Anthony O. Gabriel

Anthony O. Gabriel, professor of geography at Central Washington University, died Tuesday, September 14, 2021, after a valiant 14-month battle with cancer. He was 56. He was called home to God at his home surrounded by his loving family.

Anthony was born to Oswald Gabriel and Ursula Duhr in Vancouver, B.C., Canada in October 1964.  He grew up in Langley, B.C. and attended Trinity Western University.  He went on to complete his Master’s degree at Western Washington University where he met and married his wife, Marikay Douvier.  Anthony continued to complete his Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario.

Anthony was a professor in the geography departments at Western Washington University, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and finally, for the last 20 years, at Central Washington University.  Through is love of teaching and research, he helped to mold the future of many students. He always went over and above to serve his department and his students. He successfully supervised over 30 Masters of Science theses.

Together Anthony and Mari welcomed two children, Katie and Zach. Anthony was very proud and supportive of his children, as he was involved in their education, extra-curricular activities, and life lessons. He always encouraged his children to pursue their dreams and goals.

Anthony was a devout member of St. Andrew’s Catholic Church. He enjoyed camping and fishing, walking his dogs, playing pool in the Ellensburg Pool League and being a 4-H leader for On Target Shooting Sports.

Anthony was a remarkable, very generous, and caring person, completely devoted to his family. He mentored many young faculty members in the department of geography at Central Washington University, helping them navigate work-family balance. He will be especially missed for his hilarious (and unique) sense of humor and how he loved to make people laugh.

Anthony was preceded in death by his father, Oswald Gabriel. Anthony is survived by his wife Mari, daughter Katie, son Zach, mother Ursula Gabriel, sister Angela Gabriel-Morrissey, brother-in-law Chris Morrissey, as well as numerous in-laws (and out-laws), nephews and nieces.

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Bobby M. Wilson

Dr. Bobby M. Wilson, Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Alabama, who was a widely recognized leader in anti-racist scholarship, passed away on August 25th, 2021.

Dr. Wilson grew up on a farm in Warrenton, North Carolina where his responsibilities on the farm shaped his character and strength. It was also in Warrenton that he participated in the struggle for civil rights in the early 1960s. Later, he would attend North Carolina Central University, which was one of the few historically Black colleges that offered an undergraduate degree in geography. He earned a B.A. in Geography there and then received a fellowship to attend Clark University, where he earned a M.A. (1973) and Ph.D. (1974).

His first teaching position was in the Department of Urban Studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, from 1974-2002. He moved to the University of Alabama (in Tuscaloosa) in 2002, where he stayed for nearly two decades pursuing anti-racist scholarship. He also served as interim chair and retired as professor emeritus in 2015. Fittingly, his office in Farrah Hall was only a few steps away from Malone Hood Plaza on The University of Alabama campus, which celebrates the desegregation of the University of Alabama. His proximity to the plaza is symbolic of Dr. Wilson’s long dedication to anti-racist scholarship.

Wilson was active in several research areas including Urban and Social Geography; Urban Studies; Black Geographies; and the civil rights movement. His publications cover topics including Black perspectives on labor geographies, racial capitalism, urban planning, and residential segregation. His most notable publications were America’s Johannesburg: Industrialization and Racial Transformation in Birmingham, and Race and Place in Birmingham: The Civil Rights and Neighborhood Movements, both published in 2000. These books explore crucial links between the civil rights movement, the unique rise of industrial development in Birmingham, and Alabama’s former slaveholding plantation economy. These books are highly regarded in a variety of disciplines from Urban Studies to Economic Geography for their clear analysis of the spatial dimensions of race and exploitation of Black labor during industrialization. As a testament to the lasting importance of his work, The University of Georgia Press republished America’s Johannesburg in 2019.

In addition to being a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners and the Editorial Board, of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Dr. Wilson was also a long-time member of the American Association of Geographers and was active in the Southeast Division (SEDAAG). He served on the Editorial Committee, of Southeastern Geographer, Journal of the Southeastern Division, Association of American Geographers, the Editorial Board, of Annals of the Association of American Geographers, and AAG’s Commission on Afro-American Geography.

He was recognized by the AAG with a Presidential Achievement Award in 2012, and both a Rose Award for Anti-Racism Research and Practice and the AAG Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. The latter in “recognition of his extraordinary contributions to the scholarship of urban and social geography, urban studies, and anti-racist theory and practice; his teaching and mentoring; as well as his exemplary leadership in support of geography.”

Dr. Wilson is remembered fondly by many former colleagues and students at the University of Alabama and elsewhere.

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Perspectives

Invisible and Silent No More: The Necessity of Centering Anti-Racism as We Address Inclusion and Access for Disabled Community Members

By Gretchen Sneegas, PhD, Texas A&M University and Arrianna Planey, PhD, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Editor’s Note: This month, we present a Perspective from AAG members Dr. Gretchen Sneegas and Dr. Arrianna Planey. Their commentary on the intersectional nature of marginalization and discrimination in terms of disability and anti-Blackness is a response to the August 2020 President’s Column by AAG Past President Amy Lobben. In the first version of the column shared on social media, Dr. Lobben critiqued the lack of universal physical access at AAG headquarters by saying, “People who use manual or motorized wheelchairs cannot enter the front door – something that is reminiscent of the days of segregation.” In response to member concerns, AAG made the decision to remove the reference to segregation. 

We thank Drs. Sneegas and Planey for their perspective on the intersectional dynamics of ableism and anti-Black racism. Our thanks also to Dr. Lobben for being in dialogue with the authors and with us, as well as to our Strategic Communications Editorial Board for their independent review and input as we finalized this column.

Picture this: A disabled Black woman uses her cane to navigate dark, non-descript hallways as she attends the American Association of Geographers meeting. She nervously fiddles with her badge to make sure that it is visible so that no one polices her or questions her right to be present in the space. Unfortunately, her vigilance is for naught: an older white gentleman corners her and questions whether she’s really disabled. This is the third such incident at this conference – one experienced personally by one of this op-ed’s co-authors.

This woman is not disabled first. She is Black and disabled, experiencing racism and ableism simultaneously and cumulatively, not sequentially. Understanding this reality is the essential contribution of intersectionality, or how overlapping axes of privilege and oppression compound experiences of advantage or discrimination (Combahee River Collective, 1986; Crenshaw 1989, 1991).

In her July 31, 2020 newsletter column, “The Invisible and the Silent,” AAG President Amy Lobben raised important questions on the culture of ableism in the AAG and academia, making numerous recommendations for improving inclusion for disabled AAG members and their families: applying universal design principles to the AAG’s website, improving conference accessibility, and promoting an Accessibility Task Force. However, these efforts must place racism – particularly anti-Black racism and white supremacy – at their forefront (Lewis, 2020).

We argue the AAG must explicitly address the intersections of racism and ableism, not to mention oppressions based on gender, sexuality, and socio-economic status. Any effort to address ableism is necessarily incomplete without simultaneously addressing white supremacy. We call on AAG to center its work against ableism around disabled geographers of color, especially those racialized as Black, because of how ableism is experienced by, and employed as a weapon against Black people particularly.

Confronting Ableism Means Confronting Racism

Nowhere is the racism-ableism intersection more starkly rendered than the violence perpetrated against Black communities at the hands of police and legal systems. A 2016 analysis of the Washington Post database on fatal police shootings found Black Americans to be 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans. Another study estimates that between one third to one half of all people killed by police are disabled (Perry and Carter-Long, 2016). Deafness, blindness, autism, mental illness, and physical or cognitive disabilities often register to police as ‘abnormal’ behavior or not following directions, resulting in far higher risk for violence, brutality, and death. Policing also produces disability, with survivors of violent police acts left with long-term physical and mental damage, creating an ongoing cycle of trauma. Disabled Black Americans are thus at some of the highest risk for police violence and discrimination in ways that are compounded by intersections between how they are racialized and their disability status, and not reducible to their Blackness or disability. The tragic and incomplete list of Black people with disabilities killed by police includes Marcus-David Peters , Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Tanisha Anderson, Deborah Danner, Ezell Ford, Keith Lamont Scott, Alfred Olango, and Walter Wallace, Jr.

