Two new interns have joined the AAG staff this semester! The AAG would like to welcome Iman and Allison to the organization.
Iman Smith is a junior at the University of Maryland, pursuing a B.S. in Geographical Sciences and a minor in Geographic Information Systems. Her areas of interest include agricultural monitoring and crop management, and global food security. In her spare time, Iman likes to travel, crochet, make pottery, and she also hosts a college radio show.
Allison Rivera is a senior at the University of Connecticut pursuing a B.S. in Geoscience and a minor in Geography. She is mostly interested in geomorphology and physical geography and is currently completing a senior thesis on such topics. After graduation, Allison hopes to attend graduate school and pursue further research in the field of geomorphology. In her spare time, she enjoys watching cartoons, going for walks, and reading.
If you or someone you know is interested in applying for an internship at the AAG, the AAG seeks interns on a year-round basis for the spring, summer, and fall semesters.
In Denver and Beyond, Moving Toward More Just Geographies
Aerial view of downtown Denver with mountains in the background. Credit: CANUSA Touristik via denver.org
Our annual meeting is just around the corner, and I am excited. This is our first opportunity to meet in person since 2019, and AAG members are showing up! In March, more than four thousand geographers are going to descend on Denver, CO, the Mile High City, bringing with them the “spirit of Geography” More than fifteen hundred geographers will join remotely. Together, this means that well over 50% of our membership will be gathering to share research, ideas, and catch up, with one another for our largest gathering since 2020.
The theme of the meeting, Toward More Just Geographies, sprang from the ideas espoused in my nomination statement, back in 2020 when I talked about what we needed to do to create a stronger, more just AAG and discipline, and in the process, make Geography a force for positive social change. The heart of the theme is that the reality of a just geography is on the horizon, something that we must work towards, continually, but perhaps something that we never fully achieve. This is not setting us up for failure but a recognition that justice is not a finite, unchangeable thing, rather it is something that is constantly evolving towards an ideal. Hence, it’s towards a just geography. Member response to this theme has been heartwarmingly high — 471 of our 1,283 sessions are Just Geography themed.
Set against a backdrop of the numerous responses submitted to the appeal for member ideas on what a just geography means to them, the Presidential Plenary, scheduled for Friday, March 24 at 6:30 PM Mountain Time, is structured as a panel, featuring Tianna Bruno of UT-Austin, Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes of Pomona College, and Kelly Kay of UCLA. Our speakers will reflect on how we can approach a Just Geography in the tools that we use (GIS), in the framing of our research questions, and in our mentoring of students and early-career geographers. These reflections are not intended to represent the only ways in which we can approach a Just Geography, indeed, the member responses are rich with ideas on that subject.
Our intention is for these discussions to continue beyond the time allotted to the plenary and across all the days of the meeting. To facilitate this, AAG staff are creating at the meeting site, space where a curated set of the ideas discussed at the plenary as well as those contained within the member responses to the appeal are projected so that people could come in, sit or walk around and see the statements and spark conversations.
And there’s more! Beyond the immediate Presidential Plenary plans, in this meeting there are clear examples of the ways in which the AAG is moving towards a Just Geography. We are changing the way in which AAG’s conferences interact with the community, becoming less extractive while moving towards long- and short-term community engagement. This goes beyond the customary, popular offerings among our members to encourage mentoring, career development, and professional celebration and recognition. This year AAG also moves to connect with our host community, for example by once again offering a land acknowledgment on our website and during the meeting, and for the first time providing free registration to any member of the 48 tribes and nations with ancestral ties to the land defined by the state boundaries of Colorado. Several participants have taken up this offer. AAG works with and will make a monetary contribution to the work of the Denver Indian Family Resource Center (DIFRC), which works to protect the rights and serve the needs of Native American and Alaskan Native families in the Denver area. The DIFRC will also be on a panel of other Indigenous-led Denver advocacy groups on Friday, March 24 at 11:45 AM MT to discuss Denver as an Indigenous place. This session is co-sponsored by the Indigenous People’s Specialty Group.
