Perspectives

Where are GIScience Faculty Hired From?

Portion of word cloud graphic showing Wuhan University as the largest entity.

Analyzing Faculty Mobility and Research Themes Through Hiring Networks

The following Perspective is drawn from a paper currently under review at Cartography and Geographic Information Science journal. This research was supported by the CaGIS Rising Award and the GISphere project, which summarizes more than 400 GIS programs and faculty information globally.

By Yanbing Chen, University of Wisconsin, Madison and Yuhao Kang, University of Texas, Austin

Academia is profoundly shaped by the dynamics of faculty hiring networks, acting as a pathway for knowledge dissemination and collaborative research formation in higher education. With rapid technological advances and a surging demand for spatial analysis, GIScience is transforming research and industry alike, underscoring the need to examine how hiring practices influence academic networks and research trajectories. This study addresses the gap by analyzing data provided via the GISphere project (GISphere Institution Guide, 2023) on 946 GIScience faculty members from 384 universities across 27 countries. We employ network and word cloud analyses to demonstrate the connections between PhD-granting institutions and faculty affiliations, revealing global placement patterns, diversity in hiring trends, and the thematic evolution in GIScience research interests between year 1990 and 2024. These findings contribute to the broader discourse on faculty hiring (in)equities and provide insight into the formation of research clusters within the GIScience community.

The network analysis of GIScience faculty placements reveals that hiring is predominantly concentrated within the Global North. North America, Asia, and Europe collectively account for 92% of GIS faculty positions, with the United States (28.54%), China (26.74%), and the United Kingdom (8.35%) leading in faculty placements. The analysis shows that certain institutions play a dominant role in the GIS hiring network. For example, Wuhan University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of California Santa Barbara, The Ohio State University, and Peking University are responsible for 15.43% of all global GIS faculty placements (Figure 1). While faculty hiring in other fields, such as computer science and economics, follows a clear prestige-driven hierarchy (Clauset et al., 2015; Wapman et al., 2022), the GIS hiring network appears more decentralized, with a wider distribution of contributing institutions. However, this relative decentralization does not eliminate regional inequalities. The network structure reveals localized recruitment patterns within continents. For instance, North American GIS faculty often originate from U.S. or Canadian PhD programs, while European institutions tend to hire graduates from within Europe. This regional clustering reflects the limited cross-continental mobility of GIS faculty, likely influenced by geographic proximity, immigration policies, and reduced recruitment costs for regional candidates.

Word cloud graphic showing Wuhan University as the largest entity.
Figure 1. Network graph of global GIS faculty placement (n=946). Nodes represent universities, color-coded by country. Node size reflects the number of faculty produced, while edge thickness indicates the number of faculty movement between universities.

 

The diversity index refers to the proportion of faculty originating from a particular region relative to the total affiliated faculty within that same region. It examines regional disparities in hiring patterns at the continental, country, and institutional levels. At the continental level, North America has the lowest diversity index, with only 11.01% of GIS faculty holding PhDs from outside the continent (Figure 2). Asia (24.37%) and Oceania (64.00%) show higher cross-continental hiring, though often from neighboring regions or countries with historical ties. Europe reports 11.15% diversity overall, with nine countries having 0% diversity, as all GIS faculty obtained PhDs within Europe. The country-level diversity index highlights varying patterns of domestic retention. For example, in the United States, 87.70% of faculty obtained their PhD domestically, while China exhibits a similar pattern, with 79.45% of GIS faculty holding domestic PhDs. Conversely, Singapore and Thailand have the highest country-level diversity indices (100%), indicating reliance on external academic talent. At the institutional level, external recruitment is common. On average, 60.66% of GIS faculty at global universities were externally recruited. These trends suggest that while universities value external perspectives to promote intellectual diversity, internal recruitment practices persist in countries with smaller academic systems (Figure 3).

Faculty Hiring Networks are predominantly in the United States.
Figure 2. Faculty Hiring Networks in North America. The figure shows all GIS faculty currently employed in North American institutions and indicates whether their doctoral training was obtained in North American countries or other countries.

