A massive tax reform package signed into law by President Trump shortly before the holidays drew attention primarily for slashing corporate rates and amending individual filing rules. The legislation, however, was also of significance for the higher education community.
The original bill that passed the House of Representatives included language that would have counted graduate student tuition waivers as taxable income. This proposal drew significant protests and press criticism and was ultimately removed by House and Senate negotiators. The AAG was actively involved in opposing the provision and keeping our student members and departmental leaders informed, and we are pleased with the outcome.
Separately, the new law will apply a new excise tax of 1.4 percent on investment income for certain private colleges. Institutions with over 500 students and holding assets of $500,000+ per student will be affected. It is estimated that this new tax will affect approximately 35 institutions including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford and will generate close to $2 billion in revenue over ten years. The House had proposed taxing additional colleges and universities, but Senate negotiators argued for the more narrow language.
Finally, it will bear watching how much of an impact the new law has on financial support for public institutions in high-tax states. The legislation caps personal deductions of state and local taxes at $10,000, which could apply pressure on certain states to lower taxes. This, in turn, could force these states to cut budgets, including for public higher-ed institutions.
Over the past decade, most universities and some secondary schools across Africa have been exposed to geographic information system (GIS) technology. Teaching about and with GIS on that continent has been both challenging and rewarding.
On April 9, 2017, the panel session “Teaching GIS in Africa” was held at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual meeting in Boston. Esri organized this session, and speakers came from several nations and spoke of their diverse experiences as teachers and, in one case, as a student in Eastern Africa.
Although every African university and nation has its own unique characteristics, the speakers and audience members coincided on several issues. GIS education across Africa—with exceptions especially in South Africa—has been slow to evolve beyond the teaching of basic GIS theory, in large part due to a lack of sustained resources such as computer labs, Internet connections, and updated local datasets. Often these resources are donated but not maintained in the medium or long term. Software is generally available either as open source or via discounts and donations by Esri and other commercial providers.
The main limiting factor identified was the lack of instructors educated on the latest technologies and methodologies such as mobile data collection, data publishing and sharing, and advanced spatial analysis. Far too many students are still learning GIS from textbooks instead of via hands-on use. Much of the applied GIS being taught is natural resources (and satellite imagery) oriented, with less attention being paid to human geography, urban issues, and cartography. This, again, is due to the limited availability of specialists in these areas and of spatial data such as street networks and geodemographics. Many steps have been taken in the form of short-term, donor-funded projects, but often momentum is lost after project completion.
The University of North Alabama’s Jonathan Fleming, an Esri education ambassador, teaches in the geography department at the University of Dar es Salaam.
Esri is committed to making a long-term difference in GIS education in Africa and, over the past five years, has ramped up its involvement in this endeavor. Esri has sponsored a series of education user conferences (in Eastern Africa), training sessions, and other activities organized by local Esri offices. Additionally, special assistance has come from Esri’s offices in France, Portugal, and Switzerland to support universities in francophone nations, lusophone nations, and Rwanda, respectively. Esri has sponsored a growing group of education ambassadors to travel and conduct teaching and geomentoring missions across the globe. Among them are Jonathan Fleming of the University of North Alabama, who taught in Dar es Salaam in 2013, and Stace Maples from Stanford University, who visited Kenyatta University (KU) in Nairobi in spring 2017. Maples taught several classes and also mentored faculty and the university administration about how to apply and sustain GIS across the entire campus. Feedback from the universities and ambassadors was extremely positive, and so Esri will continue to support these missions in the future.
Among African universities, Kenyatta University has emerged as a star—a lighthouse exemplar—in adopting and promoting GIS. As in many GIS success stories in any field, a GIS champion was involved: Professor Simon Onywere. Onywere had been a GIS and remote-sensing expert for many years, but in 2013 he decided to take his university to the next level. He worked with Esri’s home office and Esri Eastern Africa Limited (in Nairobi) to craft a memorandum of understanding (MOU) whereby both parties would contribute to the success of GIS across the entire KU campus. Under Esri’s 100 Africa Universities program, the MOU included a donation of ArcGIS software to the university. Esri has worked with approximately 70 universities under this program thus far. With software installed in the laboratories, Onywere and Esri personnel trained instructors, students, and administrators on the power of GIS for solving spatial problems in any field of study. Enterprise GIS, including attention to servers and client apps, became available to anyone showing interest in learning on the same platform used by industrial, commercial, and government entities around the world. GIS Day and similar events were run; a GIS club was formed; and, soon, a small army of GIS users and promoters was created.
The first Esri Eastern Africa Education GIS Conference was held in Nairobi in 2013.
KU recently hosted the 2017 Esri Eastern Africa Education GIS Conference. GIS is being taught and used for research by Onywere’s environment science faculty and several others including staff of the recently added tourism and hospitality department and the newly built library. The KU story is a story of hope for GIS at African universities, demonstrating that with personal and collective initiative, anything is possible.
Working with instructors, students, and university/school administrators in Africa has been extremely rewarding and gratifying. We encourage all AAG members to consider lending a helping hand to slowly but surely raising the level of GIS education across the continent. If you’d like to apply to become an Esri Education Ambassador, send a brief CV with teaching experience and a statement of interest to edambassadors [at] esri [dot] com.
By Michael Gould, Global Education Manager, Esri
Featured Articles is a special section of the AAG Newsletter where AAG sponsors highlight recent programs and activities of significance to geographers and members of the AAG. To sponsor the AAG and submit an article, please contact Oscar Larson olarson [at] aag [dot] org.