The move towards justness is everywhere in AAG 2023’s programming. As noted above, one in three sessions is devoted to our theme of Toward a More Just Geography. A focus on just geographies is also a factor in our choice of honorees such as this year’s Honorary Geographer, Rebecca Solnit, who has worked conscientiously from an intersectional view of activism for climate action. AAG has given one of its highest recognitions to a person whose work arguably centers on justness. You can see Ms. Solnit alongside AAG members Farhana Sultana and Edward Carr on Saturday, March 25, at 10:20 AM MT, discussing the new book to which Sultana and Carr are contributors, Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Narrative from Despair to Hope. Ms. Solnit will deliver the Honorary Geographer lecture on Sunday, March 26, at 11:45 AM MT. Local independent bookseller Boulder Book Store will sell copies of Ms. Solnit’s books onsite for signings.
Reducing our carbon footprint: Working with AAG’s Climate Action Task Force, we are applying the lessons we’ve learned to a less carbon-intensive meeting this year. The past three years have forced us to become more adept at organizing the virtual experience and now we are learning how to manage a more travel-intensive experience while continuing to reduce our carbon footprint. This is in line with a key commitment made by the AAG in 2020 to estimate and report the carbon footprint of the annual meetings, using the baselines that were established then. Our goal is to reduce the carbon footprint of our meeting by 45% by 2030, relative to 2010 values. Our meeting in Denver is likely to be on track for meeting that goal, something that unfortunately, is not as likely with our planned meeting in Honolulu. As laid out by AAG executive director Gary Langham recently, this is another aspect of the work we have been doing, which includes divesting from fossil fuels as well as making sustainable choices for our management and office space.
This year, AAG is investing significant resources in making the Denver meeting hybrid, increasing accessibility to members. At a time that many other organizations are pivoting back to in-person-only meetings, AAG has made a commitment to continue to offer virtual and hybrid experiences so that presenters and participants could take part without traveling to Denver, thereby increasing accessibility to the meeting. AAG has worked with other institutions to test “nodes,” the most active of which will be at Montreal, but there are others forming in other locations, such as UC-Fullerton in California. The organizers of these nodes are trailblazing for future meetings; as technology improves and costs drop over the years, we can look forward to these approaches becoming the norm for AAG meetings. Find out more about this year’s nodes.
Personal choices also matter. AAG is encouraging our meeting participants to make low-carbon travel choices to attend the meeting, and low-carbon transportation choices on the ground. We encourage you to signal us about your travel decisions using the #AAG4Earth hashtag, or to reach out to us at helloworld@aag.org.
All of these steps towards making a meaningful and memorable meeting, while small individually, move us along the path towards a Just Geography.
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 raphael [at] geog [dot] ucla [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.
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Stories
Wayfinding: Tracing Pandemic Geographies Across Time
Credit: U.S. Department of State
Before COVID-19 locked down the world, AAG member Melinda Laituri was a world traveler. As director of the Geospatial Centroid at Colorado State University and principal investigator for participatory mapping programs for the U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Geographer, she used technology to stay connected to the world: “I have been exploring the world at my fingertips through virtual travel to exotic locations” she writes at the beginning of the book she co-edited during COVID-19. “I have visited places I never thought to explore before—Chernobyl, Mars, and Iceland’s oldest shipwreck. It isn’t quite the same but does fill a bit of the void.”
Laituri also channeled her love of place and adventure into her work with the Department’s Cities’ Covid Mitigation Mapping (C2M2) program, working with three participatory mapping hubs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. While program coordination was virtual, the city-level projects were very much physical, or sometimes hybrid: six sites in Latin America, three in Africa, and three in Asia. Projects varied: an examination of the pandemic’s impacts on domestic violence in Peru; an assessment of second-order impacts of COVID-19 (education, economic, healthcare) in several African cities; a crowd-sourced health access app in Mongolia; and a participatory project to map the pandemic impacts on tourism-related businesses in Nepal.
The observations gained from this work are collected in The Geographies of COVID-19: Geospatial Stories of a Global Pandemic(Springer), a set of case studied co-edited with Robert B. Richardson and Junghwan Kim. The co-authors describe the spatialized impact of COVID-19 this way: “These geographies are located in both time and space, revealing impacts that are both immediate and long-term. The story of the pandemic is dynamic, in constant flux, and flush with ephemeral observations.”
In Nepal, Asia Hub partner Kathmandu Living Labs compiled extensive information from tourism-based businesses to map and analyze the impact of COVID-19 on their livelihoods.
One through-line of the case studies is how a large-scale event like COVID-19 reveals and exacerbates the inequities of societies around the world. Across scales, distances, and cultures, these inequities and impacts are “compounded by the government and social responses,” the team found, but also hold the key to “revealing how geography and geospatial technologies can contribute to future solutions and adaptations.”