 

This chart shows that a total of 345 GIS faculty members are currently affiliated with institutions in North America. Of these, 88.99% obtained their PhDs in North America, 7.83% in Europe, 2.03% in Asia, 0.87% in Oceania, and 0.29% in Africa.
Figure 3: Marimekko chart visualizing the distribution of GIS faculty placements across four continents (North America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania) and their PhD origins. The X-axis represents the total number of current GIS faculty in each continent, while the Y-axis shows the percentage of faculty based on where they obtained their Ph.Ds. The width of each segment on the X-axis corresponds to the number of GIS faculty in that continent. Colored segments represent the proportion of faculty whose PhD origins are from different continents. For example, a total of 345 GIS faculty members are currently affiliated with institutions in North America. Of these, 88.99% obtained their PhDs in North America, 7.83% in Europe, 2.03% in Asia, 0.87% in Oceania, and 0.29% in Africa.

 

The findings of this study have important implications for GIScience education and hiring policies. The preference for internal recruitment at continental and country levels highlights the need to promote international mobility. Institutions should encourage greater international recruitment, particularly from underrepresented regions like Africa and South America, to diversify the pool of GIS scholars. The role of influential institutions in global GIS hiring also raises concerns about academic equity. While GIS faculty placement appears less hierarchical than in other fields, the concentration of placements within a small subset of universities highlights a potential inequity in access to faculty positions. Universities seeking to foster a more inclusive academic environment should consider promoting mobility pathways for PhD graduates from less influential institutions. In conclusion, hiring patterns and thematic shifts in GIScience highlight the importance of fostering a more inclusive, globalized GIS community, ensuring that ideas from across the world are equitably represented in GIS education and research.

 

References

Clauset, A., Samuel Arbesman, Daniel Larremore. (2015) Systematic inequality and hierarchy in faculty hiring networks. AAAS Science Advances, 12 Feb 2015, Vol 1, Issue 1. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1400005

Wapman, K.H., Sam Zhang, Aaron Clauset, Daniel B. Larremore. 2022. Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention. Nature 610, pp. 120–127. Access https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05222-x

Perspectives is a column intended to give AAG members an opportunity to share ideas relevant to the practice of geography. If you have an idea for a Perspective, see our guidelines for more information.

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President's Column

Welcoming a New President to AAG—Interview with Bill Moseley

Image of digital dots and lines forming a gavel on a desk. Credit: Conny Schneider, Unsplash
Credit: Conny Schneider, Unsplash

Photo of Patricia Ehrkamp

William MoseleyFor 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.

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Patricia Ehrkamp
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Perspectives

Care as Leadership: Sustaining and Strengthening Our Programs in a Time of Stress and Change

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By Ken Foote

Portrait of Ken FooteFor almost a quarter century, the AAG’s Geography Faculty Development Alliance (GFDA) and Healthy Departments Initiative (HDI) have provided support for our members, from those just getting started in their careers to those leading departments and programs. Summer workshops, symposia at national and regional meetings, webinars, and publications like Thriving in an Academic Career and Practicing Geography are all part of these efforts.

Fundamental to all these activities is the belief that caring for our community strengthens our community. Indeed, hundreds of our members have already benefited from the community-building activities the AAG supports, including those that focus on building mutual respect, empathy, trust, and shared responsibility for the health and progress of our field and all its members.

The need to reaffirm these values this year has been made imperative by rapid-fire policy changes at the national and state levels. These are already having profound impacts on geographical research and education at all levels. This impact has been especially hard on our undergraduate and graduate programs, where changing policies are affecting students, faculty, research, and teaching. This year’s workshop “Maintaining what matters: Strengthening your department in a time of rapid change” has been organized to help our community respond to these challenges by providing a forum for sharing concerns and strategies in a supportive setting. Sessions will touch on:

From crisis to courage: Creating a sustainable future for your department

Planning for improving our departments

Supporting international students

Academic freedom in the face of new, restrictive legislation,

Mentoring, promotion, and tenure in the current climate

Envisioning transformative GenEd curricula in challenging times

Scheduled online for June 23-24, starting at 11:00 a.m. ET, with panels, discussions, and interactive activities throughout each day. The program is free to all AAG members. Non-members pay $250.

