News

The Geographies of New York Seltzer

September 18, 2026

To discover the joys and journeys of one of the world’s most iconic effervescent drinks, you first need to walk through the modern Jewish diaspora. Starting in the mineral spa town of Selters in German’s Rhineland, the naturally carbonated waters gave the drink its name sometime in the 18^th century. Rich in sodium bicarbonate, calcium, magnesium and potassium, the waters of Selters were known for their restorative properties. The town is also in the Rhine River watershed, near the cities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, known as ShUM (שו”ם ), “the cradle of Ashkenazic Judaism,” when the drink first became popular. Selters provides one connection to the traditional Jewish involvement with seltzer as a health drink, and later a drink of celebration and merriment.

Early claims that seltzer is antibacterial are not untrue: the carbonic acid in fizzy water does lower pH and can kill some bacteria. The health benefits of naturally bubbly mineral springs such as Selters prompted scientists to perfect a human-made version by forcing gaseous carbon dioxide into water. The first to do this was Englishman Joseph Priestley in 1767. By 1783, enthusiasm for seltzer inspired watchmaker Johann Jacob Schweppe to found his company of the same name (yes, that Schweppe’s) in Geneva, Switzerland. He invented a revolutionary, crank-operated compression pump, perfected later by French inventors as the soda siphon, which works by being pressed instead of cranked.

A Carbonated Diaspora

Home to the largest single Jewish population in the world, just under 3 million regionwide, New York City long attracted Jewish migration, including the large population of Sephardic Jews from Brazil in in the 1650s during the Portuguese Inquisition. Mass in-migration accelerated from the 1830s to the late 19^th century, especially after Czar Alexander II was assassinated in Russia, setting off a wave of pogroms (targeted ethnic violence against Jews) across Europe. That exodus is the one largely responsible for the Jewish food and food businesses that make New York famous now for its bagels, pickles, creamed herring, and other delights, including seltzer.

Map of Lower East Side of New York City — 1899 map drawn by poverty reformer Jacob Riis showing the ethnic neighborhoods of the Lower East Side, where Jewish immigrants lived alongside many other new Americans. Image in the public domain.

Sometimes affectionately called Jewish Champagne, seltzer wasn’t just a luxury item. As the tenement districts grew overcrowded in the late 19^th century, poverty and health hazards increased. Seltzer became an important way to avoid contaminated drinking water, and to have something elegant on a budget. The birth of the New York Egg Cream is attributed to Jewish candystore owner Louis Auster, probably in Brooklyn. Despite its name, there are no eggs or cream in it, just milk, chocolate syrup, and seltzer.

Anita Garlick recalls her childhood and the sought-after treat of the egg cream in the Jewish community of Brownsville, Brooklyn in the 1930s:

By the 1920s, all of New York had discovered seltzer, and kept the deliverymen busy dropping off crates of the stuff for use in soda fountains and cocktails. At one point, there were hundreds of routes and thousands of destinations throughout the five boroughs, particularly in the Lower East Side and downtown areas spanning from Canal Street up to 30th Street. Many bottling companies were in Brooklyn in neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Canarsie, and Cypress Hills. But formal maps of the routes don’t exist, because “seltzer men” or syphoners operated independently, memorizing their routes or keeping them in private logbooks.

Seltzer delivery was a tough job, especially in buildings with no doormen or elevators. Manufacturing hubs were small-scale, trucks were initially horsedrawn, and some deliveries might even be made by bicycle for the tightest street grids.

Wise guy, eh?

New York seltzer took on a cultural life of its own. During Prohibition, many bars opened nonalcoholic soda fountains to survive. Even after repeal in 1933, seltzer reigned supreme, as the tricks and craft of the underground surfaced in new cocktail innovations.

In Hollywood, the spraying seltzer bottle became a recurring gag in movies, rivaling the classic cream pie in the face for screentime. Popularized by comedy acts like The Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges (incidentally, all of them Jewish immigrants or first-generation Jewish Americans), the lowly seltzer bottle because a sturdy weapon of mirth.

But by the 1940s the seltzer trade was waning, By the 1970s, it was nearly extinct. Hand-delivered seltzer from pressurized bottles disappeared for a variety of reasons, at least one of them surprising: The world’s seltzer bottle manufacturers were primarily in Czechoslovakia, and their factories were destroyed during World War II. The pressure to produce war materials effectively shut down American bottle production. The death blow was the widescale production of flavored sodas for soda fountains and bottled seltzer for groceries stores that left the industry flat.

The Last Seltzer Company in New York

In 2017, Eli Miller, one of New York’s last seltzer man, passed his route on to Alex Gomberg, a third-generation member of a seltzer family in Brooklyn. Gomburg’s Brooklyn Seltzer Boys has taken over the remnants of this once thriving business. Gomberg also cofounded the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum with co-curator Barry Joseph; the two sponsor festivals, virtual tours, and egg cream parties.

New York seltzer is made with New York tap water (some of the world’s best municipal water), from the Catskill and Delaware watersheds. Filtered through charcoal, sand, and paper, the water is then chilled to 42 degrees and mixed in a carbonator where liquid CO2 is introduced.