Throughout their book, the editors consider the act and tools of mapping, and especially the dimensions introduced by live, dynamic, and interactive mapping tools, and cautioning the reader regarding the unintended consequences of decisions about such factors as data collection and scale. “Our stories are only as good as the data we have,” and the digital divide—uneven internet access, lack of access to phones and other devices–influences which data are included. “The data are constrained by what is collected (or not), how numbers are aggregated, the level of precision of data collection instruments, and algorithms. Maps and associated models are simplifications…”
Additionally, the book highlights the need for practitioners of many disciplines to pool their knowledge for cross-cutting solutions. Citing the work of the World Health Organization in identifying 15 international laboratories “that coordinate with national labs around the world to increase connectivity within the science community,” Laituri et al say that such efforts can go forward still more efficiently with the support of the virtual geography based on shared data and geospatial tools for place-based, data-driven decision-making. Our responsibility as geographers and geospatial students, practitioners, and scientists is to ensure grounded, ethical, and sound scientific approaches in addressing the profound problems we face,” they assert.
Last month, we examined the data for trends and indicators in terms of gender identity. This month, we look at how well graduation trends are doing in terms of representation of students across racial and ethnic groups that have been historically excluded from geography.
As President Marilyn Raphael noted in her February 2023 President’s column, “The [State of Geography] report confirms some of the concerns about our field’s lack of diversity, offers signs of change, and leaves us with important questions about the nature and constraints of the data,” which is drawn from the National Center for Education Statistics, Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) codes.
In the report and this article, AAG is using the term “historically excluded populations” to designate the students in these categories. American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, Student Visa Holder, Race/Ethnicity unknown, and Two or More Races. We also used the term to follow the practice of AAG’s JEDI committee, which uses the term intersectionally, acknowledging that multiple modes of discrimination can combine (e.g. racism, sexism, ableism, classism), and describing the persistent barriers of the discipline, be they formal or perceived:
“Geography is not perceived as a welcoming discipline for women, queer and trans people, oppressed racial/ethnic groups, and other individuals from historically excluded populations. There are several interconnected reasons for this. First, modern geography’s roots in white, Western, patriarchal, settler colonial, and cis-heteronormative understandings of the world mean that the discipline has long reflected and perpetuated systems of oppression. Second, there are systematic and structural barriers that limit the recruitment and retention of diverse faculty and students. Third, marginalized faculty and students do not necessarily see geography as relevant or reflective of their realities, and as a result, they do not see in it prospects for a well-defined, practical, and impactful career. Together, these elements create impressions of geography that range from antiquated to hostile. While these perceptions exist today, they should not mark geography’s future. Receptivity will only improve if we become intentional about embedding JEDI into standard practices within the AAG and the broader geography discipline.” [Source: AAG 3-Year Justice Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Plan, 2021]
The State of Geography report is among AAG’s efforts to embed JEDI into standard practices within our organization and to encourage their adoption throughout the discipline.
Signs of Promise
Even as growth in overall degree conferrals has dropped in geography for roughly the past decade, the graduation rate of students in historically excluded populations has grown during the same time. In fact, during the past 25 years, the percentage of degree-earning geography students who are from historically excluded populations has more than doubled, from 14.8% in 1994-1995 to 36.4% in 2020-2021. The trend is most pronounced in graduate studies, particularly PhD programs. Our analysis included student visa holders among the categories because NCES counts them among the race and ethnicity categories they track. This group of students makes up a large proportion of students at the graduate levels, and themselves form a diverse cohort of many racialized identities within and beyond an American context, although it is hard to identify specific racial or ethnic groups in this category.
At the bachelor’s degree level, the proportion of students in many racial or ethnic categories increased, with the greatest gains among students of more than one race and Latinx or Hispanic students. There was little growth in bachelor’s degree conferral among American Indian and Alaska Native students or Black/African American students.
In fact, there appears to be almost no growth in bachelor’s degree conferrals for Black students since 2010. Given total growth, the percentage appears to be declining for percent growth of Black students, a phenomenon that adversely affects the number of Black PhD graduates and, consequently, Black geography faculty.
Figure 22. Trends in Geography Bachelor’s Degrees Conferred by Race and Ethnicity
At the master’s and doctoral levels, U.S.-based diversity drops dramatically, while student visa holders become a significant proportion of degree recipients. The increase in student visa holders, proportional to other student groups, during the past decade suggests that international students–who often have quite different understandings and experiences of race—may be more attracted and welcomed to U.S. geography than U.S. students of color.