Learn more and register

 

The GFDA and HD Organizing Committee

This year’s Department Leadership workshop has been developed by a capable and experienced organizing committee of leaders within their own institutions, in GFDA and HDI, and at AAG:

  • Patricia Ehrkamp, Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor, Professor of Geography, University of Kentucky, and 2024-2025 AAG President
  • Ken Foote, Deputy Head and Director of Urban and Community Studies, Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies, University of Connecticut, 2010-2011 AAG President
  • David Kaplan, Professor, Department of Geography, Kent State University, 2018-2019 AAG President
  • Rebecca Lave, Associate Dean for Social and Historical Sciences, Professor, Geography, Indiana University-Bloomington, 2024-2025 AAG President
  • Shannon O’Lear, Joint appointment with Environmental Studies Program, Professor, KU Chancellors Club Teaching Professor 2024-2029, University of Kansas
  • Risha RaQuelle, Chief Strategy Officer, AAG

For questions or further guidance about any of these opportunities, please email [email protected].

Ken Foote is a member of the Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies at University of Connecticut. A past president, longtime member, and Fellow of AAG, he founded the Geography Faculty Development Alliance in 2003.

The AAG Culture of Care column is an outreach initiative by the AAG JEDI Committee. Don’t forget to sign up for JEDI Office Hours. The current theme of Office Hours is An Ethos of Care in the Research Enterprise.

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Resources

AAG Journal Articles on Queer and Trans Geographies

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In celebration of Pride 2025, AAG is offering free access to these articles on queer and trans geographies from June 1 until July 15, 2025. These articles are available for download at the links listed below.

To find out more about LGBT2QIA+ geographies, visit the AAG Queer and Trans Geographies Specialty Group.

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Lisa Schamess
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President's Column

Staying Engaged

Attendees explore a giant map of Michigan displayed in the Huntington Center atrium during AAG 2025 in Detroit

Photo of Patricia Ehrkamp

This year’s Annual Meeting in Detroit provided a welcome opportunity to meet up with geographers, learn about their scholarship, make space for conversations about our discipline, generate new ideas, and also address the challenges brought about by the rapidly shifting political climate in the United States. News about looming travel bans led some of our members to change their plans to travel to Detroit, but our ongoing commitment to offering hybrid meeting possibilities allowed AAG staff to pivot, switch registrations to virtual participation, and convert sessions to hybrid format on very short notice, occasionally within a couple of hours. Numerous sessions addressed our collective challenges, including broader attacks on science, research funding, and funding for education. Despite these challenges, we also took the time to celebrate geography, including our colleagues who won awards and honors by the AAG and by our specialty groups. Gathering in Detroit felt energizing and restorative, as I’ve heard from many of you who reached out. It was great to be in the company of geographers who do amazing work in research, education, and practice—who make spaces of possibility, despite the times.

The work of the AAG does not stop when our Annual Meetings end, however. And it is my hope that we can carry the positive energy from our last gathering into the next several months to support our work as geographers, and on behalf of geography. As we have returned to our home institutions, we continue to collaborate with institutional alliances, and to build new coalitions with other professional and scientific organizations to represent the interests of geographers. AAG’s Geography Faculty Development Alliance is getting ready for another set of virtual summer workshops for Early Career Faculty, as well as workshops for Department Leaders. Both these workshops will take place in June. And individual specialty groups offer regular writing group meetups via Zoom, or early career peer review workshops throughout the year. Our work at AAG goes on year-round, and I am especially grateful for the work of the JEDI committee, which has gone above and beyond to compile resources for our members, and has established office hours to hear members’ concerns.

I have learned and deeply appreciate our collective commitments to strengthening our discipline and creating an association that is able to face the challenges of our present and future. We cannot do this work without our members!