Dr. Lobben writes that “People with disabilities become invisible….Through able-ism, they are silenced.” Her claim can be deepened by a broadened focus on other axes of privilege, oppression, and power. The disproportionate police violence against Black people with disabilities transects the literal and metaphorical invisibility of disabled people with the hypervisibility of Blackness as a perceived threat to white supremacist “law and order,” while simultaneously erasing Black disabled peoples’ individuality and vulnerability. Not coincidentally, many such incidents turn on the misperception of disability, wherein “invisible” disabilities affecting mental and physical health (e.g., deafness, mental illness) are ignored in the white mainstream disability conversation, even as they figure prominently in police violence against Black communities.

The intersections of (in)visibility, racialization, and ableism are highlighted by a particular section of Dr. Lobben’s column. On our first reading, we were struck by a parallel comparison she drew between the lack of American with Disabilities Act compliance at AAG’s headquarters and the shameful history of racial segregation in the United States: “People who use manual or motorized wheelchairs cannot enter the front door – something that is reminiscent of the days of segregation.” The sentence was subsequently edited out of the column.

Defining ‘segregation’ as merely a form of spatial separation is widely seen in mainstream disability conversations. However, the term ‘segregation’ cannot be uncoupled from its history of state-sponsored domestic terrorism in the U.S. The weight of these cultural meanings makes comparing the seemingly “universal” challenges of a majority-white mainstream disabled community to racialized segregation insensitive at best. Separate accommodations for people with disabilities cannot be compared with racial segregation, defined as the racialization of space and the spatialization of race by means of policy, policing, and other informal and state-sanctioned practices (Lipsitz, 2007). The harmful effects of racial and ethnic segregation reverberate throughout Black American communities to the present day, including the disproportionate public health, economic, and regulatory impacts of COVID-19 on Black people (Summers, 2020).

While the segregation comparison may seem innocuous, not addressing the harm it causes to Black AAG members perpetuates the foundations of anti-Black racism that have long gone unaddressed in academic spaces and institutions, including the AAG. Countless Black scholars have written about such micro-aggressions – on Twitter with the #BlackInTheIvory hashtag, in essays and op-eds (Hamilton 2020a, Roberts 2020), and via peer-reviewed scholarship (Eaves 2020b, Hamilton 2020b, 2020c) – which unambiguously inform Black academics on a daily basis that their safety and well-being are not respected, centered, or guaranteed.

How AAG Can Engage Fully in the Work to Address Ableism

Geography is an overwhelmingly white discipline – not only in terms of membership numbers, but also in its cultural norms and institutional structures, which function as gatekeeping tools to determine who is included (Kobayashi and Peake, 2000; Gilmore, 2002; Peake and Kobayashi, 2002; Pulido, 2002; Woods, 2002; Kobayashi, 2014; Eaves 2020a; Faria and Mollett 2020; Hamilton 2020c; Oswin 2020; Roy 2020). Geography lags behind other disciplines in African American and Hispanic representation for student enrollment and degree conferral, and comprises less than 5% of all geography faculty compared to 10% of all higher education faculty (Faria et al., 2019). It is vital that the AAG act on the arguments which these and other BIPOC (Black and Indigenous People of Color) scholars have been making for decades if justice and inclusivity are truly its goals.

AAG must exert stronger leadership to have uncomfortable yet essential discussions about racism and colorism across all of its activities. We are glad to see President Lobben leveraging her access to AAG’s large platform to highlight the long-overlooked issue of suppression faced by disabled scholars. AAG’s efforts to do so must also explicitly center, not just include, disabled geographers of color who face unique and compounded challenges at the racism-ableism juncture.

One of the most critical actions AAG can take is for the new Accessibility Task Force to explicitly highlight the intersections of race/ethnicity and ableism, to address and avoid reproducing white supremacist power dynamics in the AAG. Some recommendations include (but are not limited to):

  1. Actively center disabled scholars of color across all stages of the Task Force’s activities and act on their suggestions. It is not enough to include BIPOC scholars with disabilities at the table – their needs must be prioritized.
  2. Create multiple avenues for formative feedback from the AAG membership, making sure to prioritize comments from disabled BIPOC AAG members.
  3. Develop relationships with AAG specialty/affinity groups that work with AAG members with increased risk of discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability status, including the Disability specialty group, Mental Health affinity group, and Senior Geographers association.
  4. Work with the AAG Harassment-Free Task Force and COVID-19 Rapid Response Task Force to address intersections of race/ethnicity, ableism, discrimination, and health.
  5. Highlight the racism-ableism relationship within this year’s Geographies of Access theme for the Annual Meeting, as well as future AAG conference themes, special AAG conference sessions, and/or proposed special issues in AAG journals.

We also encourage all AAG members to center the needs of BIPOC geographers with disabilities as they actively engage the Black Geographies Specialty Group’s call to “go beyond their statements [of solidarity] and work to transform the discipline by addressing its legacies of racism, imperialism, colonialism, homophobia, and sexism”.

Incorporating the intersections between ableism and racism in the AAG’s continued work on disability-based discrimination will benefit all AAG members. This is the only way to avoid deepening the unequal vulnerabilities faced by disabled geographers of color, while working towards restorative justice that centers those who have been most harmed. We ask the AAG leadership and all geographers to bring their energy and dedication to the concerns we articulate here, implementing them at the AAG; your institutions and departments; and in your teaching, research, and mentorship.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0096

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

On Teaching, Mentoring, Balance, and Service

With summer almost here, I’m about to head into my last year as an academic. I’m “retiring” June 2022, although in truth I’ll work full time running my family’s winery and nonprofit, both built around the mission of providing training, jobs, and community for those with disabilities. As I transition from academics, Andrew and I are encountering many things we didn’t know were part of running a small business. This transition has prompted me to reflect on my transition from student to faculty member and, in turn, on how we prepare our graduate students for major life and career transitions.

In my case, I was fortunate. Judy Olson, my PhD advisor at Michigan State from 1996 to 1999, was and is amazing. Those three years were life-changing; Judy gave me one of the greatest gifts of my life—the courage to think. Her advising style was respectful and quietly demanding. She didn’t give answers, but provided guidance on how to discover them. Judy also instilled in her advisees the importance of service, something she epitomizes herself. I would not be AAG president if she hadn’t steered me in that direction. Judy and my department also gave me the opportunity to teach my own class, a large multi-section beast of a GIS class that was a major learning experience for students—and for me.

I was lucky to receive so much guidance, support, and preparation. Even so, I was thoroughly unprepared for life as a faculty member. Almost overnight, I went from being a student, focusing only on my own research, writing, and limited teaching to mentoring many students, teaching multiple classes, having much higher research expectations, juggling work-life balance in a whole new way, and… the service. So much service.

As I reflected on my major career transitions, I became curious about the student-faculty transition of others and whether those of us in PhD-granting programs are adequately preparing our students to launch into successful careers. So, I contacted multiple individuals in different positions and institutions (thank you all!) and asked them two questions: “What experience in your PhD program best prepared you for your career?” and “What didn’t you learn that you wish you had?”

Intriguingly, almost no one mentioned research training or field expertise in response to either question. Perhaps that’s because most people feel that their PhD program prepared them for future research and expected that to be the primary focus. Instead, answers focused on the preparedness (or non-preparedness) in two main areas: Teaching and Balance. I’ll provide some very brief highlights below. For a thoughtful and much deeper discussion of mentoring, see Kavita Pandit’s 2020 article Mentoring graduate students in an era of faculty career restructuring.

