Perspectives

Building Healthier Cities: A Call for Geographers and Building Professionals to Collaborate through Geospatial Data

May 29, 2026

By Oluwaseun Ipede

As our cities grow more complex and environmental crises mount, urban sustainability is no longer a theoretical discussion; it’s an existential necessity. Among the greatest challenges facing 21st-century cities is balancing rapid urbanization with public health and environmental sustainability. At the heart of this challenge lies an indispensable asset: Geospatial data.

Geospatial data is the connective tissue that binds physical infrastructure, human behavior, and environmental systems. But data alone is not enough. Its responsible use requires geographers, academic and professional, human and physical, cartographic and computational, to engage collaboratively with built environment professionals such as architects, engineers, and construction (AEC) specialists. In doing so, we can transform urban spaces into sustainable, healthy cities that serve both people and the planet.

This perspective calls for a more intentional convergence between academic geography and the built environment professions. We must create stronger alliances between geographers and AEC practitioners to unlock the full potential of geospatial technologies, not only for smarter infrastructure but for a higher Public Health Index (PHI), a metric that integrates the determinants of health within the spatial context of urban development.

Why Geospatial Thinking Matters in the AEC World

The AEC sector is in the midst of a digital revolution driven by tools such as Building Information Modeling (BIM), GIS, IoT, and AI. Yet, what’s often missing from this techno-centric evolution is geographical thinking, the ability to analyze the spatial dimensions of urban life, social equity, and environmental justice.

AEC professionals typically design and construct the built environment based on functional needs, client specifications, and engineering requirements. But without geographers’ input, they may overlook socio-spatial disparities, ecological sensitivity, or historical injustices embedded in urban landscapes.

By leveraging geospatial data, geographers can help architects and engineers ask better questions:

Are green spaces equitably distributed?
What neighborhoods face the highest air pollution burden?
Where are vulnerabilities to urban heat islands concentrated?
How does access to healthcare, clean water, and public transport vary across districts?

These are not only public health questions, but also inherently geographic questions. The answers lie in maps, models, and location-based data.

Public Health and Urban Sustainability: A Spatial Convergence

There is growing recognition that the health of urban populations is shaped more by where people live than by individual behavior. The WHO’s urban health framework emphasizes that air quality, noise pollution, walkability, access to nature, and housing conditions are all place-based determinants of health.

In a 2021 article in Nature Sustainability, Nieuwenhuijsen et al. demonstrated how integrated urban and transport planning using spatial models could significantly reduce premature deaths in cities by designing healthier environments. Similarly, the Lancet Global Health commission on urban design highlighted the health dividends of data-informed land use, mobility, and environmental planning (Giles-Corti et al., 2016).

The missing piece? Systematic and sustained collaboration between academic geographers and built environment professionals, rooted in shared access to data and mutually informed practices.

Large number of houses built on a hill with greenspace saved within. — Junnar, Maharashti, India. Building and planning professionals should work more closely with geographers to capture the full range of geoinformation about places, such as the distribution of green space, health outcomes for residents, history and context, and more. Credit: Zoshua Colah, Unsplash

Bridging Academic Research and Real-World Impact

Academic geography often generates invaluable insights into urban systems, population health, environmental exposure, and spatial justice. Yet, these insights are frequently siloed, buried in journals, datasets, or local case studies without pipelines into professional practice.

By contrast, AEC professionals often possess the authority and tools to shape real environments but may lack the time or training to engage with cutting-edge geographic research. The result is a fragmentation that wastes both insight and opportunity.

A more effective model would:

Create applied research partnerships where academic institutions support municipal projects with geospatial modeling, health risk mapping, or sustainability planning.
Co-develop open data platforms that bring together public health data, environmental monitoring, land use, and infrastructure systems.
Embed geographers in interdisciplinary planning teams within urban design firms, public agencies, and NGOs.
Incentivize knowledge translation, encouraging academics to publish not only in peer-reviewed outlets but also in formats digestible by policymakers, planners, and engineers.

Through these approaches, we transform geographic knowledge into actionable intelligence for healthier cities.