 

As my time as AAG President is drawing to a close, I wanted to take this opportunity to invite and encourage you to stay engaged—or to become more regularly involved with AAG. My service as AAG President has taught me the importance of volunteer work for our organization, and the value of working with colleagues as we continue to stand by our commitments to broaden the tent of geography. Serving on AAG’s Council has been an honor and an education. I have learned so much from my colleagues on Council, including about their areas of expertise, the breadth of contributions that our discipline makes to knowledge production, and the uneven challenges that geographers contend with across a variety of institutions and careers. AAG’s Student Councilors, in particular, have made sure that the challenges of early career geographers remain front and center in our conversations; the Student Day at our Annual Meeting is one of the reflections of their work. Beyond Council meetings, I was able to attend several of AAG’s regional division conferences that brought home the uneven geographies of demographic change as well as the challenges to funding, to our classrooms, and to academic freedom. And I have learned and deeply appreciate our collective commitments to strengthening our discipline and creating an association that is able to face the challenges of our present and future. We cannot do this work without our members!

How to Get More Involved in AAG

There are multiple ways of getting involved with AAG, for example, by running for office as National Councilor or Student Councilor, engaging through your regional division as regional councilor, or running as vice-president/president of a regional division or of our national association. In my October 2024 column, I introduced AAG’s headquarters and sketched out AAG’s governance structure, including the AAG Council that serves as the governing board of our 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. AAG Council is responsible for the financial health and stability of our organization, makes decisions on behalf of all our members, and providing guidance for departments, including through our Statement on Professional Ethics for geography practitioners and publishing best practices for evaluating Public and Engaged Scholarship in different institutions. As the elected governing body of the AAG, Council represents our members and their collective interests, and advocates on behalf of our discipline as a whole.

There are other ways of being involved with AAG, of course. Many of you already serve on the boards of specialty and affinity groups, or you are active in your regional divisions by serving on boards, organizing sessions, workshops, and/or field trips for the fall meetings. In addition to these, AAG has a number of standing committees (such as the JEDI committee) that serve in advisory function to Council, for example on finances or our publications. All committees support our mission as a professional and educational association, and all of our standing and elected committees generally need geographers who are willing to serve. One of the reasons why we were able to seamlessly convert sessions to hybrid format in Detroit on short notice is a direct outcome of the Climate Action Committee’s work over the years. Originating as a task force in 2019, the CAC’s actions and advice to AAG Council has cemented AAG’s commitment to hybrid Annual Meeting formats in efforts to meet our goals of significantly reducing AAG’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions.

As we look forward to summer and fall, you will be seeing calls for nominations for various committees whose members are elected, including the Nominating Committee, and the Honors Committees. The Nominating Committee works to put together the slate of talented candidates willing to serve for the AAG’s highest offices, and the Honors Committee has the difficult—if fun—task to select nominees for AAG’s various honors. Other committees are appointed. If you are approached, please consider serving. Or nominate yourself. Being involved with AAG is a highly rewarding experience. Serving our community of geographers is part and parcel of building a stronger community of geographers—which I find critically important in these challenging times.

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.

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Patricia Ehrkamp
Patricia Ehrkamp

Brian Berry

On January 2, 2025, Dr. Brian Berry passed away at the age of 90. Renowned for his influential work in urban and regional research, he was also a past AAG president (1978-79).

Berry was born in Sedgely, Staffordshire, United Kingdom on February 16, 1934. He graduated from University College, London, with a B.Sc. in Economics with first class honors in 1955. He was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Washington, where he completed an M.A. in 1956, and a Ph.D. in 1958, studying under noted geographer and leader of the quantitative revolution, William Garrison, in the Department of Geography.

Upon completing his Ph.D., he began his career, which spanned more than six decades. In 1958 he was named the Irving B. Harris Professor of Urban Geography, chairman of geography and director of the Center for Urban Studies at the University of Chicago. Berry’s early spatial analytic research helped spark the scientific revolution that occurred in geography and urban studies in the 1960s, making him the world’s most frequently cited geographer for more than 25 years. He refined the concept of “central place theory” and laid the foundations of analytic urban geography, spatial analysis, and of geographic information science.

In 1975, Berry was the youngest social scientist ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He subsequently was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the British Academy. From 1976 to 1981, Berry joined Harvard University where he served as the Frank Backus Williams Professor of City and Regional Planning, chair of the Ph.D. Program in Urban Planning, director of the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis, and a faculty fellow of the Institute for International Development. He was appointed University Professor of Urban Studies and Public Policy and dean of the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, until he joined the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) in 1986.