“We dial the gas up to 60 pounds of pressure; that’s a lot of pressure,” Gomberg told an interviewer from The Tablet. “You need a thick bottle.” Gomburg’s business, which was founded by his great-grandfather Moe in 1953, still uses the same 26-ounce bottles in blue, green, and clear glass, many decades old and hand-blown in Czechoslovakia. The metal siphons that cap the bottles are scarce, and Gomburg often resorts to piecing together two imperfect sets to make a new one. Although this creates a—forgive me—bottleneck in serving new customers, there are no shortcuts possible to the real thing.

“Good seltzer should hurt — it should be carbonated enough that it kind of stings the back of your throat,” says Gomburg. And there’s only one way to make it that way: with an old-fashioned siphon in an old glass seltzer bottle.

New Life in Old Places

The region where seltzer was born is making a comeback. In 2021, the ShUM area of the Rhineland was placed on the UNESCO World Heritage List for its Jewish history and culture. Although the Jewish population of these small cities is less than 50% what it was before the Holocaust, there is hope that additional attention and resources can help restore and preserve vital Jewish cultural resources and culture, notably the still-active synagogues in the region, including the world-famous synagogue of Worms, destroyed by the Nazis in 1938 and since magnificently restored.

The perfection and export of seltzer in the Jewish Diaspora is a very small part of the 1,000-year history of ShUM, a region better known for scholarship, religion, and culture than it is for bubbly water. But so much of culture is carried in food, in celebration, and in the day-to-day pleasures that bring us hope and connection. What better place to find hope than the effervescence of a cool drink?

New York’s Music Geography: Research Fellowships and Opportunities at the New York Public Library

September 11, 2026

President's Column

Getting Ready for AAG 2027 in New York

August 28, 2026

The tiles are brown, teal, gold and black forming a circle that illustrates a map of rivers and shapes in the Congo.

Rivers, by artist Houston Conwill, is set in the floor of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

In May I was thrilled when Tashi Dekyid Monet invited me to participate in her event “Living with Climate Change in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau” at Columbia University. I hadn’t had the opportunity to visit New York since the 2013 AAG meeting. I booked a hotel last minute based on cost, not realizing I had gotten a place just a few doors down from the Apollo Theater. Every day on our way to the conference or after, my daughter, Sasha Kunzes, and I visited a few sites on a Harlem walking tour, moved by thinking about the writers and artists and thinkers who had walked these same sidewalks. It was my first time visiting the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, and we ran late that day because the story and exhibits were riveting. But at the same time, we were getting to know Himalayan New York – seeing friends from Ladakh, Tibet, and the broader Himalaya region as we seek to build up a network of scholars from the region (led by Mabel Gergan, Pasang Yangjee Sherpa, Elspeth Iralu, and others). We were getting momo recommendations and attending an event with Pasang to celebrate Sherpa histories and futures for Everest Day. We learned that there is a Himalayan New York tour, and Nawang Gurung welcomed us into his home to feed us dinner. My former student, Carlos Serrano, had generously given us tickets to see Romeo and Juliet in Central Park — a free Public Theater event — in this case it was a reimagining of the play at the border wall, and Sasha was thrilled to get to practice her Spanish, explaining the plot to Tashi Dekyid. With the new mayor and a slew of social programs being unveiled, the city feels full of life.

This is the New York we can’t wait to visit in February with all of you — a New York comprised of land layered by cultural and political histories that are distinct across each neighborhood, and places that contain whole worlds on a single city block. I was thinking back to the May visit after a recent generative and moving meeting set by Lisa Schamess with Joe Baker and Hadrien Coumans of the Lenape Center, and Meredith Palmer (Six Nations Tuscarora), from the Grounded Relations and Repair Taskforce. The Lenape Center will be our collaborator during the meeting, providing a living link to Lenapehoking, the homeland we now call Manhattan.

I can’t imagine a better city to think about Grounded Relations and Desirable Futures than New York. These days, if you work at a university, small talk can quickly take awkward turns and even a simple “how are you?” can come with a disclaimer that you expect they aren’t doing so great. What kind of a time is this to wax poetic about the future? But New York right now, with its new political leadership and long history, feels like a city fully in the fight for our future, and this is the perfect time and the only time to build ourselves up for what’s next. It’s with this in mind that I have curated our annual meeting conference themes, with generous help and assistance from AAG staff, especially Lisa Schamess, and my taskforce members — especially Elspeth Iralu, LaToya Eaves, Jovan Scott Lewis, and Andrew Curley.

Our overarching theme — one which I hope every geographer can see themselves in — is Grounded Relations and Desirable Futures. In our current moment, tomorrow is uncertain, and each day we ask ourselves how to protect the values that make us human — care for life, love of beauty, appreciation for the earth. As geographers we both inherit and transform a discipline: methods, techniques, and tools that were made for exploration and empire. We are working collectively to build a disciplinary home in which all people can find community and develop science, techniques, and technologies for liberation and the protection of our planet.