There appears to be an inverse correlation between the level of degree and the diversity of the students pursuing the degree. Diversity is greatest at the undergraduate level, drops at the master’s level, and drops still further at the doctoral level.
Figures 24 and 26: Trends in Geography Master’s and Doctoral Degrees by Race and Ethnicity
How Geography Compares Among Disciplines
Because geography is an interdisciplinary science, we compared student choices of major among several social science and physical science disciplines. As a graduate degree sought out by students from historically excluded populations, geography holds its own among the social sciences at the master’s level, with slightly better representation at the PhD level than most other social sciences (with the exception of economics). At the bachelor’s level, however, geography has a lower rate of representation among these students than most other social sciences, except for history.
Geography fares similarly to other physical sciences in the amount of representation from historically excluded groups in bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, and PhDs. Representation increases from bachelor’s to master’s to PhD.
Overall, geography is behind virtually all other fields of study we examined across all degree types, in terms of racial and ethnic representation. From 1997 to 2019, Jordan et al. (2021) found that “geography [doctorates] consistently trailed the social sciences and the academy,” a gap that has been widening. More than half of computer science degrees, to cite one example, are conferred on students from minoritized backgrounds—across all levels of degree. This indicator has relevance for GIS studies within geography: computer science and data analysis, perhaps data visualization, are a popular degree for students of many backgrounds, and GIS programs can leverage this popularity, combined with greater efforts to attract and retain students from diverse backgrounds.
Detail from Figure 20. Minoritized students (in red), as an overall proportion of bachelor’s degrees in (L to R) geography, business management and related services, and computer science.
Concluding Thoughts
The growth in geography degrees among students from historically excluded populations is good news for the discipline: it is they who have contributed any new, positive growth to the field in recent years. That growth is nowhere near the levels needed for full, representative equity, however. While it offers a signpost to a more diverse geography, the overall lack of diversity is also a reminder that we must redouble our efforts.
In developing the report, we encountered several unknowns, such as the “race/ethnicity unknown” category and the student visa category. As noted in our article on gender, qualitative information is also not available. Gaining qualitative insight is crucial because an increase in graduates from groups previously excluded does not mean that racial bias and inequality do not exist. Jordan et al. (2021) identify four drivers of inequity in doctorate programs:
lack of dedicated funding for underrepresented minority doctoral students,
minimal prior exposure to academic and professional geography,
In her 2002 article “Reflections on a White Discipline,” geographer Laura Pulido looks at her own experience as a student and faculty member of color within geography programs. Finding that “the study of race is both marginalized and fragmented within geography,” she ultimately moved from geography into a newly organized American studies program that acknowledged ethnicity and race. She writes, “Although other issues also existed, comfort and intellectual community were the key reasons I made the move.” These studies indicate that pragmatic factors such as funding and active recruitment should be coupled with a strong commitment and follow-through for the representation of many identities, and a welcoming and supportive intellectual environment for engaging critical questions around race, ethnicity, and identity.
As we previously noted in our article on gender identity and degree conferral, NCES data do not lend themselves to being examined intersectionally, that is, with an acknowledgment of the complex ways discrimination and marginalization can function across multiple identities. Separating out race and ethnicity from gender cannot be done: we are all a combination of various identities and experience our lives through the lenses of those identities, including our experience of exclusion. Quoting the JEDI Committee once again, “…there are systematic and structural barriers that limit the recruitment and retention of diverse faculty and students [and] marginalized faculty and students do not necessarily see geography as relevant or reflective of their realities, and as a result, they do not see in it prospects for a well-defined, practical, and impactful career.” Although the numbers indicate that more students of differing identities are finding their way to geography, especially for advanced degrees, we must find ways to build on this positive trend: to actively working toward structural change in the discipline and to find out more about what attracts students of differing identities and experiences to geography, and what contributes to their decision to pursue advanced study.
Get Involved in the Next State of Geography Report:
We look forward to further expanding on our findings in the State of Geography Report in the future, with data from a variety of sources, including NCES, AAG surveys, and AAG member expertise. We welcome questions, ideas, or suggestions about the findings at data@aag.org.