The Role of Data Collaboration: Optimism over Obstacles

It’s true that data limitations exist, especially in the Global South, where political sensitivities or institutional gaps can impede access. But rather than accepting these barriers, we should see them as challenges to overcome through professional solidarity and innovative collaboration. Emerging models such as data cooperatives, public-private academic partnerships, and community mapping projects (e.g., Humanitarian OpenStreetMap) demonstrate how diverse stakeholders can pool geospatial data to fill critical gaps.

Data availability and collaboration challenges are not exclusive to the Global South, they also exist in the Global North, though in different forms. In wealthier contexts, issues often revolve around data fragmentation, siloed institutional access, and proprietary restrictions by private firms. Despite robust infrastructure, academic research, and AEC professionals in the Global North still face hurdles in sharing and integrating geospatial data for public benefit. Collaborative initiatives, but the need for stronger academic-practitioner synergy remains. The opportunity to blend research with practice to improve public health through spatial insights is global. AEC professionals can enhance this effort by sharing non-sensitive spatial data collected during design or construction phases, site assessments, building footprints, and environmental impact data back into public or academic domains. Meanwhile, universities and research institutes can act as neutral custodians of data, improving transparency and trust.

Everyone Has a Geographic Role

No matter their specialization–transport geographers, medical geographers, climate modelers, or remote sensing analysts–every geographer works with “place” as a foundational concept. And every AEC professional works in a place, whether designing a water pipeline, planning a hospital, or modeling a transportation network.

This shared concern with space and place is the starting point for collaboration.

We must redefine geography not only as a field of academic inquiry but as an action-oriented discipline embedded in urban development processes. Geography, through its emphasis on scale, systems, and connections, offers a language to unify the fragmented efforts of planners, builders, public health experts, and citizens.

By foregrounding geospatial data and geographical expertise, we can help cities evolve not just in form, but in function, as ecosystems of wellbeing.

Conclusion: Toward a Healthy Urban Future

As a multidisciplinary expert, I stand at the intersection where physical space meets digital insight. I’ve witnessed firsthand how each role contributes a vital piece to the urban puzzle, from capturing accurate terrain models with GPS/drones to analyzing social disparities with spatial data. What’s clear is that no single discipline holds the key to building sustainable, healthy cities. It is only through intentional collaboration between academic researchers and built environment professionals that we can truly unlock the power of location-based data.

Geospatial data is not just about maps, it’s about meaning. When survey data informs urban models, when drone imagery validates land cover changes, and when GIS connects these insights to public health indicators, we move beyond design toward decision-making for human well-being. Geography isn’t just a field; it’s a framework. It equips us to see connections, understand patterns, and act across scales.

The future of our cities depends on breaking down silos, sharing data openly, and applying geographic thinking across professions. It’s time we all, academics and practitioners alike, step up as co-creators of healthier, more equitable urban spaces. After all, everything happens somewhere. And where it happens matters. “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.”

This article is based on the author’s presentation on urban oases during AAG 2025 in Detroit.

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.

Advocacy

The Battle for SBE and Science Funding: What You Can Do

April 23, 2026

In early April, the White House published its proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2027. In its current form, the proposal threatens the core of U.S. scientific leadership; and if passed by Congress, would impose devastating cuts to programs supporting geography, climate, and spatial sciences.

These proposed reductions included a 55% cut to funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the elimination of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) directorate. The impact of this proposed elimination is already being felt, with Nature reporting that NSF leadership is moving to comply in advance by dissolving the directorate entirely, strictly on the basis of the White House request.

Historically, the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate has been a cornerstone of funding for geographers, and social and psychological scientists, supporting nearly 63% of all academic research across those disciplines, but it suffers from an administrative hurdle that other directorates do not have: it was not statutorily established. SBE was established in the early 1990s because of years-long advocacy by social scientists who believed it should exist outside of the biology directorate. In 2017, NSF reaffirmed the value of SBE research to the nation’s priorities in a report that asserted “The diverse SBE sciences that are supported at NSF—anthropology, archaeology, demography, economics, geography, linguistics, neuroscience, political science, psychology, sociology, and statistics—produce fundamental knowledge, methods, and tools for a greater understanding of people and how they live,” knowledge that forms a foundation for acting on national priorities in keeping with the NSF mission.

Nonetheless, SBE’s lack of statutory status reduces its legal and budgetary protections.

The Administration took similar measures in 2025, when it proposed the elimination of the directorate in the 2026 Budget. Due to push-back from many in the science community, including geographers, Congress took measures to limit these cuts, ensuring that the SBE would be able to operate at least through FY 2026.