My hope is that we can assess and further our ethical relations to one another and the institutions we are part of, and strengthen our core values to make a world in which all people can thrive and live with dignity and without fear. Geographers are well positioned to think across disciplinary boundaries, to create and use tools critically and in partnership with local communities, and to take up carefully the most important questions of our day:

What are universities for? How do we manage rapidly developing technologies like generative Artificial Intelligence? What is the role of teaching and pedagogy in preparing young people for rapidly changing political, technological, and environmental climates? How can we protect human and nonhuman life when many of the frameworks developed for that protection are at risk?

This year as we gather in New York, on the homelands of the Lenape People and in a place

that has a rich history and cultural tradition for many of this country’s peoples, we invite you to participate with these questions in mind.

Geographies of Repair and Liberation: In conversation with the work of the presidential taskforce, we seek to continue conversations in our discipline on our institutional and disciplinary relations to Indigenous dispossession, the afterlives of slavery, and other forms of accountability. Whose land are we on? Who built and maintains our buildings? How do we depend on international research relations? This theme invites geographers to consider our ethical relations to the places and people who make life possible.
Geographic methods, tools, and techniques for knowledge and justice: As geographers we lay claim to wide ranging and extensive space and place-based methods. When the tools and techniques of our discipline are used for violence and surveillance we must intervene, and we also must step up when our methods can be of service for liberation.
Science for people and the planet: We are facing planetary scale ecological crisis layered on politically-generated challenges of cuts to funding and restrictions on data access. Rapidly developing technologies such as AI raise new ethical and environmental equity questions for us. Let’s convene to learn from another how we can best respond to these challenges and put our collective expertise to work for the planet.
Desirable Futures: Who is included in our future visions? Time is both a method for liberation and a weapon of domination. What do we learn when we make it part of our means of analysis? This theme invites us to reflect and build on the temporal turn in geography, but is also a call to reshape the intimate geopolitics of our relations through how we take up and allocate time in community with one another..

Our May visit to the city reminded me that so many of us have New York stories. We would love to hear yours, and for you to join us in February to make more. Many of our specialty groups — from Black Geographies (celebrating their 10^th Anniversary!) to Latinx Geographies to Queer and Trans Geographies view the city as their city — and we want this to feel like your conference. Please reach out to AAG to plan fieldtrips, offer webinars, or suggest other ways for us to build community this February. As always, reach out to me with your reflections and ideas.

NOTE: As it has every year since 2024, AAG will again offer a free series of informational webinars that shed light on the geography, histories, and current moment of our Annual Meeting city, New York City.

Some webinars are still being confirmed, but please mark your calendars for the hour-long free online presentations and discussion we will announce in mid-September.

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 AAG President Sara Smith directly to enable a constructive discussion.

President's Column

Geographies of Accountability

July 30, 2026

Tan and red brick mosaic walkway on the UNC campus.

“The Gift” is a brick walkway and installation incorporating images important to Native traditions, such as turtles, eagle feather, dogwood flowers, hills, water, and corn created by artist Senora Lynch (Haliwa-Saponi) for the American Indian Center at the University of North Carolina. Courtesy UNC

When I interviewed for my job at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I was nervous or maybe even awestruck. It was beyond comprehension that I could get a tenure track job at such an institution. I remember my anxiously chosen secondhand outfit, mistakes I made, but also little moments that seem telling now. On the campus tour, a professor paused by a towering figure of a soldier facing North, and said sarcastically: “Welcome to the South — this is Silent Sam — he’s facing north to protect us from the Yankees.” Much to my surprise, I got the job, and started in 2009.

Most folks described the statue as though he had sprung out of the earth and would be there until the whole university was in ruins in some distant future. My office was in the Saunders building — and I slowly learned from undergraduate students that Saunders was a KKK leader. I had been teaching political geography without knowing the political geography of my own building. Student activists in the Real Silent Sam Coalition spent time in the library, in the archives, and found documents confirming Saunders’s KKK leadership, and that this was a reason the building had been named for him. Students used geographic strategies to force the university administration to rename the building. Students have taught me how to be in ethical relationship to the place and people that sustain me and my work — teaching and learning from UNC students has been one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. Witnessing these events shaped my approach to political geography and is reflected in the first chapter of my political geography textbook.

In 2018, a decade after my interview, that Confederate monument was toppled by activists and pictures of his face in the dirt were national news.

Investigating Power and Place

I’m writing to you today from a sunny summer Ladakh, in the Indian Himalayas, but at the same time I am recalling these events, to introduce my motivations for starting my presidential Task Force on Grounded Relations and Repair, with the dream team of James Bryan, Andrew Curley (Diné), LaToya Eaves, Elspeth Iralu (Angami Naga), Jovan Scott Lewis, Natasha Myhal (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians), Meredith Palmer (Tuscarora, Six Nations of the Grand River), Laura Pulido, Isaac Rivera, and Kayla Roulhac. A future column will describe more of the task force’s activities and invite participation, but I wanted to begin with the inspiration.