Peake, L.J. & England, Kim (2020). (What Geographers Should Know About) The State of U.S. and Canadian Academic Professional Associations’ Engagement with Mental Health Practices and Policies, The Professional Geographer, 72:1, 37-53, DOI: 10.1080/00330124.2019.1611455
Brinegar, S.J. (2001). Female Representation in the Discipline of Geography, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 25:3, 311-320, DOI: 10.1080/03098260120084395
Kinkaid, E. & Fritzsche, L. (2022). The Stories We Tell: Challenging Exclusionary Histories of Geography in U.S. Graduate Curriculum, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 112:8, 2469-2485, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2022.2072805
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William “Bill” Koelsch
William “Bill” Koelsch, 89, professor emeritus of geography, retired University historian, and a longtime activist for LBGTQ rights, died on Nov. 5, 2022.
Koelsch, who established the modern Clark Archives, was well known on campus as the author of the highly regarded “Clark University, 1887-1987: A Narrative History,” a chronicle of Clark’s first 100 years, researched and written over five years and published to coincide with the University’s centennial celebration in 1987. The volume graces bookshelves across campus and remains an invaluable repository of Clark’s early history.
In a 2012 story in Clark magazine, Koelsch recalled that he convinced then-President Mortimer Appley to grant him some time off from teaching to craft the book, which he insisted would be a robust, accurate, and honest accounting of Clark’s past.
“Non-Clark people are more interested in the University’s early years, and Clark people tend not to know about them,” he said. “I tried to get the record reasonably straight about those years. It wasn’t a public relations piece — I attempted to call the shots as I saw them.”
William Koelsch in the stacks of Goddard Library, Clark University
Koelsch scoured the academic landscape for sources. According to the story, in the 1970s, he’d crossed the country looking for original manuscripts related to early Clark, conducted interviews with former faculty and administrators, and culled from the unpublished memoirs of former presidents Howard Jefferson and Appley.
“By the time I wrote, I was in a secure position against anyone who might want to squawk about something,” he remembered. “I can defend every sentence using the backup material.”
He earned a bachelor’s degree from Bucknell University (1955), a master’s from Clark (1959), and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1966), and served several years in the U.S. Army Transportation Corps. He joined Clark as an assistant professor of geography in 1967 and later became a tenured professor known for his incisiveness, erudition, and wit.
“Bill was my first adviser when I entered Clark. He was a walking encyclopedia, but not in an intimidating manner,” recalled Jeremy Tasch, Ph.D. ’06, professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Planning at Towson University. “My classmates and I valued his long list of chronological reference lists he shared in his class on the history of geographic thought — he introduced all of us to Clarence Glacken. Because of Bill, I went into Cambridge to find ‘Traces on the Rhodian Shore’ — we weren’t using Amazon in those days. He was kind and gracious, quietly knowledgeable, and ready to give his time.”
Clark Geography Professor Rinku Roy Chowdhury told the Worcester Telegram & Gazette that when she was pursuing her doctorate at Clark, she took a course with Professor Koelsch, who created a “welcoming and fun space in a really, really intense Ph.D. program and department,” allowing the students to “establish rapport and camaraderie, not just with the professor, but with each other.”
Koelsch, who retired in 1998, moved to San Diego, where he wrote more than 20 scholarly articles and essays, including articles about G. Stanley Hall and about the influence that Jonas Clark’s strong abolitionist beliefs had on the formation of Clark University. His book “Geography and the Classical World: Unearthing Historical Geography’s Forgotten Past” was published in 2012.
He also crafted many longhand, meticulously worded letters to friends and Clark associates over the years, often alerting them to his latest work or to approaching Clark-related milestones.
Koelsch made a memorable return to Clark in 2019 to speak at the invitation of the late Professor Robert Tobin, who had organized an exhibition titled “Queering Clark.” The retired professor recounted his personal experience as a member of the “silent generation” of gay men who came out later in life, recalling that he wrote columns for Boston’s Gay Community News under the pseudonym “A. Nolder Gay.”
In 1975, Koelsch began teaching a course at Clark on the gay liberation movement. In 1982, when the HIV/AIDS crisis was dawning, he incorporated information on the disease into the syllabus of his course Health and Disease in the American Habitat and spoke about HIV/AIDS to church groups.
In his return visit, Koelsch cited reasons for optimism about the future of gay rights in the U.S., noting with satisfaction that same-sex couples can now marry and an openly gay soldier can serve in the U.S. military. “I never expected to see either of those things in my lifetime,” he marveled.
Koelsch’s papers regarding his activism are in the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. An oral history of his Army service is online at the Library of Congress.