This iteration of the administration’s budget proposal is likely to face a steep uphill climb in both halls of Congress, as it did in 2025, with members from both sides of the aisle articulating their support for sciences. We must continue to show our legislators that funding for spatial science matters.

What’s next?

In the past two weeks, the House and Senate Budget Committees held their first hearings with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Russell Vought. These were the first opportunities for the administration to defend the proposed cuts. During these marathon sessions, members from both sides of the aisle grilled the OMB Director on cuts to NSF, and other domestic agencies, voicing their displeasure with the impact that this would have on research across the board. Each chamber will work to draft and complete their concurrent budget resolutions by months-end.

In the month or so ahead, the budget will move through both Chambers’ appropriations committees, where it will be marked up for hopeful completion by the end of June. The subcommittees most important in determining how NSF, and SBE funds are appropriated include the House and Senate Subcommittees on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies (CJS). The House Subcommittee will hold its markup on April 30, 2026, followed by a full House Appropriations Committee markup on May 13, 2026. Both will be public unless voted on as otherwise by committee members. Between these two Committee markups, the National Science Board (NSB) was scheduled to hold its next meeting on May 5^th. This meeting has since been cancelled. As the governing body of NSF, the NSB’s perspectives on the budget are vital to helping Congress and the president understand which budgetary decision best align with the NSF’s mission. The NSB’s dismissal will have more consequential impacts as the budget process continues to unfold.

Congress must approve a budget, to be sent to the President’s desk by the 30^th of September, or face a government shutdown.

What can you do?

Document how SBE funding has made an impact on your work, your institution, and especially your community and the nation. Send examples to advocacy@aag.org and use them in your communications with your Congressional representatives.
Reach out to your member of Congress, using tools like those provided by the Consortium of Social Science Associations, and AAG’s Action Kit to urge your member of Congress to recognize the importance of disciplines like geography to the nation’s long arc of innovation, and to express any concerns you may have related to the elimination of this crucial directorate of the NSF.
UPDATE: As of April 25^th, 2026, the Administration has fired the entirety of the National Science Board, the governing body of the NSF. May’s meeting of the NSB has been cancelled. Please use tools like those provided by the Consortium of Social Science Associations, and AAG’s Action Kit to urge your member of Congress to recognizethe important role of this storied institution.
Encourage members of your network, such as department leaders, provosts, executives in the private sector, to be in touch and amplify your message.
Add your voice to the public dialogue on science funding. Many people in your community may not even know the stakes of this battle. Write an op ed, schedule a talk at your library, or share on social media. AAG’s Action Kit has ideas and how-to’s.

Stay alert to the appropriations process as it progresses, and stay in touch with AAG through advocacy@aag.org with your questions and ideas.

See All Awards

B. L. Turner II Award for Doctoral Research in Human-Environmental Science

Deadline for the 2027 awards: October 15, 2026 (by midnight, Eastern Time)

Over a distinguished career spanning more than five decades, B. L. Turner II has fundamentally shaped our understanding of human-environmental interactions, land systems, sustainability, and socio-environmental vulnerability. Drawing on rigorous field-based and quantitative and mixed method approaches, his pioneering work on land change/systems, sustainability, and coupled human-natural systems helped to solve various research problems and created intellectual pathways that continue to guide research across multiple disciplines and space-time scales.

Beyond his scholarly achievements, Turner mentored generations of students and colleagues, fostering a collaborative research approach that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. His guidance shaped not only research agendas but entire career trajectories, instilling in his mentees a commitment to rigorous scholarship that bridges theory and practice.

The Award

This award is designed to support scientific research in human-environmental science. The award will be made every year to a Ph.D. candidate who has successfully defended their proposal, demonstrating geographical or related motivation with particular attention to rigorous science drawing on fieldwork and mixed or emerging methods. Although primarily designed to stimulate human-environment system-oriented scientific investigations within the discipline of geography, this award is open to doctoral candidates examining problems of human-environmental systems regardless of the discipline in question, membership in the American Association of Geographers (AAG), or country of the degree-granting institution.