Teaching: While teaching loads vary by type of institution (e.g., teaching vs. research intensive, community college vs. 4-year college, etc.), all faculty I know teach. Moreover, even at a research-intensive institution, I spend more time talking with colleagues about teaching than I do about research. Likewise, I spend much more time working with graduate students than I do conducting literature reviews or launching new research. And, yet, most PhD students receive little to no formal teaching training, and many PhDs do not even experience teaching our own class until we become faculty members.  This almost inevitably leads to us dusting off our old syllabi and notes taken as students, frantically updating content-related notes right up until class starts and—only occasionally—emulating what we believed were the best practices to help students learn.  As one of my friends said: “I had no teaching experience. I mean none. The first time I taught was when I walked into a classroom of 80 students.”

There was one exception in the answers: a friend said he received an intense amount of formal pedagogic training. In summarizing his experience and its impact, he stated, “The professors were professional educators and the students were in-service teachers. Wow. I learned about pedagogy, good reflective teaching practice, and the language of assessment (student learning objectives, rubrics, normalizing grading expectations, etc.).”

What a show-off.

But… that really should be the standard we set for training the graduate students who will be the future educators in higher education.

Recent years—and particularly the Covid-year-of-teaching-remotely—have added a major issue that makes preparing graduate students for teaching far more complex. It’s true that I spend more time talking about teaching with my colleagues than I do about research. But, lately, I’ve spent even more time talking about issues of mental health and how to help guide students who experience issues across the spectrum of mild anxiety to catastrophic breakdowns. Thus, in addition to preparing our graduate students to use best learning practices, organize stimulating class materials, and prompt discussions, they now need to understand that their roles as teacher/mentors extend well beyond the basics of pedagogy. For many faculty, engaging with students as fellow humans brings challenges that can seem to blend roles of teacher and counselor. One of my friends summed up this challenge brilliantly: “Mental health training–this is, quite simply, the biggest challenge of my career. Teaching is care work, and yet we are rarely (if ever!) equipped with the adequate skills or support networks to deal with a range of mental health challenges in our students and colleagues.”

Let me be clear; I am NOT advocating that we be mental health professionals. But we must prepare our graduate students to know how to direct students with mental health issues to the appropriate people and centers and, equally important, how to avoid being personally ensnared in trying to solve those problems for the students.

Balance: Nearly everyone I know, including most of my friends and colleagues who responded to my email request for input, struggle with work-life balance and time management.

Achieving work-life balance has been a priority for me for about 10 years. I’m pretty much failing. But, here are the four things that I regularly try to accomplish:

  1. Set boundaries and work hours. I’ve actually been pretty good at this one because it involves cocktails. When Andrew first started as Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, I implemented evening cocktail hour.  This is the moment when work stops.
  2. Make time for yourself, family, and friends. I’m super bad at the first, pretty good at the second, and marginal at the third.
  3. Work a job you love. This is absolutely one of the most important things. Because, even if you have achieved work-life balance, if you don’t like your job, you’re not in equilibrium. And, if you do find yourself out of balance, at least the time demands are something that you enjoy.

Finally, 4. accept that there is no constant nor perfect work-life balance.

The last one is especially important for me to focus on as I sit here at 5am working on my column because there’s not enough time in the day.

Solutions: Ideally, the teaching and work-life issues are ones we should be addressing within our programs.  But in truth, most of us learn about these professional expectations and options by observing rather than through any formal training. Even observing is not effective in many cases. Many PhD programs are within R1 universities, but most PhD students get hired in other types of institutions; graduate students thus have little if any opportunity to learn about the kind of careers into which they will arrive. As a friend said, “Getting hired at a R1 and reproducing your advisor’s career is not possible or desirable for everyone.”

But we don’t have to do it all—there are external resources available. In fact, the AAG has taken a lead in providing something that is missing from most graduate programs: professional development.

Here’s where I will shamelessly plug an AAG program which a friend described as “miraculous and life-affirming.” The AAG’s Geography Faculty Development Alliance Early Career Workshop begins this week. If you miss it this year, be sure to put it on your calendar for next year. You will receive 5 days of formal training in pedagogy, professional development, and work-life balance.

The AAG also has taken a strong role in providing opportunities and training elsewhere. Both career workshops at annual and regional meetings and seminar series, such as the recent remote series organized by Ken Foote, provide excellent resources. In addition, more and more universities are providing workshops and resources on these topics for graduate students or new faculty; for example, the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon funds many of its new faculty to attend a year-long program run by the National Center for Faculty Diversity and Development. We thus don’t always have to develop these programs in our departments, but we should at a minimum make sure we are directing our graduate students or new faculty to these areas of training and learning.

On a different note: This is my last column as the virtual AAG President. Occasionally, people have asked me what it’s like being AAG President. Here are the top 3 Pros and Cons.

Pros:

  1. I have had a chance to get to know some amazing people, especially AAG staff.
  2. I have surprised myself in how much I enjoyed writing these columns (and working on them with Andrew, who is a phenomenal editor). They have been a turn from my usual guarded privacy.
  3. I have learned so much more about geography, geographers, and programs around the world. I’m very grateful for all of the experiences that people have shared with me (even when the experiences weren’t positive).

Cons:

  1. It didn’t help my time management or work-life balance. But, I loved the work.
  2. Email.
  3. As I’ve shared with some people, my biggest regret during my term as President is that I never met another AAG member face-to-face (excluding my husband and UO colleagues). What a strange year to be in this role. I VERY much look forward to seeing a lot of you at future meetings

With my last column words, I’d like to thank everyone for trusting me with this position. I especially want to thank Dave Kaplan for sharing so much knowledge, patience, and time with me. You are a good mentor, Dave.

It’s been an honor to serve as AAG President.

—Amy Lobben
AAG President and Professor at University of Oregon
lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0093

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 lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

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From the Meridian

Perspectives: A New Column in the AAG Newsletter

In May, we introduced a new column to the AAG Newsletter called Perspectives, replacing AAG’s former Op-Ed feature. Perspectives will share the opinions and ideas of members on issues of relevance to geography. We encourage submissions that stimulate dialogue, get members thinking, and challenge our discipline to take new approaches to the social, political, and environmental issues confronting geographers and the public.

We are grateful to Guo Chen of Michigan State University, whose article “Working Together for Racial and Social Justice: From Anti-Asian Racism and Violence to Anti-Racist Praxis in Geography” was the first Perspective to appear, last month. We look forward to sharing more of our members’ thought-provoking commentary in the coming months.

One of the great strengths and challenges of the discipline of geography is that it embraces the world. We envision Perspectives as having wide-ranging potential, showcasing our members’ voices, experiences, and opinions regarding virtually any topic. We want to make space for members to engage and challenge one another, taking on questions that help illuminate and strengthen the relevance of geography to people’s lives.

In all cases, the articles will focus on the best ideas: showcasing novel ways of considering social, political, and geography concepts, adhering to the AAG Code of Conduct and supporting AAG’s goal of fostering robust discussion and respectful disagreement. Optimal length is 1,000-1,500 words.

So, do you have a probing question or fresh inspiration for the discipline? Do you have a unique and engaging response to a column or feature article you’ve seen in our newsletter? We want to hear from you. Consider submitting a column for consideration as an upcoming Perspectives. Read more about our submission guidelines here.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0092

Please note: The ideas expressed by Executive Director Gary Langham are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. Please feel free to email him at glangham [at] aag [dot] org.