He is survived by his partner of over 50 years, William Dennison.
AAG Letter to Members on the Forces that Shape Police Brutality
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Resources
On the Structural and Spatial Forces that Contribute to Police Brutality
Photograph entitled "Volunteer Bridge" by Tyre Nichols
The systemic forces and spatial conditions that shape police brutality, especially against Black people, are well documented by researchers in many disciplines, including geography.
In 2022, at least 1,192 people were killed by law enforcement officers in the U.S., the most of any year since at least 2013 (Mapping Police Violence project). As geographer, Rashad Shabazz has written, “Policing in the U.S. has, from its inception, treated Black people as domestic enemies.”
AAG is providing a resource list that brings together work by geographers and colleagues in other disciplines to illuminate how “police and policing [are] a multifaceted manifestation of state power, coercion, and territoriality” (Bloch, 2021). AAG members are committed to studying and working to change these structural issues in their work and lived experiences. Our list of resources is drawn in part from the list curated by the AAG Black Geographies Specialty Group. We also have created a list of Black Geographies articles from AAG journals, available with free access through December 2023.
Bloch, S. (2021). Police and policing in geography: From methods, to theory, to praxis. Geography Compass, March 2021, 15,3. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12555
Bloch, S. (2021) Aversive racism and community-instigated policing: The spatial politics of Nextdoor. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 10.1177/23996544211019754, 40, 1, (260-278).
Carby, H (1992). “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context.” Critical Inquiry 18: 739–55.
Hamilton, A.R. & Foote, K. (2018) Police Torture in Chicago: Theorizing Violence and Social Justice in a Racialized City, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108:2, 399-410, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2017.1402671
Herbert, S. (1996) The Normative Ordering of Police Territoriality: Making and Marking Space with the Los Angeles Police Department, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 86:3, 567-582, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8306.1996.tb01767.x
Jackson, A.N. (2022) “The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: A Spatial Analysis of Historical and Contemporary Incidents of Police Violence”, Leitz, L. (Ed.) Race and Space (Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Vol. 46), Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 65-86. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-786X20220000046004
Pauschinger, D. (2020). Working at the edge: Police, emotions and space in Rio de Janeiro. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(3), 510–527. https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544211019754
Ramírez, M. M. (2020). City as borderland: Gentrification and the policing of Black and Latinx geographies in Oakland. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(1), 147–166. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775819843
Radil, S. M., Dezzani, R. J., & McAden, L. D. (2017). Geographies of US police militarization and the role of the 1033 program. The Professional Geographer, 69(2), 203–213. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2016.1212666
Tulumello, S. & Iapaolo, Fabio (2022). Policing the future, disrupting urban policy today. Predictive policing, smart city, and urban policy in Memphis (TN), Urban Geography, 43:3, 448-469, https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2021.1887634
van Stapele, N. (2020). Police killings and the vicissitudes of borders and bounding orders in Mathare, Nairobi. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(3), 417–435. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775819884
Vigneswaran, D. (2014). The contours of disorder: Crime maps and territorial policing in South Africa. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(1), 91–107. https://doi.org/10.1068/d18311
Vitale, A. S. (2005). Innovation and institutionalization: Factors in the development of “Quality of Life” policing in New York City. Policing and Society, 15(2), 99–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/10439460500071754
Wall, T., & Linnemann, T. (2014). Staring down the state: Police power, visual economies, and the “war on cameras”. Crime, Media, Culture, 10(2), 133-149. https://doi.org/10.1177/174165901453142
Yarwood, R., & Paasche, T. (2015). The relational geographies of policing and security. Geography Compass, 9(6), 362–370. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12216
Report of the Metro Gang Strike Force Review Panel – Andrew Luger and John Engelhof “Drug Enforcement in Minority Communities: The Minneapolis Police Department” – Police Executive Research Forum / National Institute of Justice
On the Map: Denver’s Five Points and Whittier neighborhoods
Image of Robinson Atlas of the City of Denver (Plate 12). Source: Denver Public Library, Special Collections
By Sam Hinton with Lisa Schamess
Northeast of downtown Denver, the Five Points and Whittier neighborhoods are among the city’s oldest, the first to extend beyond Denver’s original Congressional Grant. As a longstanding center for African American life in Denver, as well as a hub for the Chicano Movement, these neighborhoods are a vital location in the city.