At UTD, Berry became the first director of the Bruton Center for Development Studies. In 2005, he was appointed dean of what was then the School of Social Sciences before he engineered its transformation into the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences (EPPS).

Among his many accolades, Berry was the 1978-79 President of the Association of American Geographers. In 1988, he was also awarded the Victoria Meda, the Royal Geographical Society’s highest honor, and the Vautrin Lud Prize — considered the “Nobel Prize for Geography” — in 2005. He also earned the Kondratieff Medal from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2017 and the Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography from the American Association of Geographers in 2020. Most recently, in 2021, Berry earned the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science Research Award. The award recognized Berry’s early research on geographic information systems — specifically his conceptualization of the geographic matrix in 1964 — that continues to shape practice and to ensure conceptual and functional linkages between geographic information science technique and the field’s intellectual core.

Although Berry authored over 550 books and articles, he is most proud of being the advisor to more than 150 Ph.D. students and has served on an equal number of other doctoral committees. Many of his students have gone on to successful academic and professional careers in their own right.

He also has been an active family historian and genealogist, with many additional publications to his name, most recently delving into genetic genealogy. Brian retired from active academic life to become a “gentleman rancher” in 2020. Brian is survived by his wife, Janet (Shapley) Berry; son, Duncan J. Berry; and daughter, Diane Berry Yakel.

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Perspectives

JEDI Is More than an Acronym

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By Jenna Loyd, JEDI Committee Chair

Jenna Loyd

Justice. Equity. Diversity. Inclusion. These words animate the work of the AAG committee going under the acronym JEDI. These words represent values that are enshrined in AAG’s Statement of Professional Ethics, whose second paragraph reads:

Our discipline of geography is stronger when we uphold equity, human rights, and educational freedom across the breadth of geographic inquiry. We appreciate the diversity of our members’ experiences and backgrounds, as well as the broad variety of ideas and approaches to geographic knowledge production.

When I joined the JEDI Committee in 2023, DEI already had assumed a prominent place in the campus culture wars along with the distortion of critical race theory (CRT). Since then, these acronyms have been unmoored from the meanings found in the scholarly history of critical race theory and social movement histories of the struggles against racial, gender, and disability discrimination. DEI and CRT came to mean reverse discrimination and indoctrination, arguments that situated its proponents on the right side of history and validated their efforts to dismantle it. Since 2023, 19 anti-DEI bills have become law across seven states, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education; another 75 have failed or been tabled. Related pieces of legislation have passed restricting what can be taught in classrooms.

These efforts became an opening salvo in the even broader attacks on higher education and research we are living through right now. Some universities, academic associations, and research nonprofits have scrubbed their websites of DEI. The AAG has not, nor does it intend to do so. In February, the JEDI Committee reiterated its commitments to its principles and reaffirmed the AAG’s 2023 statements of support of educational freedom, critical geography and the well-being of LGBT2QIA+ people, and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).

We are not backing down because JEDI is more than an acronym. When I was first learning this committee’s history, Meghan Cope explained to me that justice was an important principle informing its initiatives. Justice has more than one meaning for our discipline, a concept that often provides a way of linking issues together, from racial justice to economic justice, environmental justice, disability justice, climate justice, and more. To me, it informs why equity would be a value and suggests that inclusion itself should be just. In the introduction to their new edited collection, How to Foster Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice in Geography, Guo Chen and LaToya Eaves recount how decades of collective efforts to broaden the scope and societal relevance of geographic inquiry have gone hand in hand with criticisms of the discipline’s systematic forms of exclusion. For Chen and Eaves, our embrace of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion as interconnected values serves to “enrich the theories and practices that help more and more geographers feel at home and foster passion and inquiry in creating a vibrant world discipline for current and future generations of geographers” (2024, 3-4).

More than an acronym, [TLC-GRAM is] a mnemonic reminding us that care and relationships should guide transformative work in the AAG, departments, and specialty groups.