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Newsletters

Newsletter – May 2021

PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

Opening Up the Possibilities for an Accessible AAG

By Amy Lobben

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Many of us “went” to the AAG annual meeting last month, scheduled to take place in Seattle. Of course, we all attended virtually from separate isolated locations. I attended from my living room, my kitchen table, and my bedroom floor… Keeping with my personal mission and my conference theme of Access, now is a good time to discuss how we all can participate in enhancing inclusion of attendees with disabilities at our meetings, whether they be national, regional, or in our departments. And wouldn’t it be nice if we all could be disciples, each carrying this message forward into our sister organizations when we attend meetings in cognate disciplines? My hope is that this column will be useful going forward, in particular for people who are as yet less familiar with disability and other accessibility issues, not just at AAG but at other conferences as well.

Continue Reading.

FROM THE MERIDIAN

A Good Day for Geography, Every Day

By Gary Langham

The late Will Graf would end his AAG President’s columns with this optimistic affirmation: It’s a good day for Geography. Given the last year, you might be surprised to hear that it is just as true today as it was during his tenure in 1998-99. Let me explain.

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PERSPECTIVES

Working Together for Racial and Social Justice: From Anti-Asian Racism and Violence to Anti-Racist Praxis in Geography

By Guo Chen, Associate Professor of Geography and Global Urban Studies, Michigan State University

stopAAPIhate-1-300x197-1In June 2020, the Association for Asian American Studies issued an open call for putting an immediate end to anti-Black racism and advancing efforts toward achieving global social justice. The murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and George Floyd pulled a painful trigger for many Asian Americans… Since January 2020, the lives of Asian-heritage people in the U.S. and likely the same for those in other countries have been violently shaken. Asian Americans were among the first to help local communities combat Covid-19, while racist attacks were increasing in cities like Los Angeles…

Continue Reading.

ANNUAL MEETING

What was Presented at the 2021 AAG Annual Meeting?

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Curious about all 2,952 papers and posters that were presented during the 2021 AAG Annual Meeting last month? Geographers Seong, JI, Stanescu, Lee, and Hwang used keyword network analysis to create a visual summary of the annual meeting. Based on presentation keywords, Urban was identified as the most frequent keyword, followed by COVID-19, GIS, and Climate Change.

Read the full analysis.

Save the Date for AAG NYC!

Join us for the 2022 AAG Annual Meeting February 26 – March 1, 2022. We invite you to organize and participate in sessions, workshops, field trips, special events, and activities. Look for the call for papers in June 2021. We look forward to seeing you in New York City.

PUBLICATIONS

NEW Annals of the American Association of Geographers Issue Alert:
The 2021 Special Issue of the Annals on the Anthropocene

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The Annals publishes a special issue each year to highlight research around a specific theme of global importance. The thirteenth annual special issue includes 29 articles on the Anthropocene and is guest edited by David Butler. The articles are divided into six sections: definitions and conceptual considerations; historical perspectives on the Anthropocene; physical geography and the Anthropocene; natural hazards, disasters, and the Anthropocene; the environment and environmental degradation; and the Anthropocene and geographic education. Introduced in 2000 as a concept indicating that human modification of the environment had reached such a significant level that a geological epoch distinct from the Holocene had been initiated, the Anthropocene has no universally accepted starting point. The 2021 special issue examines all geographic facets of the Anthropocene.

Read more about the Annals Special Issues.

Questions about the Annals? Contact annals [at] aag [dot] org.

NEW The Professional Geographer Issue Alert: Research featuring urban agriculture, geospatial analysis of HIV care, unemployment and more

The-PG-2017-generic-213x300The most recent issue of The Professional Geographer has been published online (Volume 73, Issue 2, May 2021) with 14 new articles on current geographic research. Topics in this issue include direct injuries and fatalities from tornado outbreaks, shrinking cities, post-great recession geographies, electoral geography, principal component analysis, residential satisfaction in historic blocks, and structural fractality of road networks. Local areas of interest include Henan Province, Brazil, New York City, and Ethiopia. Authors are from a variety of institutions including University of Cologne, University of Connecticut, and Simon Fraser University.

All AAG members have full online access to all issues of The Professional Geographer through the Members Only page. In every issue, the editors choose one article to make freely available for three months. In this issue you can read The Elasticity of Shrinking Cities: An Analysis of Indicators by Maxwell Hartt for free for the next three months.

Questions about The PG? Contact profgeog [at] aag [dot] org.

NEW Spring Issue of the AAG Review of Books Published

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The latest issue of The AAG Review of Books is now available (Volume 9, Issue 2, Spring 2021) with 14 book reviews on recent books related to geography, public policy and international affairs. The Spring 2021 issue also includes two book review essays: Olwig’s comparison of Landscape and Power in Geographical Space as a Social-Aesthetic Construct and Landscape Theories: A Brief Introduction both by Olaf Kühne; and Kearns’ review of A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers by Jen Jack Gieseking, recipient of the 2021 Glenda Laws Award.

Questions about The AAG Review of Books? Contact aagreview [at] aag [dot] org.

Journals-newsletter-100In addition to the most recently published journal, read the latest issue of the other AAG journals online:

• Annals of the American Association of Geographers
• The Professional Geographer
• GeoHumanities
• The AAG Review of Books

ASSOCIATION NEWS

2021 AAG Nystrom Award Recipients Announced

Nystrom-Awardees-300x169The J. Warren Nystrom Award, established by a former AAG President to annually recognize a paper based on a recent dissertation in geography, is awarded during a special session at the AAG Annual Meeting. Two recipients were chosen for the 2021 AAG Nystrom Award: Daniela Aiella, currently a Postdoc at Queen’s University (PhD University of Georgia), for “A colonial genealogy of eviction: racialized dispossession in Atlanta and Vancouver” and Ziqi Li, a Visiting Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (PhD Arizona State University), for “Computational Improvements to Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression.” The Nystrom Award session recording is available to watch in the Annual Meeting program until May 11.

Learn more about the Nystrom Award and previous awardees.

AAG Announces Undergraduate Program Excellence Awards

awards_hi-res-300x160

Two recipients have been named for the 2021 Award for Bachelors’ Program Excellence in Geography: The Geographic Science Program at James Madison University (JMU) in Virginia, and the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. The annual award honors Geography departments and programs that have significantly enhanced the prominence and reputation of Geography as a discipline and demonstrated the characteristics of a strong and engaged academic unit, playing an important role in educating future geographers and promoting the discipline to a wider world.

Learn more about these programs.

Get a Glimpse of AAG’s New Website

Web-redesign-reveal-1200x675-1-300x169During our virtual annual meeting, we gave a sneak peek of our new website currently in the design process. If you missed the session or weren’t able to attend the conference, you still have a chance to see the recording. Our website agency, Free Range, revealed some of the exciting changes in store for this completely accessible, innovative, and mobile friendly website launching later this spring. Please send us your questions and thoughts at feedback [at] aag [dot] org. We’d love to hear from you! View the recording.

We are also looking for some fresh taglines to appear on the new AAG website when it launches this summer! What does AAG mean to you in a few words? Submit your suggestion here.

Careers in Geography: Developing Collegial Relationships in a Department

Wednesday, May 12, 2:30 – 3:45pm EST

Join AAG members in the next webinar in our Department Leadership and Early Career series. This free event brings together panelists to discuss issues of onboarding, collegiality, and how a healthy department is widely beneficial for students, staff, and faculty. REGISTER NOW!

The Department Leadership and Early Career series combines two themes in one: building and growing strong academic programs, and helping students and young geographers navigate their early careers. AAG is pleased to continue this series throughout the spring, free and open to the public. Recordings of webinars held thus far are also available to watch at any time.

See upcoming webinars and view recordings

POLICY CORNER

New Data from Census as Geographers Prepare for Redistricting

US_Capitol

Last week the Census Bureau released its long-awaited congressional apportionment data. The 2020 population count resulted in some surprises and close-calls as states learned how many seats in the House of Representatives they will keep, gain, or lose. The release of this apportionment data was the first of two important steps in what’s next for congressional and state redistricting. States still require the Census demographic data in order to start drawing new district lines, which may not be released until late summer.