Our university does not have an official land acknowledgment. The First Nations Graduate Circle has written: “We acknowledge that the land on which the University of North Carolina stands is the ancestral homeland of Eastern Siouan-speaking Indigenous peoples (Yesàh, “The People”).” Many of the buildings on campus were built by people who had been stolen from their homelands in Africa and enslaved in North Carolina, and university founders and faculty rented out the people they had enslaved to build and maintain our buildings. Nearly all of the early benefactors were settler-enslavers, including Benjamin Smith, who enslaved 221 people and gave the largest early donation of 20,000 acres of land, and Duncan Cameron and then his son Paul — generational benefactors and trustees who also owned the largest plantation in North Carolina. In the first half of the 19^th century when the university faced financial crisis, it benefited from Indian removal by acquiring and selling Cherokee and Chickasaw lands as far west as Tennessee, and also by profiting from the sale and labor of enslaved people.

Working at the university taught me so much about power and geography, and I started to write about these questions and work with student activists. Diné geographer Andrew Curley and I also wrote about what it’s like to work at this kind of institution. This led me to ask Danielle Purifoy to join me in co-founding our Landback Abolition Project. This is a collective endeavor in which we have been working with Native students, descendants of the enslaved, and the students in our classes to create an archive of place-based knowledge about the university in order to support institutional change and repair — for instance, working with descendants of those enslaved by our institution to understand what could constitute justice or repair when plantation power structures still animate our institution; and working with members of the Carolina Indian Circle to create an archive of Native life in this place.

In our classes, we take students to the archives and on campus tours: I am trying to recreate for them the process through which I learned to take my ethical relations to place more seriously. I also tell them that this is a rehearsal — that when they graduate and move to a new place, a new job, or a new educational setting they can ask the same questions: whose land am I on? Who built these buildings? Whose neighborhood is this?

The legacies of slavery and Indigenous dispossession at our institutions are both widespread and contextually specific. In 2020, the Land-grab Universities report from High Country News asked us to consider how our academic institutions had been funded by the expropriation of Native land. In 2016, the Universities Studying Slavery consortium convened to ask what responsibilities universities have to the enslaved people who built them and their descendants. These are natural place-based questions that geographers are well-placed to take up. Who are the people that our institutions and research are grounded among and who do our institutions and research agendas serve? How can we be in better ethical relations to the land and people upon whom we are dependent as scholars, practitioners, educators, learners, and simply as people?

I want to take up these questions in my taskforce, and I have also found that these kinds of questions really draw community members and students into the discipline — connecting to past President Bill Moseley’s Generation Alpha Project Task Force asking about our discipline’s future, and past President Rebecca Lave’s Task Force on Public and Engaged Scholarship, for example. Since beginning these conversations with members, it has been wonderful to hear here how many of you are doing related or similar community-based work. For the task force, I am bringing together scholars to study how we can cultivate better grounded relations in the institutions and communities we are located in, and be more responsive to the ethical responsibilities that these relations entail.

As geographers, we sometimes operate as though we were untethered to the places that support our work and existence, whether that is the cleaning and maintenance labor that makes our university or organization function or the places and people we engage with through research. I am hoping through the task force for us to learn more about geographers who are building strong and careful ethical relations to place and people so that we can expand those models and share best practices. We are beginning from these initial questions.

What are best practices for accountability to the Native nations to whom our institutions are in debt? How can we advocate for enhanced Native governance at our institutions? What are the current relations between our departments or organizations and the Native nations in their region and how can they be improved without placing a burden on overburdened individuals and institutions?
What are best practices for engaging with repair at our institutions for the legacies of slavery and understanding how those logics and antiblackness shaped our institutions? How can we support existing demands for reparative action?
How do we best ground our relations to places and the labor that currently sustains our work?
What are our responsibilities to address the uneven and extractive politics of research and fieldwork (including international research and collaborations), as well as our material complicity in empire and extraction, both material and intellectual?

During my time in AAG leadership, I want us to think through these questions in relation to our institutions and to the AAG itself — building on much prior work the organization has been taking up. I am excited to talk about these ideas at regional meetings and I would like to be learning more about what you are doing at your institution. Please reach out to me — and share your ideas with us!

Perspectives

Finding the Way: A Tribute to Geography

July 30, 2026

By James Chan

James Chan posed in front of a wall shelf full of books One June 1, my lifelong companion and I bought a condo at The Philadelphian, right next to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. When I opened the mailbox of our unit guess what I found? A copy of the latest Annals of the AAG (American Association of Geographers) with the previous owner’s name on the label. The presence of that journal struck me like a message from Providence. It reminded me of my geography training and—now at age 76 and after nearly 55 years of work both within and outside of the field—made me wonder: could a discipline which I once thought had led me astray have actually been my lucky star? Here is my geography story.

No sooner had puberty awakened me to the need for an education in this chaotic world than I realized I excelled at geography in high school. I became a geography major at the University of Hong Kong and graduated in 1970. In 1971, the University of Chicago accepted me as a foreign student in their geography department. I studied under Marvin Mikesell (cultural geography) and Paul Wheatley (historical geography of East and Southeast Asia), graduating in 1973. I then went to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor to work with Rhoads Murphey (China, India, and regional geography), earning my Ph.D. in 1977. Peter Gosling (Southeast Asia) and George Kish (Soviet Union) were my other geography advisors. Professor Chang Chun-shu (History of China) was the only non-geography member of my doctoral committee.