For just inclusion of groups of people who’ve been neglected or excluded from the discipline, we need to actively change the structure of our collective work as geographers. And this takes cultivating a culture of care. Over the first two years of the JEDI Committee’s existence, the committee worked with over 50 members in seven working groups to synthesize 32 points of its strategic plan into a useable framework for change shorthanded as TLC-GRAM. Like the idea that justice is indivisible, each of the elements of Training, Listening, Communications, Governance, Reports, Advocacy, and Membership are interconnected. More than an acronym, it’s a mnemonic reminding us that care and relationships should guide transformative work in the AAG, departments, and specialty groups. AAG’s Chief Strategy Officer, Risha RaQuelle, has provided invaluable leadership for this work. She launched the beta version of the toolkit at the 2024 GFDA meeting; you can read her overview of the TLC-GRAM here and discussion of how care can inform research here. At a session last month in Detroit, leadership of the Energy and Environment Specialty Group walked through how they had put the toolkit to work in their specialty group and the Committee will be finalizing materials for its use this academic year.

I think part of why JEDI work continues undiminished in the AAG is because of the decades of cultivating principles of justice as interconnected. Another reason is the longstanding engagement with care ethics, articulated by AAG President Victoria Lawson in 2005. Geography as a discipline and AAG as an association are filled with members, staff, and leadership who want our profession and field of inquiry to hold true to justice and care, even as we debate and expand what these terms mean. We know that we are responsible for making this space as a collective effort. What we do will continue to be debated and will continue to evolve. And we do this because we think the space we make to do critical work with each other is worth defending.

The AAG Culture of Care column is an outreach initiative by the AAG JEDI Committee. Don’t forget to sign up for JEDI Office Hours. The current theme of Office Hours is An Ethos of Care in the Research Enterprise.

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AAG Staff
AAG Staff

Ross MacKinnon

Ross MacKinnon, scholar and administrative leader at UConn, SUNY-Buffalo, and the University of Toronto, passed away from pancreatic cancer at his home in Sonoma, California, surrounded by family, on Jan. 27, 2025, at the age of 82.

As a geographer, he was well-versed in the development of mathematical models for geographical systems, and he made particular contributions to geography through the application of these models to the fields of transportation and migration.

Ross grew up in New Westminster, Trail, and Kelowna, British Columbia. He earned a bachelor’s degree in geography from the University of British Columbia in 1964. He was a Woodrow Wilson Scholar, earning a Master of Science in geography from Northwestern University in 1966, and a Ph.D. in geography from Northwestern University in 1968. He was a faculty member of the University of Toronto’s geography department, where he became a Director of Graduate Studies. He joined SUNY-Buffalo in 1976 as Chair of the geography department and later became Dean of Social Sciences. He joined UConn as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 1996 until he retired in 2008. He championed major investments in hiring, research, academic programing, and most importantly … people.

From Dr. Peter A. Rogerson, one of Dr. MacKinnon’s advisees at SUNY-Buffalo:

Ross MacKinnon was my Ph.D. advisor, and I’ll begin by literally “turning back the clock.”  Somewhat more than midway through my dissertation defense, I made a statement to the effect that I was running out of time. Ross immediately got up, went over to the wall clock, and turned the hand back ten minutes. That is just a small story hinting at the many ways that he showed his support over the years. He was proactive when it came to students and recruitment — while I was taking a gap year after doing my M.A. with him at the University of Toronto, he wrote to me, convincing me to do my Ph.D. at Buffalo, where he was beginning to build the department in his new role as Chair. During my first AAG, he and I split the presentation of our joint paper. Aside from recalling how much my knees were shaking, I can now recall all of his colleagues he introduced me to — and although I didn’t have a clue at the time, I now recognize how this was one of the most important moments in my career. Over time I saw the time he spent with students, the care he took with them, and how important his mentorship was to their careers. A long line of his students and eventual professors went on to have very successful careers.

One of his traits that I always marveled at was his ability to “cut to the chase.”  As a student this took the form of his knowing precisely what to ask a student.  He knew what you didn’t know and needed to know, and he was unequaled in asking exactly the right question at the right time, to push you a little further. Later on, when I saw him in his roles as Chair and Dean, this took the form of sizing up both current and prospective faculty.  He simply had an uncanny knack for seeing precisely how both personality and talent could or could not contribute to a department or program.