Five Points starts at 17th and Downing on the east edge and extends north along Downing to 38th Street. The Whittier neighborhood is less extensive, starting at 23rd and Downing Street and extending north until East Martin King, Jr. Boulevard. Established in the 1870s, Five Points was named after Denver’s diagonal downtown grid with a rectangular suburban grid, which meet at Washington Street, 27th Street, 26th Avenue, and Welton Street. Whittier Elementary School was named in honor of John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), an American poet and abolitionist.
The neighborhoods were and still are today dynamic and multi-cultural places. Many Latinx-Americans and Asian Americans work and reside in the area. While it was always historically a home to African Americans, increasing segregation in the 1920s resulted in more than 90% of Denver’s African American residents living in Five Points or Whittier during the mid-20th century.
Throughout the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, the area was also a significant cultural and entertainment destination. The area is home to Denver’s first urban park, Colorado’s oldest Black church, and Temple Emanuel, one of the state’s oldest synagogues. Jazz also runs strongly through Five Points and Whittier’s narrative. Sometimes called the “Harlem of the West,” the area was a popular stop for jazz stars like Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis. They played clubs like the Rossonian and the Rainbow Room, and Benny Hooper’s hotel. Today, the annual Five Points Jazz Festival and Juneteenth Music Festival are renowned.
The neighborhoods have a rich entrepreneurial history. For example, the Niederhut Carriage Company was a family-run business by brothers Henry and William Niederhut for a century, and one of the largest transportation manufacturing companies in Denver.
In 1920, Dr. Clarence Holmes founded a dental practice at 2602 Welton Street and was the first African American to join the Denver Dental Society. A graduate of Howard University in Washington, DC, he otherwise lived his entire life in Denver. He was born to a family that valued civic responsibility: his mother Mary Holmes was the first African American woman to run for the state legislature. Dr. Holmes helped found the Colorado-Wyoming branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His early years as the first Black dentist in Denver were “rough,” he said in 1973, with obstacles put in his path by segregation, individual racism and intimidation, and white supremacist forces in professional societies and businesses serving dentists. Hear Dr. Holmes offer his oral history to the Denver Public Library in 1973 (Content Warning: frank use of racist terminology).
Reverend David West Mallard owned multiple businesses including Mallard’s Grocery and Confectionery. Other notable businesses included Rice’s Tap Room and Oven, The Rhythm Records and Sporting Goods Shop, the American Woodmen’s Insurance Company, and Melvina’s Beauty Shop.
Niederhut Carriage Company circa 1900. Credit: Denver Public Library Special Collections
David and Virginia Mallard in front of their store, circa 1948, with an unidentified man. Credit: Denver Public Library Special Collections
Today, many descendants of the original Black residents no longer live in Five Points. Efforts to bring new life to the community have included a new urban rail line and the renovation of the Rossonian Hotel. These changes, however, have also accelerated gentrification, Nonetheless, the Five Points and Whittier remain an important touchpoint for Black and Latinx communities. The neighborhoods host many artists and are the center of several lively mural projects depicting their history and culture, such as La Serpienta Dorada and the Five Points Mural Gallery.
Artist Brian Doss at the annual Jazz Festival in Five Points. Credit: Kent Kanuse, Flickr.
Over the last few weeks I have been reading the AAG’s recently released report on the State of Geography. The report observes trends in post-secondary geography education in the United States over the period 1986-2021. These include trends across degree categories, and growth trends among students from populations historically excluded from the discipline. By historically excluded populations, I mean people who have been racialized/minoritized and excluded due to systems of white supremacy. The report confirms some of the concerns about our field’s lack of diversity, offers signs of change, and leaves us with important questions about the nature and constraints of the data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Here I highlight what I think are some of the important takeaways from this report.
What it reveals
A quick overview of the trends shows that the number of geography degrees grew quickly from the 1990s through 2012, but since then, that number has steadily decreased due largely to a decline in bachelor’s degrees. By comparison, masters’ and doctorate degrees have continued to grow. This negative trend in undergraduate geography degree conferral since 2012 reflects a broader downward trend across social sciences, unlike in physical sciences where fields like atmospheric science and conservation are both growing strongly. This is noteworthy because these fields are often found within or combined with geography departments.