In the late 1970s, as now, tenure-track jobs in geography were scarce. I had a one-year stint at Boston University and a brief stay at SUNY Cortland, teaching cultural and world regional geography, along with a course I created on China. Personal issues at the time compounded the shortage of good jobs in geography, so I left academic teaching and worked at Academic Press, Inc., a scientific publisher in New York, where I served as China Area Manager and then International Promotion Manager for two years. Corporate politics made me want to leave an otherwise good position. In May 1983, I set up my own consulting practice, helping American manufacturers, database companies, and professional associations do business in China and Asia. I’m still an independent consultant, doing what I love—something I literally cooked up on my own.

For several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was lucky to befriend Woody (Forrest) Pitts, whose work at the University of Hawai‘i specialized in Japan, Korea, and quantitative methods. I used to complain to him about the lack of career opportunities in geography and how I felt “let down” for having chosen it as my specialty. Woody, kind and supportive, told me I was wrong to feel that way. Intellectually, I agreed with him. But emotionally, I couldn’t stop blaming geography for a career I thought I would never find.

In truth, I was disingenuous with myself. It is true that I never became an academic or research geographer, and business consulting has never been seen as a natural path for geography majors. Yet my knowledge of geography contributed to the epiphany I had about working in international consulting.

One day in church, I made a vow: I wanted to help pull China and America closer through trade. A deep calm and sense of peace came over me the moment that idea struck. Now, as an independent business consultant with a Ph.D. in China geography and cultural geography, I’m reminded by the serendipitous Annals of the AAG in my mailbox that what I’ve been doing is still deeply, intimately geographical.

Imagine me at the nadir of a troubled life when I was in my late 20s and early 30s, seeing myself as Hercules standing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, pulling China and America closer—moving the tectonic plates themselves. Isn’t that a quintessentially geographical idea?

In April 1979, while I was a young geography professor at SUNY Cortland, Clifton Pannell (University of Georgia, urban, economic and cultural geography of China and East Asia) invited me to give a paper on China. I traveled to Philadelphia from Cortland, New York to attend the 75th Anniversary of the AAG annual meeting, which was held at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel. In the evening of April 22, 1979, I met my lifelong companion by chance in the city. Our meeting has turned Philadelphia into my home and the United States of America into my adopted country.

Now you know why that latest issue of The Annals turned out to be such a revelation. Geography as a subject works mysteriously for me.

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.

President's Column

Toward a More Grounded Geography Community

July 2, 2026

Credit: Eilis Garvey, Unsplash

I’m writing to you from a hot summer in Carrboro, North Carolina. My daughter has a long to-do list: make art, write, play in the woods, see family. As an assistant professor, I’ve felt guilty when I wasn’t working or being efficient. Sometimes we are teaching and cursing ourselves for not writing — then we write and get to the classroom and judge ourselves for not being better prepared. Instead, I hope you all are out in the sunshine.

I’m humbled to write to you as president of AAG, and grateful for everything I learned as vice president. I was shocked to get nominated, but am eager to serve during uncertain times. This is a good time for all of us to think about who we are to one another and how we can stay true to hardwon values of justice, freedom of speech, and equity. Let’s move with joy, be of service, and strengthen one another. I want to use this first column to introduce myself and my taskforce, speak to our current political context, and ask for your continued hard work and engagement.

Most of you are learning my name for the first time. I am an anticolonial and feminist political geographer. I started my research in Ladakh, in the Indian Himalaya, along contested borders with Pakistan and China. In my first research I developed the concept of intimate geopolitics — that who we love and how we interact with our neighbors is territorial and shaped by colonial legacies, making embodied life geopolitical. It’s a classic feminist and political question: how do our intimate lives make the world? Then, with my first student, Mabel Gergan, I worked with Himalayan college students to understand experiences of racism and personal transformation as they attended university in big Indian cities. Alongside this research, I began to work to reshape political geography and feminist geography through engagement with anticolonial, Black, and Indigenous geographies. In recent years, I have co-founded two collectives:

The Desirable Futures Collective studies time: what kind of futures are available for whom? How is time a tool to claim territory through telling stories about past and future?
The Landback Abolition Project, co-founded with Dr. Danielle Purifoy, works alongside community to understand what justice would look like at our university with its lasting legacy of indigenous dispossession and slavery.

These experiences have contributed to my vision for the presidency, and work with AAG beyond that. My Grounded Relations and Repair Taskforce takes up the question of our ethical relations to people and place. I want to showcase how geographers can be in good ethical relations to the history and present of their institutions. How can we be accountable to Native nations? To the enslaved labor that built many of our universities? To workers who clean and care for our institutions? I want to see a geography where every geography student learns to ask whose land they are on and consider their ethical responsibilities to the communities that sustain them.