The B. L. Turner II Award for Doctoral Research in Human-Environmental Science consists of a cash award of $10,000, a certificate of recognition, a one-year mentorship from one of B. L. Turner II’s mentees, past awardees, or a scholar identified by the Award Trustees, and recognition at the AAG Annual Meeting during its awards ceremony (registration and travel expenses not included).

Eligibility

Applicants must be Ph.D. students who are either already ABD/Candidates OR will be Candidates at the time of receiving the award.
The research problem in question must contribute to the advancement of problem solving and theory and/or methods relevant to human-environment systems.
There is no limit with respect to the number of students who can apply from each institution.
Applicants for the award do not need to be members of the American Association of Geographers, but membership is encouraged.
As with all other AAG awards, eligibility also rests on the candidate being in compliance with the AAG Professional Conduct Policy. Nominations may be rescinded, and the award may also be revoked for any candidate or awardee who is found in violation of the AAG’s Professional Conduct Policy.

Applications

A complete application must be received no later than the close of business on the deadline (Eastern Time).

A statement of intent to apply for the award.
An abstract of the dissertation that explicitly identifies the individual’s contribution to human-environment systems, including theory/methods.
The applicant’s academic curriculum vitae (CV).
A recommendation letter from a member of the student’s dissertation committee or other faculty member from the student’s Ph.D. degree-granting institution.

APPLY

For questions or difficulties, please contact grantsawards@aag.org or call the AAG at 202-234-1450.

B. L. Turner II Award for Doctoral Research in Human-Environmental Science Committee

Applications will be reviewed by the B. L. Turner II Award for Doctoral Research in Human-Environmental Science Committee. The committee consists of three members, appointed by the Trustees. The committee is charged with reviewing the applications and recommending awards to the Trustees. The Trustees will make the formal awards.

Donate to the Fund

News

The AAG Annual Meeting Revenue Flow

April 20, 2026

By Antoinette WinklerPrins, AAG Council Treasurer

This is the last message by outgoing 2024-2026 Council Treasurer Antoinette WinklerPrins. In her earlier series, she helped illuminate several financial dimensions of a professional organization such as the AAG. In this column, she shares a visualization of the income and expenses flow of the AAG’s Annual Meeting. Read previous columns.

We recently gathered for our annual meeting in San Francisco—a celebration of the broad and diverse community that geographers are. The annual meeting is a key activity for the organization and its members. We had over 5,000 registrants and 1,200 sessions, with the majority being held in person, with a hybrid option for session organizers who opted in. Running a meeting is an expensive affair, and arrangements are usually made many years ahead of time, with some costs locked in while others are set at the time of the meeting. This means that there can be inflationary pressures on costs, as there was this year.

The figure below illustrates the flow of the 2026 AAG Annual Meeting Revenue and Expenses—demonstrating the fixed and variable costs that must be accounted for.

Sankey diagram titled “AAG Annual Meeting Revenue and Expense Analysis.” Revenue flows from registration (79%), exhibit booths (4%), sponsorships (7%), and other sources into total meeting revenue. Expenses flow into categories such as hotel, facility, and catering (22%); audiovisual services (23%); contracted meeting services (17%); staff capacity (25%); and smaller technology and administrative costs. Expenses ultimately divide into 62% variable costs and 38% fixed costs. Credit: Betsy Orgodol — Credit: Betsy Orgodol

The AAG operates on a break-even model for its annual meeting and sets its registration fee accordingly, but has to do so ahead of time without knowing precisely how many people will register, nor how some costs will change.

Annual Meeting variable expenses consist primarily of usage-based costs such as catering, certain hotel and facility fees, and audiovisual services—these are not fixed when the contract is signed, and depend on factors such as the number of registrants and number of sessions. The AAG contracts several meeting services, such as meeting and exhibit managers, decorators, childcare services, conference assistants, security, and service providers for conference participants who need accommodation. Staff capacity, insurance, and software technology fees are largely fixed costs that do not change based on the size of the meeting or the number of attendees.

The cost structure the AAG uses provides more flexibility and scalability—when attendance is strong, total expenses rise proportionally but are matched by increased registration and sponsorship revenue, enabling the organization to serve more participants without compromising the quality of the meeting experience. When attendance is smaller, costs decrease in areas like catering and certain service charges, though only to a limited extent since some baseline expenses remain fixed; even so, the meeting can be delivered efficiently while maintaining a consistent standard of value for attendees.