While the drawing of new maps won’t start for several months, now is the time to familiarize yourself with the process. To learn more, check out A Geographer’s Place in Redistricting published in Esri’s most recent edition of ArcNews. In this article, AAG’s Michelle Kinzer emphasizes that “when it comes to the fight for fair redistricting, there is no one better equipped than a geographer.”

In the News:

  • Competing NSF bills have been introduced in the House and Senate, the NSF for the Future Act (H.R. 2225) and the Endless Frontier Act (S. 1260). While both bills propose a new NSF directorate, they are otherwise substantially different. Click here to see a side-by-side comparison prepared by COSSA.
  • On March 31, the White House issued a fact sheet detailing many of the spending priorities in President Joe Biden’s proposed infrastructure initiative, the American Jobs Plan. The proposal includes $250 billion in research funding.
  • Nominations are being sought for to fill eight upcoming vacancies on the National Science Board (NSB), the policy-making body of the National Science Foundation (NSF) that also serves as an independent advisor to the President and Congress on federal science policy. More information on the nomination process is available on the NSB website. Nominations are due by May 31, 2021.
MEMBER NEWS

Profiles of Professional Geographers

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Growing up in the Bay Area inspired a career in hazards for Johanna Ostling, a Forestry Technician (Fire Lookout) for the U.S. Forest Service. Fire Lookouts play a vital role in identifying locations of wildfires during fire season and directing responders to the location on the ground. Ostling uses her knowledge of weather conditions to record variables like wind speed, cloud types and cloud cover, and precipitation as well as her abilities to identify physical landscape features and map coordinates to determine wildfire locations and response.

Learn more about Geography Careers on the recently updated AAG Jobs & Careers website.

May Member Updates

The latest news about AAG Members. 

Four geographers are newly elected to the Academy of Arts and Sciences: incoming AAG Vice President Marilyn Raphael, 2020 AAG Lifetime Achievement recipient Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Marshall Shepherd, and 2021 Stan Brunn Award for Creativity recipient Dawn Wright. Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” Read more.

Two geographers have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences: Marshall Shepherd and 2021 Stan Brunn Award for Creativity recipient Dawn Wright. Established in 1863, the National Academy of Sciences is committed to furthering science in America, and its members are active contributors to the international scientific community. Read more.

Dr. Reece Jones of the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa has been named a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow. Read more.

AAG Member Caroline Tracey is among eight selected to be a WW Dissertation Fellow in Women’s Studies for 2021. Tracey, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, is working on an ethnography of the activism of women and trans deportees and return migrants in Mexico City for her dissertation. Read more.

Dr. Matt Cook of the Department of Geography and Geology at Eastern Michigan University (EMU) has been awarded the Ron Collins Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching award EMU presents. He received this award in the same year as being granted tenure and serving as a co-PI on a major grant project. Read more.

RESOURCES AND OPPORTUNITIES

A Few Spaces Remaining: AAG Leadership and Early Career Workshops, 1-5 June

Two summer professional development workshops from the AAG’s Graduate Faculty Development Alliance have moved online. Registration is free and currently open, though only a few open slots are available – reserve your spot by May 15. Department Chairs, Heads, new Deans, and other emerging leaders – develop the tools you need to do your job, network with peers, and learn from top leadership professionals in an inclusive, innovative, and interactive series. The AAG Geography Faculty Development Alliance for early career geographers, as well as non-AAG members who are graduate students or teaching geography in higher education, offers an innovative, new online approach to the highly successful early career workshops that have been offered since 2002.

For more information about both workshops see http://www.aag.org/gfda or contact Dr. Patricia Price (patricia [dot] price [at] baruch [dot] cuny [dot] edu) with questions about the leadership workshop or Dr. Michael Solem (msolem [at] txstate [dot] edu) about the early career workshop.

Call for Abstracts: 2021 Climate Adaptation Research Symposium

call-for-abstracts-graphic-twitter_Climate_Adaptation-300x150The UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation is delighted to invite abstracts for our 2021 Climate Adaptation Research Symposium. This virtual event will feature recent social science research on the impacts of climate change, particularly on vulnerable populations and communities. We’re building off the success of last year’s event, which brought together 70 presenters and more than 2,000 attendees from across the nation and world. Abstracts are welcome from economics, geography, law, public health, sociology, urban planning, and related disciplines. Research should measure the scale of climate impacts or focus on strategies to reduce these impacts.

Submission deadline: May 7, 2021

Symposium: September 8, 2021

Learn more and submit your abstract here: https://innovation.luskin.ucla.edu/abstracts/

Please direct any questions to lcievents [at] luskin [dot] ucla [dot] edu.

Participate in AGI’s Geoscience COVID-19 Impacts Survey

RAPID-COVID19-Geosciences-Study_04-1-300x194The American Geosciences Institute’s Geoscience COVID-19 Impacts study has been extended into a second phase that will continue the longitudinal study through March 2022, thanks to continued support by the National Science Foundation (Award #2029570). The second phase of this study will focus on how the COVID-19 pandemic has permanently changed the way in which geoscientists work and study and how workplace and instructional environments transition into post-pandemic configurations. The study will continue to accept new participants through January 2022 and is open to all geoscientists, including students, retirees, and those not currently employed, who reside in the United States, and are at least 18 years old.

For more information and to participate in the study, please visit https://www.americangeosciences.org/workforce/covid19.

IN MEMORIAM

Hultquist_NancyNancy B. Hultquist, retired Central Washington University (CWU) geography professor, died March 30th, 2021. Nancy is remembered fondly by students, friends, and colleagues. Starting out using computer punch cards, Hultquist eventually moved to using GIS, ultimately introducing countless K-12 teachers to the early iterations of making maps and GIS through NCGE workshops she participated in. She was quick to assist junior faculty and devoted countless hours to helping students find employment, including maintaining a jobs list of employment opportunities across the Pacific Northwest which currently has over 800 subscribers. Read more.

The AAG is also saddened to hear of the passing of Jene McKnight and Roger Kasperson this past month with written tributes forthcoming.

FEATURED ARTICLES

Why should geographers care about data science?

By By Canserina Kurnia, Esri Senior Solution Engineer for Education, and Joseph Kerski, Ph.D., GISP, Esri Education Manager

HouseValueMap-300x229“Data science is the study of data. Data science involves developing methods of recording, storing, and analyzing data to effectively extract useful information. The discipline of geography has always been focused on data science, because geographers have always been keen to gather, analyze, and make sense of large volumes of data across a wide variety of scales and covering a wide variety of themes, from ecoregions to individual census blocks. Those using GIS are spatial data scientists: They combine their data with theoretical foundations such as Tobler’s First Law to explain and predict. As they visualize and analyze data, they detect patterns and relationships, testing real-world phenomena against hypotheses.

Why is geographic thinking and spatial analysis important to data science?” Continue reading.

GEOGRAPHERS IN THE NEWS
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President's Column

Opening Up the Possibilities for an Accessible AAG

Many of us “went” to the AAG annual meeting last month, scheduled to take place in Seattle. Of course, we all attended virtually from separate isolated locations. I attended from my living room, my kitchen table, and my bedroom floor. Though just to insert some sense of the old days, for one committee meeting, I invited one of my University of Oregon colleagues (Alec Murphy) to the “Presidential Suite” (my kitchen table). I mistakenly thought the meeting was scheduled for later in the day and in my email invite, I offered to serve charcuterie and wine. Alec corrected my timing mistake and suggested that 8am might be too early for wine. I’m not so sure.

President Lobben opening up “the Presidental Suite” (her table at home, and a laptop) at AAG 2021.

Keeping with my personal mission and my conference theme of Access, now is a good time to discuss how we all can participate in enhancing inclusion of attendees with disabilities at our meetings, whether they be national, regional, or in our departments. And wouldn’t it be nice if we all could be disciples, each carrying this message forward into our sister organizations when we attend meetings in cognate disciplines? My hope is that this column will be useful going forward, in particular for people who are as yet less familiar with disability and other accessibility issues, not just at AAG but at other conferences as well.