He saw to all aspects of a department — seeing to it that we not only had excellent personnel, but a vibrant social life with picnics, happy hours, and the like. Oh, and by the way, at one of those department picnics, while playing the outfield in the annual softball game, I tried to gun down a runner at second base.  When I started my throw, I forgot that Ross was playing second base, and it was only while the ball was in mid-flight that I realized I should have made a softer throw. My last recollection was going to some emergency room or urgent care to see how his fingers were doing and thinking that this was not a good thing to do to your advisor.

Shortly before I arrived at Buffalo, budget cuts in the SUNY system led to very serious consideration of eliminating the department.  It is difficult to capture here, but his efforts were absolutely crucial and pivotal in keeping the department alive.

He was also central to putting the department on the road to prominence (and in fact it would not be an exaggeration to say that he did this single-handedly). Part of this was attributable to his vision and his judge of talent and promise, and part was due to his vision of, and his work toward a successful bid to bring the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) to Buffalo.

Ross MacKinnon was a “quick study” when it came to sizing up people’s academic potential, their personalities, and their current or potential contributions to a department or program. His sharp wit and sense of humor gave him the ability to make lightning-quick comments about how someone could or could not help a program, might or might not become a star in the discipline, etc. Listening to his evaluations often left one both laughing at the humor and impressed with his assessment, as well as being in awe of how he could combine the two so quickly. All of this made him a fantastic mentor, colleague, Chair, Dean, and friend.

Ross was a proud Canadian and naturalized U.S. citizen. He loved travel, a good meal with friends, live jazz, contemporary painting, new plays, his dog, and the Buffalo Bills. He had a great sense of humor and was quick with encouragement.

He is survived by his wife, Marilyn Hoskin, and his two daughters, Pam and Caroline MacKinnon.

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Resources

AAG JEDI Committee Resources for Defending Geographic Inquiry and Our Communities

Key values and ethical commitments held by geographers, including those encapsulated in the AAG Statement of Professional Ethics, have been challenged by presidential executive orders, Dear Colleague letters, and other executive branch actions. This resource guide aims to gather a usable set of materials to inform action across a range of issues and groups that have been directly targeted. Two throughlines in these documents are recommendations: 1) to refuse anticipatory obedience and its iterations of over-compliance or anticipatory compliance; and 2) to organize to assert rights as part of defending our communities.

We will add to and update with new material. Please message [email protected] with resources you would like to recommend.

Defending Immigrants

Statements

Organizing Networks & Resources

Defending JEDI

Statements, Research

Organizing Networks & Resources

Defending Academic & Scientific Inquiry

Statements, Research

Organizing Networks & Resources

Defending LGBTQ+ People

Statements, Research

Organizing Networks & Resources

Data Repositories for Federal Agency Data

Digital Security

Statements, Research

Addressing Transnational Repression on Campuses in the United States. 2024. Freedom House

Organizing Networks & Resources

Legal Defense & Liability Insurance

Statements

(Check back for resources to be added)

Organizing Networks & Resources

Mental Health

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AAG Staff
AAG Staff
President's Column

Meeting in Detroit, and Meeting the Moment

Word cloud created by Patricia Ehrkamp to complement her column including the major words: Detroit; movements; agency; communities; land; talk; indigenous; reparations; urban; returns; black; anishinaabe; ways; etc.

Photo of Patricia Ehrkamp

When I first considered “Making Spaces of Possibility” as the theme for our 2025 Annual Meeting, it would have been difficult to imagine how much the world of geography and higher education would be in turmoil by now. Rapid policy shifts in the U.S. with regard to funding for geographic research and the scientific enterprise more broadly, restrictions on academic freedom and the topics we can teach, drastic challenges to the institutions of democracy, and the looming upheaval in geopolitical alliances in the world were not what I anticipated when envisioning our Annual Meeting this year. Alas, this is where we find ourselves.

As our conference in Detroit is approaching, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the importance of such a gathering as geography scholars, educators, and practitioners come together. We do so in order to exchange scholarly findings and insights, think about geographic futures, and collectively contribute to geographic knowledge production. Gathering, collaborating, thinking, debating—sometimes fiercely, and organizing for better futures strike me as critically important in the current moment, a moment that seems intent on undermining the very foundations and principles of our work. My hope is that gathering in Detroit will energize us and strengthen our commitments to working toward more equitable futures. The Annual Meeting program is a testament to these commitments, and I am very much looking forward to learning from and with geographers later this month.