The AAG consistently works to control more costs to ensure that resources are used efficiently and that the meeting remains both financially sustainable and rewarding for attendees. While the AAG strives to conserve meeting expenses in the most efficient manner possible, inflationary pressures, such as those driven by tariffs impacting meeting-related costs and California sales and use taxes, presented a challenge this year. The combination of planning and contracting ahead helped AAG absorb some of these costs.

We realize that it may feel that registration fees are high; the break-even model for pricing is meant to provide you with the services the membership has asked for and expects (refreshments and meals, hybrid options, childcare, and accommodations for disabilities, among others) and to assure that the meeting is a quality event and a positive experience for all.

Please feel free to reach out to me or Gary Langham, AAG’s Executive Director with questions, comments, or concerns. Send your comments and questions with the subject line “Treasurer’s Corner” to helloworld@aag.org.

Stories

Member Profile: Dydia DeLyser

April 13, 2026

Photo of Dydia DeLeyser “Figuring out what places are about” is the foundation of Dydia DeLyser’s inquisitive, hands-on work to explore and preserve American landscapes and cultural histories. A professor of geography emerita at Cal State Fullerton, DeLyser has cultivated this outlook from early on. As the child of Dutch immigrants who came to the U.S. in the 1960s, she learned early how place, belonging, and language could open—or close—doors.

“My first language is not English, it was Dutch,” she says. “So my earliest memories are of having sort of a secret language at home that nobody else could understand.” Her parents were “always trying to understand American culture, and yet never able to become a part [of it].”

For DeLyser, the outsider status was doubled by another kind of “outside:” the past. Her parents’ vivid stories of their experiences of World War II and the privations of life in Europe even before Nazi occupation lit up DeLyser’s imagination and appreciation for social history: “The broader cultural stories about our past, like my parents’ stories about the war, are also intimate personal stories that happen in the lives of individuals,” she says. “We connect our individual experiences to the broader narrative, you know, of victory over the Nazis or so many other issues. That’s a geographical or spatial experience.”

DeLyser’s hunger to understand and embrace places and times she couldn’t know firsthand have led to her foundational preoccupation with what she calls “the intimate geographies of social memory.”

Bridging Time and Space

DeLyser started working on her intertwined study of history’s large scales and intimate personal histories while she was still an undergraduate at UCLA, aided by her work at UCLA Library’s Department of Special Collections in the manuscript, photographs, and rare books library, one of the largest such departments in the country. The archive housed the personal papers of L.A. notables and international figures such as novelist Raymond Chandler, journalist Carey McWilliams, writers Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, and Peggy Hamilton, the first fashion editor of the LA Times.

Reading their letters and manuscripts opened DeLyser’s eyes to new ways of knowing people, even after their deaths. Research—specifically, qualitative research with primary materials—was like a portal through the gap in time and place that had so fascinated and frustrated DeLyser from childhood. She has dedicated her career to the methods that make qualitative research vibrant.

“To me, scholarship should be empirically rich, grounded in some real thing,” she says. “It should be theoretically sophisticated and engaged with whatever conceptual conversations are current and engaging and relevant in the discipline or subdiscipline you are in, and it should be methodologically articulate.” Put simply, she says: “You should be clear how you know.”

DeLyser describes research methods as “an important form of credibility for a scholar, as the core of your scholarly credibility. If you can show how you know—because you interviewed these people or because these are the quotes or because you did this archival research or you spent ten years observing at this place or because you actually did the labor or whatever the reason—If you can show how you know, then we will trust you. And then we’ll be able to learn from you, we’ll be able to take on whatever your point is.”

If you can show how you know, then we will trust you.”

Early in her career, DeLyser established a close relationship to Bodie, a California ghost town in the Eastern Sierra region. Designated a National Historic Landmark and state park in the early1 960s, Bodie began as a gold-mining town that boomed in the 1870s, crashed in the 1880s, but then lingered well into the 20^thcentury. As the population declined, at one point there were more buildings than people. And as residents left, they abandoned furnishings and things they didn’t want to pay to move, which became the intact artifacts of their daily lives on display in about 200 buildings, from dishes, pots, and chairs in kitchens to unused caskets in the town morgue.