Supporting Each Other Through Difficult Times

I’m writing during a challenging time for all of us in education. I want to call us in to support one another, and not to concede to the current political climate but rather to be in solidarity and lean into our core values. We cannot afford to give up the gains we have made. As vice president I had the pleasure of traveling to our regional conferences in Cincinnati, Lexington, and Milwaukee, and our political climate and lack of resources for scholarship were the first things that geographers talked to me about. Geographers are drawn to the discipline because they love its creativity, interdisciplinary nature and expansiveness, but most of all because they want to change the world for the better. Geographers work for justice, for healthy and beautiful and equitable urban spaces, for climate justice and environmental protection. We are an increasingly diverse and inclusive discipline.

These values that we worked so hard to cultivate and these spaces — that we worked so hard to create — are at risk.

Faculty wonder if they can teach on race and gender — the exact topics they cultivated expertise in over their careers. Environmental scientists with decades of training and NSF and NASA grants wonder how to fund their work. Graduate students ask if they need to stop studying environmental justice. International scholars can’t go home to visit their families because they worry they won’t make it back in the country. We all worry our neighbors will be picked up in ICE raids. Will our chancellors or administrators will have our backs? My chair, Conghe Song, like many department heads, never seems to leave his office: reassuring faculty their work is valued, trying to figure out scholars’ visas, seeking ways to keep us funded, and that support is such a comfort in these times. But I want you to know that AAG is here for you as well. AAG has been signing onto letters about social science and climate funding, reaching out to faculty facing institutional problems, and working to protect international scholars. I think we have more power than we think, and even more so when we stand up together.

Grounding Our Practice and Our Connections

I want to encourage us to be thinking about our ethical relations to one another and to place — and this shapes the upcoming annual meeting in New York City along with my task force. I invite us to take up these questions in New York next February, through the themes of Grounded Relations and Desirable Futures. As researchers and scientists and writers and teachers — how can we build a community grounded in our ethical relations to people and place, and intentionally create a future in which we can not only survive, but thrive?

Lastly, I want to ask us all to create collective structures to protect and affirm one another. The last year at AAG has been an inspiring one. We faced some of the most daunting challenges around federal funding and the political climate, and renewed concerns about the shuttering or merging of geography departments. But we also saw our members deeply consider our global relations — I was particularly moved by our members’ work on Palestinian liberation. I see the courage and work for this cause to be the best of our geographers’ impulses to be politically engaged, and put into practice Fannie Lou Hamer’s call that “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” One antidote to anxiety is action, and particularly action in the service of others. Can you build something with your colleagues, your students, your coworkers?

News

Jennifer Whytlaw Joins GISCI Board as AAG Representative

July 2, 2026

Jennifer Whytlaw The GIS Certification Institute (GISCI) Board of Directors has welcomed Jennifer L. Whytlaw, Ph.D., GISP, associate professor of Applied GIS at Old Dominion University, as the newest representative of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). She joins Darcy Boellstorff, who recently renewed her term as AAG’s second representative on the board.

Founded in 2002 by member organizations including AAG, GITA, NSGIC, UCGIS, and the Geospatial Professional Network (GPN, formerly URISA), GISCI is a nonprofit organization that administers the internationally recognized GISP® (Certified GIS Professional) credential. The GISCI Board meets monthly to guide certification policies, strategic priorities, and initiatives that support excellence and professionalism across the geospatial community.

As a GISP since 2012, Whytlaw brings both professional expertise and a strong commitment to advancing the GIS profession. Throughout her career, she has promoted ethical and professional standards in GIS while inspiring the next generation of geospatial professionals through teaching, mentoring, research, and outreach.

At Old Dominion University, Whytlaw teaches undergraduate and graduate students, advises student research, and mentors emerging professionals as they pursue careers and advanced degrees. Her commitment to workforce development extends beyond higher education. She has been an active advocate for introducing GIS in K-12 classrooms, applying for educational grants, supporting GIS-integrated science curricula, and participating in STEM outreach programs that expose younger students to career opportunities in geospatial technology.

Looking ahead, Whytlaw is enthusiastic about helping GISCI strengthen its engagement with students and early-career professionals. Reflecting on her goals as a board member, she noted: “I would like to enhance GISCI’s outreach and engagement with student-focused programs such as mentorship programs and online resources targeted toward all types of colleges and universities, ensuring the future sustainability of the GIS profession.”

She also sees an opportunity for GISCI to continue evolving alongside rapidly advancing technologies: “A second focus area would be continuing the integration of new and emerging geospatial technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and XR [extended reality] technologies, into the GISCI’s certification process to ensure relevance and preparedness for the future of GIS.”

As a founding GISCI member organization, AAG plays an important role in helping ensure that GIS certification reflects the needs and perspectives of the geography and GIScience communities. Whytlaw’s experience in education, outreach, and emerging technologies will provide valuable insight as GISCI continues to advance the GISP credential and support the future of the profession.

Learn more about GISCI and the GISP credential

President's Column

Welcoming a New President to AAG—Interview with Sara Smith

May 29, 2026

For the last President’s Column of his term, President Bill Moseley talks with incoming President Sara Smith about her experiences within the discipline and her aspirations for her upcoming leadership at AAG. The following conversation offers insight into the new directions for the 2026-27 presidency. View the interview

Bill: Sara, thank you for being here. My first question is, what’s your history with geography? What brought you to the discipline?