Growth in women graduates across physical sciences, relative to geography
While the number of degrees conferred has fluctuated over the years, the field itself remains predominantly male and white, although women are making inroads at the graduate level. The strength of this finding is undermined by the binary representation of gender in NCES’s and other scientific institutions’ data collection. When I use the term “women” on its own here, I’m referring to a data category and not to individual or collective gender identities that the data do not reflect. With that said, the data show that people reported as women remain underrepresented in geography studies.They do have higher representation in graduate studies (particularly PhDs) than in bachelor’s programs, and a higher rate of growth in PhDs than in master’s or bachelor’s degrees. They also show more consistent positive growth in degree conferral than people identified as men. Overall, besides anthropology and sociology, geography is similar to other social sciences in gender makeup, remaining mostly identified as male.
It is encouraging to see that students in historically excluded populations appear to count for most of the new growth in the discipline, especially at the graduate level. Since 1994, growth in the number of geography degree conferrals has more than doubled among this population, and peopleidentifying as Hispanic or Latinx make up the most rapidly growing proportion at the bachelor’s degree level. Geography degrees are not conferred equitably at any level of the discipline. However, this population’s numbers have grown relative to the total number of combined geography degrees conferred. In fact,it appears that people from historically excluded populations are contributing to any growth that geography is experiencing. Despite this trend, representation in geography PhD degrees is similar to that of other higher education fields, lagging in bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Growth overall has not increased among African American, Native American, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander students in recent years.
What it does not reveal
The report gives a picture of the state of geography in the US but also raises questions about the data. The way in which the data were collected/organized limits what can be known. For example, the way the data are organized tends to sidestep intersectional understanding of the discipline and students’ paths through it. Separating out race and ethnicity from gender is a superficial exercise that does not reflect lived reality.
Interpretation of the data should consider that the emphasis on STEM education in the United States has coincided with a decline in social science and humanities majors. Did this affect students’ choice of a geography degree? Perhaps. Geography is not consistently considered a STEM field in US degree-giving institutions. Thus, the emphasis on STEM may mean that students seeking a science career might not major in geography at institutions where it is not considered STEM.Nonetheless, overall trends for master’s and PhD programs show us that geographers seem to be finding their way to the discipline after they earn other bachelor’s degrees.
We also know that the NCES data categories themselves have limitations, especially as geography is such an interdisciplinary field and so rapidly advancing in GIS and other technologies. Many geography programs, in fact, need to or decide to apply non-geography categories to courses and degree paths. In particular, it’s possible that many geography-related programs, (social sciences, environmental sciences, etc.) are reporting GIS degrees or those with heavy loads of GIS coursework under the Computer Science and IT code. The large number of GIS-centric programs in the new AAG Guide database, paired with relatively low numbers of cartography and GIScience degrees conferred, could be evidence of this.
Where to go from here
Studying degree conferrals alone gives us statistical insights that can create the foundation for understanding the discipline’s trends, but it also inspires more qualitative questions about how a geography program’s design, curriculum, approach to recruitment, and faculty/student support can contribute to attracting and retaining a wider variety of students. The AAG is aware of the need for data that have morecomprehensivecategories and go beyond the quantitative into factors that are more holistic. For example, the AAG is interested in pursuing data that will provide a more detailed picture of gender identities, racialized and ethnic identities, and the disciplinary experiences and conditions that students are encountering. Later this year we will be asking for the geography community’s input into these data. Please respond when you see the call.
I’d like to thank the AAG staff members who prepared the State of Geography report, notably Mikelle Benfield and Mark Revell, for their data analysis, visualizations, and insights.
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 raphael [at] geog [dot] ucla [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.
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Iman Smith is a junior at the University of Maryland, pursuing a B.S. in Geographical Sciences and a minor in Geographic Information Systems. Her areas of interest include agricultural monitoring and crop management, and global food security. In her spare time, Iman likes to travel, crochet, make pottery, and she also hosts a college radio show.
Allison Rivera is a senior at the University of Connecticut pursuing a B.S. in Geoscience and a minor in Geography. She is mostly interested in geomorphology and physical geography and is currently completing a senior thesis on such topics. After graduation, Allison hopes to attend graduate school and pursue further research in the field of geomorphology. In her spare time, she enjoys watching cartoons, going for walks, and reading.
Our annual meeting is just around the corner, and I am excited. This is our first opportunity to meet in person since 2019, and AAG members are showing up! In March, more than four thousand geographers are going to descend on Denver, CO, the Mile High City, bringing with them the “spirit of Geography” More than fifteen hundred geographers will join remotely. Together, this means that well over 50% of our membership will be gathering to share research, ideas, and catch up, with one another for our largest gathering since 2020.