Exterior view of a building in Bodie, Calif. Credit: Jon Sullivan, Wikimedia Commons — Credit: Jon Sullivan, Wikimedia Commons

Starting when she was a college student with summers free, she began working as a low-paid, unskilled seasonal worker for maintenance, DeLyser gradually deepened her knowledge of Bodie over the next 35 years in all different ways, from conducting ethnographic research tourists there to using the Park’s own archive to understand how State Parks staff were themselves shaping what visitors saw and ultimately to using her research to make the case for broadening the town’s National Historic Landmark status, all while putting in true sweat equity in caring for the town, from physically working to stabilize the abandoned buildings to “cleaning about 10,000 [public] toilets.” Now, she is executive director of the town’s nonprofit, working to preserve Bodie in a state of “arrested decay—keeping the buildings standing while letting them look like they’re still falling down,” according to DeLyser. Today’s visitors to Bodie can peer inside its buildings to see the many personal items left behind by the final occupants, and imagine the lives of the town’s former inhabitants. DeLyser was interested in the impact of this on visitors, especially in the moments of recognition when a specific object reminded them of something in their own lives. DeLyser then sought to map these personal epiphanies onto the larger stories of history.

Interior view of a kitchen in Bodie, Calif. Credit: Fronl, Wikimedia Commons — Credit: Fronl, Wikimedia Commons

“Ghost towns are so connected to the mythic West in the United States, to the heroic, mythologized tales of the “Wild West” and all that, we simply connect ourselves to big themes about American culture. All of a sudden, from a small life and a small object, it links to the big themes. I’ve seen myself have ordinary objects spark magic in my life many times, and I’ve studied how it happens.“

Always say yes

DeLyser also engages enthusiastically as a teacher, mentor, and champion of the geography discipline. Over the years, she has served on AAG Council, was a founding member of the AAG Qualitative Research Specialty Group, contributed to the work of the AAG Harassment Free Task Force, as well as its Public and Engaged Scholarship Task Force. She worked tirelessly during the COVID pandemic to deliver supportive programming for graduate students, and also serves on the AAG Climate Committee, to name only a few contributions. It’s part of her commitment to hold the door open for the next generation of geographers.

“I’ve had to bust open doors myself in my career, but the point isn’t about busting open doors. The point is to hold the door open and create a pathway for success for the people who will come after us,” she says.

She brings the same esprit de corps to her research and publishing. “There’s no sense in scholarship unless it’s shared,” she says. “If I can learn something from my scholarship about the past, I feel obligated to share that, otherwise I take it with me. It happens in the moment, it happens in the present, but it’s always for the future.”

Living in Bodie, where only Park staff now live, gave DeLyser a strong sense of community, and a strong desire to give back to that community, something that has followed her throughout her career.

DeLyser is careful to appreciate and credit the communities she works with. Years later, as she launched a new research project about how neon signs have shaped the American landscape she recognized that there was a “neon community” or “communities” in the U.S., and, she says, “I wanted people to feel like they knew who I was and they welcomed my work, so it took me a long time to become part of that community, vested in being part of a community as ‘neon people.’” DeLyser says neon signs are “an incredibly overlooked part of the American landscape. People read the sign that says “OPEN” over the door that’s red and blue—they read that sign without even realizing that they’ve read it.” She wanted to bring those hidden signs and their hidden stories to light.

DeLyser had been introduced to the behind-the-scenes world of neon by her husband and longtime creative partner, Paul Greenstein, an expert in the history and repair of classic neon signs. Early in their relationship, she accompanied him to repair a sign over a restaurant, and the adventure sparked questions and conversations, which in turn led to more than a half dozen collaborations over the years. Greenstein and DeLyser have delved into the history and cultural significance of neon, antique cars, and Indian motorcycles. Their 2021 book Neon: A Light History is the latest culmination of these collaborations.

DeLyser’s approach to research combines immersion in the topic, becoming embedded in the communities that hold deep knowledge about it. She sees her research across a spectrum of often deeply personal and committed hands-on experience and careful methodologies. “I had all the tools,” she recalls of her long relationship with Bodie. “I knew how to use a hammer and a Skilsaw, and I also I knew how to do an interview. I had a hammer in one hand and a notebook in my pocket.”

Resources

The Status of Women and Underrepresented Groups in Geography – A Multidimensional Analysis

March 10, 2026