Sara: Like so many of us, I ended up in geography completely on accident! I was doing counter development work for a women’s organization in Ladakh, in northern India. And I actually just needed to spend more time in my hometown with my family. I also was frustrated with the kinds of obstacles we were running into. My husband and I were both working in the NGO field in Ladakh. And I found myself wanting a more global context for that work, or I wanted to understand the structural forces we were dealing with better.

And so, I looked up grad schools in my hometown, Tucson, Arizona. And the Department of Geography and Regional Development at the University of Arizona was the first thing that came up, so I went there. That’s how I came to geography,

But I stayed because of the people that I met, and especially, I started taking classes from my advisor, Sally Marston, in political geography, and political geography just really spoke to me, as a way to understand the world.

Bill: I think so many geographers come into the discipline sideways.

Sara: Exactly. I think that’s why your [Gen Alpha] task force [addressing the next generation of geographers] is good. What if people came in earlier and intentionally?

Bill: Yes. But I also think it’s a good thing that this discipline is open to people coming to it in many different ways. So, I’m curious, what do you tell your students, or what do you tell people who are interested in the discipline—what, for you, makes it so relevant to the issues of the day?

Sara: Hmm…I have two answers. One is, I think, a classic geography answer, which is that we range from the environmental sciences to the social sciences and humanities, and I think that’s really beautiful. The expansiveness of the discipline is exciting to me, but I think in classes, what is exciting for students is the kind of liberties we take with geography. It’s a very fluid discipline.

If we look across the social sciences…I feel like geographers have really picked up, for instance, Black theory, Indigenous theory, and centered it in their work, which I think is unusual for the social sciences. I think sometimes those kinds of theoretical frameworks are still on the margins. In geography, they’re some of the quickest growing sub-disciplines.

I’ve been teaching environmental justice classes, and I think the students find that approach really exciting. Thinking through Indigenous theories of land relations, or thinking about racial capitalism as something that has structured why we’re facing environmental justice questions—those approaches are very accessible in geography and intuitive to students, too. I think there’s a way, when you start with place, it can feel very welcoming, and students can start thinking through the connections. Like in one of my classes, they map their hometown—an assignment Danielle Purifoy inspired me to try. They haven’t thought about their hometown in relation to environmental justice before. What if they map out the hazards and the neighborhoods? It makes it feel very relevant to them, so I think once students get that kind of welcome into geography, they find it really exciting, and just naturally relevant.

Bill: I believe a lot of our members might be wondering: Who is Sara Smith, and what kind of research does she do? Could you describe briefly the kind of research you do?

Sara: I feel coherent, but I think my research agenda might seem a little incoherent to some folks. Broadly, I study the relations between our intimate, everyday lives and territory. So, my first project about that was set in Ladakh, and it became a book project, Intimate Geopolitics.

In that work, I’m looking at Ladakh’s location on a contested border with Pakistan and China, and the colonial history of that region. I looked at the ways that territory affects people’s decisions about who they’re going to marry, how many kids they want to have, these kinds of intimate decisions. How does intimate life become understood to be making territory? People were telling me Buddhists and Muslims can’t marry each other because it’s a political problem. But a couple generations ago, they were marrying each other all the time. So, what are the conditions that made that impossible? I started with that, but then that work has kind of broadened out, so then I worked with Mabel Denzin Gergan, with Himalayan college students. What’s it like to be from a tiny town in the Himalayas and go to some of the biggest, most diverse cities in the world, like Delhi or Mumbai? How does that change how you think about your hometown back in the mountains? How does that change you politically? So both of those are about this relationship between: Our ordinary lives, how we relate to our parents or our friends at college, and the state.

That’s the basis for my research, but I really wanted to do work closer to home. So, I also started doing work on time and temporality and fascism, and just trying to understand our political scenario, and I also just love political geography, so I wrote a critical introduction to Political Geography. And then more recently, I felt…I started to get frustrated that my research was all on the other side of the world, and we’re here in North Carolina. And I had learned a lot from student organizers. Our campus is very caught up in the afterlives of slavery and Indigenous dispossession. For example, in the time I’ve been here, our building name was changed. It used to be named for a KKK leader. It was student activism that got that name off the building, and we also had a Confederate monument, students pulled it down, the administration thought about putting it back up. Students’ thinking and activism led me to this new work and taught me so much about place and power.

All these things made me feel that I need to be more locally engaged, so I started a project for our students to study the history of the university. So that’s the Land Back Abolition Project that I co-founded with Danielle Purifoy.

Bill: I love hearing how people’s research evolves over time.

Sara: Yeah, so it’s many different things, but they feel like one thing to me.

Bill: I’m wondering if you could just say a little bit about what prompted you to run for AAG president.

Sara: I was so surprised when I got the email saying I had been nominated to be vice president, I’m sure many people feel the same way. So, I was surprised, and I’m actually shy, and I don’t like to be at the front of the room with a bunch of people looking at me. So, I started calling my friends saying, “I should say no, right? I should just… I shouldn’t agree to be nominated,” but they all said, what are you talking about? You have to say yes. And I think it’s funny, because I’m shy, but I really like to build things. I like to build collectives, so ever since I started this job, I started kind of building networks of people, working toward shared goals, and I really enjoy that kind of work.