Let me start with a bit of background. Over its lifetime, members of the Disability Specialty Group have spent significant time and effort working on issues of access, inclusion, and optimal integration at the AAG Annual Meetings. These efforts have included advocating for accommodations, sending advance scouts to venues, reporting on mobility strategies, and developing guidelines for conference assistants (for example, identifying an accessible route between the Marriott Wardman Park and the Omni Shoreham Hotels in Washington, D.C; it’s certainly not a direct one).

These efforts are beyond helpful—they are necessary for many of our members. But, these are not the sort of activities in which AAG Specialty Groups should have to engage in on their own. Imagine tasking members of the Water Resources Specialty Group with mapping access to safe drinking water at each conference.

As a result, AAG Council approved the creation of an Accessibility Task Force to ensure structural foregrounding of accessibility for all in all AAG’s operations. While I hope that this Task Force will continue to work on additional issues of accessibility, the initial charge was to address physical barriers to access and inclusion in the AAG. The first report has been drafted and submitted to Council and focuses on three issues: the website, Meridian Place, and the annual conference. AAG staff are already working on implementing nearly all of the report’s recommendations. Task Force members and I are thrilled by this progress and applaud our AAG leadership for taking these steps.

While I hope that this Task Force will continue to work on additional issues of accessibility, the initial charge was to address physical barriers to access and inclusion in the AAG.

But there are substantial barriers to access—socially situated barriers—that AAG cannot legislate or manage centrally. The social model of disability recognizes that disability manifests in cultural attitudes embedded in social practices. It’s the social model that suggests our society has to change to remove disabling barriers to access.

At the AAG annual meeting, many of these socially constructed barriers to access are created by other attendees. This is something that is in your control.

If you want to take small, individual and significant steps to foster inclusion, consider making the following social and behavioral changes outlined in the table below. This list is put together from a short survey I sent out to members of our Task Force and from my own personal experiences. It is by no means inclusive of all the measures we can take, and does not touch on other sets of measures that would help inclusion for other marginalized groups, but it is a starting point. And it is often taking that first step that opens us up to being more aware of how our actions affect others.

  • Don’t block ramps.
  • Adjust microphone heights as necessary.
  • Ensure equal integration in spaces (don’t relegate people with mobility devices to areas just for them or to the margins of the room).
  • Don’t move chairs around and block access corridors.
  • Avoid wearing scents.
  • Respect independence.
  • Don’t pet service animals unless invited to do so.
  • Talking louder doesn’t improve clarity. Be clearer rather than louder.
  • Don’t use flash photography or other strobe-like devices.
  • Avoid low lighting. It’s not safe for anyone, but especially unsafe for people who are blind or have low vision.
  • When communicating with someone using a sign language interpreter don’t talk to the interpreter, talk to the person with whom you’re communicating.

I want to spend some time contextualizing four important issues: judging others, bathrooms, language, and presentation guidelines.

Judging others: We all know that we’re not supposed to judge others based on appearance. And, yet we do. People who are visibly different from the majority of others that are present in a space are judged differently and assumed to be unable (or able). It’s an age-old adage: Don’t judge people by their appearances. This is especially true in the world of ability.

Bathrooms: I have to admit, I’m obsessed with bathrooms. They seem to be the battleground for so much of our collective history and ongoing exclusions – notably also around gender non-conformity and transgender rights in present times.

I also have deeply personal experiences navigating public toileting with my son with cognitive disabilities. Many of his and our experiences have not been easy, nor dignified. There have been many times when assisting my son has involved both of us finding ourselves on filthy public bathroom floors because public bathrooms are not designed for adults in his situation. Fortunately, my son can now use the family bathrooms or men’s bathrooms with Andrew (my husband). If Andrew isn’t with us, he and I go to the women’s bathroom. That often incites negative comments and critiques from others.

I’ve been asked not to use profanity in my columns. Too bad. If I could I’d be able to convey what I think about the judgement of others in the women’s bathroom in those circumstances.

But, my obsession with bathrooms isn’t really about the bathroom itself. It’s about how we have designed and legislated our bathrooms to control access to public space. From Victorian-era gender discrimination (which extended far beyond just public bathrooms), to Jim Crow racially segregated bathrooms (also extended far beyond bathroom spaces), to recent battles over transgender people’s rights to bathrooms (think North Carolina’s HB2 law), it seems that people only want to drop drawers in spaces that include people who only look like them or suspect they are like them.

The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) ensures that public bathrooms provide accommodations for people with disabilities. But accommodation is not inclusion. ADA laws mandate separate spaces, including bathrooms (but also: building entrances, classrooms, hiring process, educational practices, work environments…). You’ve seen these bathroom spaces on campuses and in civic venues, airports, and conference settings–rows and rows of stalls for non-disabled people and merely one or two “disabled stalls.”

I’ve paid attention to our public bathrooms at the AAG annual meeting venues. Without exception, the gendered public bathrooms at our venues have been airport style; only one or two stalls for people with disabilities, but rows for non-disabled people.

Until our society implements universal design and access for our public bathrooms, in our future meetings, attendees can focus on two key things to ensure dignified access to bathrooms: 1. when both an accessible stall and standard stall are available, use the standard stall if you don’t need the accessible stall; and 2. avoid judging others for seemingly inappropriate use of an accessible stall; you cannot judge by appearance alone who needs to use those stalls.

Language. We must condemn the use of derogatory slurs about marginalized groups, and that includes words that are considered “metaphors” (e.g., “stupid” “crazy” “lame”) but really point to ableist thinking. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review provides a good overview on the use of ableist language.

I don’t think that most people are intentionally derogatory about or towards disability when they use such words. But, these are not used as words of praise, and their usage upholds stigma for many groups with cognitive impairments and/or mental health diagnoses.

For a handy guide on when it’s OK and not OK to words like those above, consult the chart below (which I developed from a chart from the Military Special Needs Network).

Adapted from the Military Special Needs Network

The National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/style-guide/) lists some excellent guidelines for referring to people with disabilities. To paraphrase:

  • Refer to a disability only when it’s relevant to a conversation and when knowledge of the disability is certain (e.g. not based on appearance alone).
  • Be sensitive to preferences for people-first or identify-first language. For example: “People who are blind…” rather than “Blind people…” This is intended to emphasize an individual’s personhood rather than their disability. However, there are critiques against the use of people-first language, including that it is often imposed by non-disabled people on disabled individuals and that the use of people-first language does not address the social injustices faced by the disability community. Also, many disabled people prefer identity-centric language because their disability is an important part of their identity and because it facilitates activism based on identity. In any case, people have the right to refer to themselves however they want.
  • When possible, ask the individual how they would like to be described.
  • Avoid made-up words like “diversability” and “handicapable” unless referring to them in a quote, a movement, or an organization.

None of us can be perfect and language preferences are subject to change. In fact, the very term “disabled” is contested as pejorative and biased. But we can all try to be better in how we use language around ability. Be open to self-correction.

Presentation Guidelines. One of the primary goals of our annual meeting is to exchange scholarly findings and ideas. We mostly use an audio/visual format for that sharing. Yet not everyone uptakes audio/visual presented information in the same way. Fortunately, presenters have a few options for enhancing the accessibility of their presentation and, happily, these guidelines by the APHA will improve the effectiveness of presentations more generally. Moderators and organizers must also stay aware of the needs of all of their presenters with regard to disabilities and access.

Going back to the inclusion diagram I referenced in the March column. We all decide what sort of Annual Meeting we want to host and attend. We can reject the medical models that suggest that disability is a personal problem and can only be ‘fixed’ by medical intervention. Instead, we can embrace universal access, and a space, a culture, and an annual meeting that moves beyond individual accommodation so as to be truly inclusive.

