is something you’ve worked on very hard with your important work on mentorship.

And then, maybe lastly, as I work at an institution that serves undergrads only, I felt that perhaps I have something to contribute in terms of thinking about the importance of undergraduate education relative to the rest of the larger discipline of geography.

PE: I think those are good reasons, and especially having benefited from great mentors and being able to give some of that back or pay it forward in so many ways.

WM: Exactly.

PE: You mentioned the undergraduate students. I wanted to ask what initiatives and projects you’re thinking about for your time as AAG President, what can we expect you to focus on?

WM: So undergraduate education is one of them. I am very interested in pathways into geography and the future of geography, which is thinking about younger geographers coming up through K-12, education and the importance of the undergraduate years. It’s sort of shocking to me that, and — I’ve always known that we were a small discipline in the United States, but 10-15 years ago there were only around 5,000 students in the U.S. who graduated with undergraduate majors in geography, and that’s subsequently declined 20% (AAG 2022). So this is a bit of an existential crisis. We’re not going to have a future if we don’t continue to have younger geographers coming up. I have established a task force to  analyze pathways into geography. We’re calling it the Gen A project. This is the cohort of students that just started their first year in high school.

PE: I love it.

WM: So there’s that. I continue to be very interested in promoting public scholarship. It’s something I’ve done for a long time and I especially think, in the current political moment, with threats to democratic institutions and threats to the Academy, and threats to the way the U.S. engages with other parts of the world, that we need people to speak up, particularly people in positions of privilege, because there are other people who are under threat and can’t do that.

I’m also very interested in continuing to ensure that all forms of diversity are well represented within the AAG. This includes institutional diversity:  R1s, and also R2s, and R3s;  bachelor’s- and associates’- degree-granting institutions, tribal colleges, HBCUs, all the other Minority Serving Institutions, the whole lot.

I’m an international scholar and I’ve been thinking a lot about our relationship in the U.S. with geography associations in other parts of the world.  And even though we might disagree with the politics of different regimes in power, I think it’s important that geography as an international discipline stretch across those political boundaries and work together.

The last piece that I’m interested in promoting is the relationship between academic geography and public policy making at different scales. You know: the IPCC on climate change, for example. I’ve done a lot of this type of work internationally related to food security (for the UN High Level Panel of Experts for Food Security and Nutrition). But we also have different science policy interfaces within lower levels of government within different countries. This is important work and the geographic perspective needs to be heard in these arenas.

PE: Lots of work to do for geographers. You bring lots of energy to this. But I do think no time like the present to get engaged.

I also wanted to ask, speaking about getting engaged or being engaged: What would you say to a member who considers volunteering or serving in office for the AAG

WM: We need good people to step up and serve. I do think the AAG is very democratic. And unlike some other organizations (where I’ve seen people become entrenched and serve in leadership roles for a long period of time), I believe there’s a healthy changing of the guard within the AAG. This creates lots of opportunities for different people to serve and to be represented. I would encourage people, if they put their name forward and it doesn’t work out the first time, to not be discouraged, and to put their name forward again. Because we need good people and new energy to keep the dynamism of the organization going.

PE: Right, I totally agree. I’ve been enjoying my time on Council, and I’m also glad that I’m handing over some responsibilities to you soon, and look forward to all the things that you’ll be doing, together with the rest of Council and everybody else who volunteers.

So is there anything else you’d want to say that I didn’t ask you?

WM: Well, maybe just one more further thing on the last question you asked. I think when you do step up and become involved with the AAG, you get to meet people from across the country and around the world. You learn how the association works and you demystify AAG governance. You know that process. You’re helping out, but you also learn a ton. I have certainly: over the past year I’ve had a very, very steep learning curve.

PE: Yes, it is a steep learning curve. But I will second the part of getting to know people from across the country and the world, and from all of these different organizations and institutions. That has been one of the most fun aspects for me as well.

Well, thank you for stepping up and for spending time talking with me today. I wish you the best of luck in your presidency.

WM: Thank you very much.  I look forward to it.

Source for undergraduate data: AAG, 2022. The State of Geography: Data and Trends in Higher Education.

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at [email protected] to enable a constructive discussion.