When I thought about it in that perspective, I just like to get involved in whatever organization I’m part of. So that’s what made me say yes.

Also … I just… I like to work. I like to work hard for things that feel right to me, so this felt like a different way to practice that.

Bill: Okay. Well, relatedly, what are you hoping to focus on during your tenure as the AAG President? Your priorities.

Sara: I’m thinking about a couple things. So, of course, I have a task force, which is at the heart of my work. The task force is called Grounded Relations and Repair, and it’s a little bit like a scaled-up version of our Land Back Abolition Project.

I want us to be thinking about our ethical relationships to place as geographers. So, when I started my job here at UNC, like I told you, I was thinking about political geography as something that’s out there somewhere. I wasn’t thinking about…what building is my classroom in? Who built this building? Has the university you know, repaired its history of bad relations with Black and Indigenous people? I wasn’t thinking about the really local politics, so the idea with the task force is for us to be thinking about our ethical relationships to the institutions we’re embedded in.

What are our universities’ relation to the community, or if we’re working in industry, what’s our organization’s or our companies’? What are their relationships to the local community, to the people who built the buildings, to the land that we’re on, or to other workers also, I’m thinking about it through labor questions.

So, what’s our faculty’s relationship to labor at our institution? Who labors at our institution? Can they live in our town, or do they have to live really far out and commute in? What are kind of the structural relations that we’re embedded in?

We shouldn’t be able to get a geography degree without knowing whose land we’re on.

I think these questions are also key to the work that AAG members have been doing to encourage us to engage more with Palestinian liberation – they are asking us to take our ethical relationship to the world seriously and it’s important for us to rise to that calling.

And I like that orientation for geography, because I think we shouldn’t be able to get a geography degree without knowing whose land we’re on.

How did this institution come to be? It’s a fundamentally place-based question.

I also like this work because it’s so fruitful in the classroom. In the task force, we’re thinking of developing a national toolkit, so that folks could do this kind of work at their university. I love teaching this way in the classroom. In several of my classes, students have to study the history of the institution. And I tell them they’re rehearsing for the rest of their life.

Next time they get a job, next time they go on to graduate school, they should be asking the same questions of that institution. I’m hoping it’s helping people… build a different kind of ethical relationship to the communities that they’re in, where they feel it’s on them to learn about their relationship to one another and to place. I want to focus on that, and then I also think about AAG’s accessibility.…As we’ve learned in Council, it’s quite difficult to make changes (for instance, on affordability). But as someone who grew up with a single mom who was worried about money, and just…I still always am thinking about money, so I’d love for AAG to be more accessible to folks and think about things like who is and isn’t included in different ways, I think that’s really important to me. AAG is doing a lot of work in that regard. And then I think the last thing is just that…It’s rough out there right now. I think we’re so worried just about the state of the discipline, the state of the academy, we’re worried about funding cuts, we’re worried about the national scenario. Worried about fascism and free speech. It’s a really good time for us to be trying to support each other. And think about what we can do as a community. Fundamentally, we’re a community, and it’s not so easy to be in a national community of nearly 10,000 people. That’s actually really rare and special, so it’s an opportunity for us to make that community stronger. And use it to protect one another, and support one another in a time that feels, I think, really scary. For a lot of folks.

Bill: You are entering this position at a really challenging moment.

Sara: It’s not, yeah, it’s not, like, smooth sailing for anyone, and everybody’s challenges are so different, depending on the kind of institution, or, the stage of your career,

Bill: Yeah. Well, like you said, we are a community, and communities need volunteers to step up and play certain roles. The AAG basically runs on volunteers, and I guess I’m curious if you have any advice for someone who might be a member considering volunteering in a certain capacity for the AAG.

Sara: I think it’s a great experience. I’ve been encouraging my students to do more. It’s nice to find and make that kind of community. I believe it was at this annual meeting that I was suggesting—I think you and I were on the Student Day panel it’s great to run for specialty group, student representative positions, or otherwise get involved in those smaller ways; or even to do things like organize a session at AAG. And I think a lot of folks throw in their abstract, or they apply for a session, but they don’t think, what if I just, tried to reach out to 5 or 10 people who I look up to and ask them to talk about a topic? It’s great to just try to jump all the way in, and people will be surprised at how welcoming folks are to that kind of engagement.

Bill: Is there anything else you would like to add that we haven’t talked about?

Sara: Yes, what about… do you have advice for me? As outgoing president.

Bill: I think you know this, because we’ve been serving together for the past year. You go into the job wanting to focus on certain things, and you don’t always control the agenda, right? And so, being very flexible and responsive to the concerns of the membership, as well as the particular political moment you find yourself in, is important. In sum, roll with the punches.

Sara: That’s good advice.

Bill: Well, thank you so much, Sara. It’s been a total delight speaking with you. I’m looking forward to continue serving alongside you in the upcoming year, and I really wish you all the best in your new position.

Sara: Thank you, I will need it!.

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 moseley@macalester.edu to enable a constructive discussion.