Speakers in this year’s presidential plenary will address how geographers and interdisciplinary scholars may contribute to Making Spaces of Possibility, spaces that allow for imagining and enacting more equitable worlds, that are tuned into local and global processes, and respect and validate the experiences of diverse residents, advocates, and activists. Drawing on their respective fields of expertise, Kyle T. Mays, Natasha Myhal, and Jessi Quizar take on these questions with regard to racial capitalism, land, sovereignty, ecological restoration, and repair. Thinking through questions of reparations, ecological restoration, and care, as these talks will do, the speakers highlight how geographers can engage in meaningful scholarship and political actions that affect positive change. Their scholarship also reminds us that organizing for change takes time, energy, and dedication. I look forward to hearing our speakers’ arguments in depth, and to the questions and conversations that these talks will spark.

After all, geographers have been making spaces of possibility for a long time. Whether these are our classroom spaces, research labs, reading groups, activism, or community mapping efforts (we honor Gwendolyn Warren this year for her innovation and advocacy in this field!) As an institution, the AAG has been fostering geographic research, education, and geographic careers for over 120 years, through journal publications, annual and regional meetings, and advocacy on behalf of our discipline and members. Along the way, our organization has evolved—for the better, as far as I’m concerned. We have been working toward broadening the tent of geography, insisted on valuing different viewpoints, affirming different research approaches and a broad range of topics, and considering how, as geographers, we can continue to make significant contributions to making this world a better place for all its inhabitants. At the same time, we have created more inclusive and accessible spaces for participating in meetings and the discipline more broadly.

While we prepare for the Annual Meeting, write our talks, and make plans to meet up with colleagues, collaborators, and friends, I also wanted to highlight opportunities for taking immediate action. If you are able to and feel so inclined, please join this week’s Stand Up For Science March in Washington DC or the numerous local events across the U.S. And please continue to call your elected representatives. There are numerous good reasons to urge Congress to protect NOAA, restore funding for science and/or for international education and exchange programs such as Fulbright, which have long been supporting geographers, geographic research, and teaching.

I also wanted to highlight opportunities for taking immediate action. If you are able to and feel so inclined, please join this week’s Stand Up For Science March in Washington DC or the numerous local events across the U.S. And please continue to call your elected representatives.

Over the past few weeks, AAG has continued to build coalitions with other scientific and professional organizations. We have signed on to several initiatives, including a letter to Congress to restore access to Federal public data. Earlier this week, AAG was one of 48 professional organizations to call on Congress to protect the future of science. The full letter, representing 100,000 scientists and experts through their professional organizations, is available here. Similarly, just last week AAG signed on alongside more than 550 organizations to urge Congress to protect the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (sign-ons are still being accepted). The AAG JEDI Committee issued a confirmation last week that the work to uphold diversity, equity, and inclusion in geography will continue. And of course, we will continue to champion NSF and work toward restoring funding and staff to the Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences Program.

As important as these activities are in the short term, we cannot stop there. One of the priorities for AAG’s next 10-year long-term plan is to strengthen support for geography departments. Among other ideas, we’re working on expanding our year-round offers of online workshops and webinars, including those for department leaders. All of these new plans will take some time to map out and implement. I am heartened to see, however, that our colleagues are already thinking about the consequences of policy shifts. Beth Mitchneck and Stephanie A. Goodwin encourage departments and institutions to consider amending tenure and promotion rules for early career scholars who experience research delays or interruptions while lawsuits and advocacy for restoring funding play out. It is wonderful to see that their arguments build on AAG’s JEDI and advocacy work, and research collaborations fostered by AAG.

As we return to Detroit, I very much hope that the meeting will energize us, allow us to build better support structures, and generate a variety of ideas and conversations about geography, catalyze future research, and inspire geographers to continue making spaces of possibility. I look forward to seeing many of you there.

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.

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Patricia Ehrkamp
Patricia Ehrkamp