If you’re wondering which disability model you embrace, answer this question: What do you think needs curing, the body or the society?

Thank you to the Accessibility Task Force for their efforts in drafting the first report: Audrey Kobayashi, Deborah Metzel, Katherine Ericson, Sandy Wong, Hamish Robertson, and Leonor Vanik. Thank you to several others who shared their conference experience with me as I gathered input for the foundation of this column. And thank you to Sandy Wong, Diana Beljaars, and Stephanie Coen for their feedback on initial drafts of this column.

—Amy Lobben
AAG President and Professor at University of Oregon
lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0091

FURTHER INFORMATION

AAG 2021 sessions on disability, mental health, and access (for registrants’ view until May 11)

Accessibility Guidelines for Presenters, American Public Health Association

Disability Language Style Guide, National Center on Disability and Journalism

Knowledge base, including chart of definitions toward inclusion, Think Inclusive

Why You Need to Stop Using These Words and Phrases, Rakshitha Arni Ravishankar, Harvard Business Review

Military Special Needs Network and EFMP Coalition

Disability Justice, from Showing Up for Racial Justice, including these Google Docs:

Disability Home Manners,

Disability Justice, anti-ableism and access resources, and

Nuts and Bolts of Disability Access.

Is there a resource you’d recommend? Email us at newsletter [at] aag [dot] org.

 

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 lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

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Perspectives

Working Together for Racial and Social Justice: From Anti-Asian Racism and Violence to Anti-Racist Praxis in Geography

By Guo Chen, Associate Professor of Geography and Global Urban Studies, Michigan State University

This column is the first in a new section of the AAG News called Perspectives, which offers a platform for members to discuss issues of relevance to geography. A slightly longer version of this article was first published in April as a tie-in with related sessions sponsored by the Asian Geography Specialty Group and the China Geography Specialty Group at AAG’s annual meeting. Registered participants at the meeting may view the recordings of these sessions until May 11:

In June 2020, the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) issued an open call directed at putting an immediate end to anti-Black racism and advancing efforts toward global social justice. The murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and George Floyd pulled a painful trigger for many Asian Americans. The Association clearly stated that “[the] fight against anti-Asian pandemic racism is rooted in a common struggle against white supremacy” and “[to] end global anti-Black racism, we must fight racism in our local communities and educate ourselves and others about the rich history of Black Americans and support, validate, and value Black lives now and always.”

Most recently, but not for the first time, the urgency of this shared struggle against white supremacy was highlighted by the horrific Atlanta-area shootings of eight people on March 16, 2021, including six women of Asian descent. In April, four members of the Indianapolis Sikh community were killed in a shooting at a FedEx warehouse. Anti-Asian racism in the United States has been more widely reported by the media lately than before (see LA Times coverage and NY Times, for example), and reports of anti-Asian hate crimes are rising around the world (see Time). In early 2020, Asian American communities and scholars were already well aware of this rise in anti-Asian racism. On a virtual panel in June 2020, the president of the AAAS, Dr. Jennifer Ho of the University of Colorado Boulder, explained why COVID-19-related anti-Chinese sentiment is essentially anti-Asian racism:

“[w]hile China and Chinese people have been targeted and blamed for the coronavirus in the United States … the truth is all forms of racism against the Chinese in the United States are forms of racism against anyone who is perceived to be Chinese in the United States. It’s an Asian/Asian American issue … what it means to be an Asian American is the recognition that those particularities that happened in a natal homeland get diminished, get flattened when you arrive in the United States. Because someone who doesn’t know what your particular ethnicity is, your nationality, and only sees your Asian-looking face and is going to make certain assumptions of who you are, about your ability to speak English … one of the things we have in common, as Asian Americans, is this understanding that we are not benefiting from white privilege, that we have been on a receiving end of systemic racism, starting with the Chinese, extending into other Asian ethnic groups.”

Since January 2020, the lives of Asian-heritage people in the U.S. and probably also in many other countries have been violently shaken. Asian Americans were among the first to help local communities combat COVID-19, while racist attacks were increasing in cities like Los Angeles. The Stop AAPI Hate website received 3,795 reports of anti-Asian hate incidents nationwide between its launch on March 19, 2020, and February 28, 2021. In these reports, the Chinese were the ethnic group most targeted, but 60% of the respondents were non-Chinese. Incidents occurred in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Asian women reported significantly more incidents than did Asian men. The fatality rate for Asian women has continued to increase due to the combined effect of COVID-19 and a terrifying rise in hate incidents. In fact, the AAPI Data website reports that 13,620 more Asian Americans died than usual in the first seven months of 2020 (a 35% increase over the prior 5-year average). Over this long year, anxiety has also built up as many have been separated from their families or extended families and ancestral lands due to travel bans from both sides of the Pacific—a circumstance that has likely caused more stress to Asian women than to men, given that women are more likely to fulfill caregiver roles. As early as July 2020, studies were already finding a large percentage (40.3%) of Asian Americans with self-reported symptoms of anxiety and/or depression (an 8-fold jump from the previous year) compounded by racism-related vigilance. These same studies warned of the serious and long-lasting negative impact of experienced and perceived racial discrimination on physical health and psychological well-being.

Despite discussions on the xenophobic sentiment stoked by the previous U.S. administration, we must also accept the historicity of our current crisis of racism and racial violence. As race scholars have commented, white supremacy is the root of all race-related violence in the U.S., and “race is a thread that connects all shootings.” Anti-Asian racism is racism, just like anti-Black racism and any other form of racism. Whenever an Asian country is perceived as a national threat, Asian Americans suffer. Asian Americans are all too familiar with the history of state-sanctioned discrimination.

Racism is like a river that affects everyone in the country, and it is deeply rooted in white supremacy in the U.S.
. . .

We have come to realize that our geographic scholarship is compartmentalized along national, experiential, and personal identity lines. Racialized identities and the angst and alterity experienced by diasporic scholars in North America often need some translation to the rest of our international colleagues. But the themes of our studies are universal. As one geographer wrote to me, “different forms of oppression are linked … nobody is free until all are free.” And, as a community of geographers, we need to continue our discipline’s strong tradition of studying how oppression and marginalization play out, within places and across space. As a former chair of a Specialty Group of the AAG, I have led open dialogues with Asian and China-heritage geographers, some of whom shared opinions and stories with me in June 2020. Most expressed pain arising from frustration with a cross comparison of the ways different nations had handled COVID-19, together with feelings including fear about the prospect of leaving their “anodyne” research areas to embrace a perceived “politicized” arena, such as addressing the legacy of anti-Asian racism and distant or near memories of being discriminated against or marginalized as a Chinese or Asian scholar within our institutions. I appreciate their sharing with me.

“[T]here is a rising anti-Asian sentiment because of the [previous] U.S. leader’s rhetoric and the hawkish advisors and media he listens to … it is easier to blame the Other, versus looking clearly at the fault of not acting early, to respond to the pandemic, and doing the necessary steps to have masks, etc. We can see the … examples of Taiwan, South Korea, New Zealand and even many African nations that have low infection rates, and VERY low fatalities [by June 2020 during the first wave] … I get emotional almost weekly because of the current situation … I will stop writing about this.”

“I’m not a China-study scholar and I was never an active member as I almost never went to those AAG happy hours. But I do care about the study subjects … I used to think politics and politicization should be separate from academic endeavors, however, it becomes increasingly difficult, if not possible at all, to be like that. And even further, being a social scientist, I started asking myself whether it’s responsible not to face the challenges from the political side. I guess it’s a learning process for me.”

“I grew up in post-colonial Africa and have a very low level of tolerance for racism in any form. Even if I am not genetically Asian, I too could say a few words on bigotry and prejudices. But is this enough? Should we try to publish our personal opinions if this helps us discover our own identity and the originality of our own contributions as transnational geographers? We are a tiny minority but maybe it is easier for us to articulate or advocate than it is for a vast majority of people.”

“[One can] in no way ignore the anti-Asian/Chinese racism and discrimination that exist around the world, not just in the US … the diasporic Chinese scholars’ life experience …matter, and … the research on Asian (im)migration and racism … matter.”

“As a Mainlander based in Hong Kong, I can totally relate to [the] feeling … [about] racial prejudices against Asian scholars.”

“[I] would like to reach out to say that I feel [I am] being discriminated [against] in my job.”

In 2021, these messages from nine months ago look so distant, but the concerns are even more relevant today. As we sojourned in the Zoom world of scholarly exchanges in the past year, the fluidity has afforded us connectedness and made us academic refugees striving for existential relevance. The interruption of COVID-19 in our customary lives also provides an opportunity to change. It is time to prioritize anti-racist praxis in Geography, like in other disciplines, and to ensure that our being anti-racist advances a resolution to “challenge structural racism and other intersecting oppressive systems—e.g., ableism, classism, ethnocentrism, homophobia, sexism, transphobia—by shifting power—e.g., funding and other critical resources, policies, processes, leadership, culture” in our discipline and subdisciplines. For area geographers (those whose research has been largely framed regionally rather than systematically or globally), some clear goals are to continue to interrogate the assumptions and privileges embedded in area-bound expertise, to continue to problematize our positionalities and the dominant narratives in our research field, and to continue to privilege the scholarship that has long been considered “marginal,” such as work on transnational migration and migrants, underprivileged people, race, ethnicity, and social justice, to name a few. There is also an urgency to develop anti-racist learning and teaching praxis in our discipline.

Many challenges are ahead, but the most dreadful time is when we are in silence. We should continue to intervene with dialogues to break this silence. The research field is there to be defined and redefined.
. . .

Guo Chen (PhD, Penn State), Associate Professor of Geography and Global Urban Studies at Michigan State University. She is the recipient of a Wilson Center Fellowship in 2017-2018 and an Outstanding Service Award from the China Geography Specialty Group of the AAG in 2020. At MSU, Guo serves as an elected faculty representative on the Asian Studies Advisory Council, a founding member of the Geo Diversity Committee, a newly appointed faculty member on the President’s Advisory Committee on Disability Issues, a SWIG faculty advisor and a core faculty member of the Asian Pacific American Studies Program beginning fall 2021. Guo thanks Christian Lentz, Ken Foote, Shaolu Yu, Jennifer Ho, and Lisa Schamess for their reading of this piece, and the many anonymous colleagues for their emails, warm words, and generously shared resources, which led to this op-ed. The opinions expressed here are solely her own.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0089

Panel resources:

Ho, J. 2020. Anti-Asian racism, Black Lives Matter, and COVID-19. Japan Forum. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09555803.2020.1821749 .

Japan Forum Podcast 8 With Prof Jennifer Ho – Anti-Asian Racism, BLM, and COVID-19. https://soundcloud.com/soas-university-of-london/japan-forum-podcast-8-with-prof-jennifer-ho-anti-asian-racism-blm-and-covid-19 .

Teaching resources for Anti-Asian racism and COVID-19. www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/2020/04/08/anti-asian-racism-and-covid-19.

To be an Asian woman in America. CNN opinion.

For an understanding of white supremacy as the root of all race-related violence in the US, read https://theconversation.com/white-supremacy-is-the-root-of-all-race-related-violence-in-the-us-157566

Read Ben Barron (PhD student in Geography at CU Boulder) article about the Boulder and Atlanta shootings: https://www.boulderweekly.com/opinion/guest-columns/race-is-a-thread-that-connects-all-mass-shootings/

Anti-Racism Resources for Asian Americans. https://tiny.cc/AntiRacistAsAmResources .

Alberts, Heike C. and Helen D. Hazen. 2013. International Students and Scholars in the United States: Coming from Abroad. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Please note: Perspectives is a new 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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Nancy Hultquist

Nancy B. Hultquist, retired Central Washington University (CWU) geography professor, died March 30th, 2021. During her geographic career she was an active member of the American Association of Geographers (over 50 years), the National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE), and the Washington Geographic Alliance (WGA). Nancy is remembered fondly by students, friends, and colleagues. She was quick to assist junior faculty and devoted countless hours to helping students find employment.

Like many geographers, Nancy was drawn to the field early in her academic career. Also, like many geographers, she had many non-academic interests including bowling, raising Brittneys, and playing the fiddle.

Born in 1943, Nancy grew up in Atlanta, GA where she lived near a 32-lane bowling alley. There she worked and became good at the sport. (Nancy holds the record of High Series (679) for Women in Moscow, ID.) She completed her undergraduate degree in 1965 at Georgia State University and then on to Graduate school, first at the University of Cincinnati and then on to the University of Iowa. Along the way she married John (also a geographer) in 1969. From the farming country of Iowa came the first Brittany. Then the University of Idaho beckoned (1974), and the three headed further west.

The Moscow university provided a split position that Nancy and John shared. Along the way she gained knowledge and teaching experience using computers to make detailed maps. Like so many of her contemporaries, Nancy started out with key-punch cards and eventually moved on to Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Countless K-12 teachers were introduced to the early iterations of making maps and GIS through NCGE workshops she participated in with Paul Baumann.

In 1988, Nancy joined the CWU geography department as the first full-time, tenure-track woman faculty member. There, she became involved with an Army initiated (GRASS) GIS program. Initially the program used CWU faculty to do mapping for the Army’s Yakima Firing Center/Training Center. Nancy expanded the program to include undergraduate GIS classes and was instrumental in moving the program along. Her popular classes grew, and she soon had students presenting their GIS projects at professional meetings. It is little wonder that, as an advisor, she supervised more interns than any other geography department faculty.

Other than her love of geography and dogs, (their kennel name – Cedaridge Brittanys – was known throughout the Nation) Nancy was also a talented musician. She first played the fiddle at the age of 4 and, as an additional outlet for her boundless energy, joined a group named Kittitas Valley Fiddlers and Friends. Heart issues from a childhood case of Rheumatic fever ended her academic career, but only interrupted her fiddle playing. Major heart surgery came in 2009. Her surgeon told her she was spared because there was more for her to do on Earth.

As she recovered and gained stamina, Nancy began to take a larger role in the music of the Kittitas Valley Fiddlers and Friends. They played at elder care facilities in Ellensburg and other venues in the area, especially at the Adult Activity Center. The photo accompanying this text is from this period. She considered the entertainment provided to the residents of the valley in these facilities one of her best experiences.

Nancy was known as a great teacher and an even greater supporter of student success. She maintained a jobs list of employment opportunities across the Pacific Northwest which currently has over 800 subscribers. Many CWU alumni credit her tireless work to helping them launch their career. The list will continue, serving as a living memorial to her impact. Please take a moment to remember Nancy B. Hultquist as a shining light to students, colleagues, and friends.

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Allen G. Noble

Dr Allen G. Noble, Professor Emeritus at the University of Akron, Ohio and a longtime AAG member, passed away on March 24. He was 90 years old.

In his early career, Dr. Noble served as a United States Foreign Service Officer in Bombay, India, and Curitiba and Belém, Brazil. He went on to a distinguished academic and publishing career in regional, cultural, and physical geography. His book Wood, Brick, and Stone: The North American Settlement Landscape was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1984. In the late 1980s, AAG recognized Dr. Noble with the AAG Honors, the highest award offered by the AAG. The Ohio Academy of Sciences cited him in their 100th Year Celebration as one of Ohio’s Distinguished Scientists.

Noble’s ability to keep his family goal oriented and organized will be greatly missed. He was predeceased by his daughter and is survived by his wife, two sons, four grandchildren and three great grandchildren

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