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Confederate Monument Controversy in New Orleans
Across the U.S. South and beyond, cities are debating the fate of their Confederate monuments. In New Orleans, the May 2017 removal of the Robert E. Lee monument in Lee Circle, the large round-about on St. Charles Avenue, was the culmination of over two years of public and political drama, driven primarily by Mayor Landrieu’s 2015 charge less than a week after the Charleston massacre to “look at the symbols in this city to see if they still have relevance for our future” (Times Picayune June 22, 2015). He explained that a conversation with jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, who when asked to help plan the city’s 2018 Tricentennial Celebration, challenged the mayor to consider Lee Circle through his eyes. “Who is he? What does he represent? And in that most prominent space in the city…does that space reflect who we were, who we want to be or who we are?” (Times Picayune June 24, 2015).
Landrieu proposed the removal of four monuments – statues of Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, and the Battle of Liberty Place Obelisk. Dedicated between the years 1884 and 1915, these four monuments were erected as part of a national trend, particularly in the South, symbolizing the Confederacy’s Lost Cause mythology – a revisionist Civil War narrative intended to transform the South’s military defeat into a political and cultural victory, promoting white dominance and states’ rights, while deifying southern leaders (Gallagher and Nolan 2010).
Using a public nuisance law, the Mayor brought the issue to the city council that ultimately voted six to one to remove the monuments. Yet, unsurprisingly, the issue was far from resolved. While the Mayor’s office moved forward with plans for removal, pro-monument groups such as the Monumental Task Committee deployed multiple legal maneuverings to slow the process. Meanwhile, contractors bidding on the removal contract received death threats. Countless protests occurred, mostly in front of the three figurative memorials which became gathering places for supporters and opponents of removal. At times the protests were small and cordial; others were tense and required police barricades and security. Some were organized by anti-monument organizations such as Take ‘Em Down, Nola, and others by anti-removal groups like Save Our Circle, and still more were informal and grew from people walking by or patrons of local bars and restaurants coming out to engage. Not even during the city’s beloved Jazz Fest was there an escape from the controversy as a plane flew overhead with a banner reading “OUR MONUMENTS OUR HISTORY!”
Site of the Battle of Liberty Place obelisk, removed in the early morning hours of April 24th, 2017. Photograph by Jennifer Speights-Binet
After town hall meetings, hearings, lawsuits, appeals, and protesting, the uprooting of the Confederate statues in New Orleans began in the early morning hours of April 24th with no public notice of the removal. Because of serious security concerns, removal workers masked their faces as well as the company name on their vehicles and wore flak jackets. With snipers overhead in a parking garage, the workers took down the first monument, the Liberty Place obelisk behind a French Quarter shopping mall. Long a controversial monument, the Liberty Place obelisk honored those who fought against political integration of blacks into a white-controlled government (Gill 1997). The White League defeated the much smaller New Orleans’s police force, where 35 people, mostly police officers, died. Nevertheless, protestors rallied to demonstrate their disapproval of the obelisk’s removal.
Removal of Robert E. Lee monument on May 19, 2017.
About two weeks later, the statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis at the intersection of Jefferson Davis Parkway and Canal Street was taken down in the pre-sunset hours of May 11th. Next, the P.G.T. Beauregard statue, erected at the entrance to City Park in 1915, was removed one week later, again in the morning hours, with a relatively calm crowd. At both sites, protestors for and against monument removal demonstrated, and while the scenes were heated, no physical injuries occurred.
Then on May 19th, in the light of day on a warm New Orleans afternoon, onlookers brought lawn chairs, held parasols while drinking mimosas, played Michael Jackson’s Remember the Time on a boom box; others danced as an impromptu jazz band sounded their instruments. This was the day that the most prominent of the four monuments, the Robert E. Lee northward facing bronzed statue, would be removed from its 60-foot column, where he had been standing for 133 years. This final of four Confederate statues removed seemed to resemble more of a tailgate party than a protest (Times Picayune May 19, 2017). However, contractors again wore masks and protective gear because of the highly contentious Confederate monument controversies. As a crane finally took the Lee statue down, the crowd of hundreds cheered and jeered. Here, New Orleans’s festive culture intersected with serious memory-work, highlighting that such work is always at its root local.
As Lee was descending, just a few blocks away New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu was delivering the speech of a lifetime – now referred to as the Gallier Hall address after the venue where it occurred. (Read entire speech here.) Noted for its rhetorical eloquence engaging pathos, ethos, and logos, Mayor Landrieu’s speech reminded us that like monuments, words matter. Consider the following excerpt:
“America was the place where nearly 4,000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp. So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth. And it immediately begs the questions: why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the same…all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans. So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission.”
The empty plinth where Robert E. Lee stood for 133 years. Photograph by Rebecca Sheehan.
The four monuments are now housed in an undisclosed location with the idea that they will be relocated to a museum where proper contextualizing and interpretation may be provided. Since the beginning of the process, Mayor Landrieu has advocated this as a solution, so that the city may remember but not revere the figures and events that they embody (Times Picayune July 9, 2015). Of course, these monuments are not the only controversial memorializations in New Orleans’s cultural landscape. Take ‘Em Down Nola is advocating for the removal of other monuments such as the Andrew Jackson statue in the beloved French Quarter’s Jackson Square. Jackson, victor at the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, is hailed as the Savior of New Orleans but also a major contributor to the Trail of Tears. Indeed, difficult memory-work lies ahead for the city and the U.S. South as complex histories and how to remember those histories for the present and future continue to come to the fore.
As geographers visiting the city and no doubt partaking in its festive culture, you are also encouraged to walk by the sites where these statues were emplaced for well over a century and consider what is present in their absence—as of this writing, the pedestals of these Confederate monuments remain empty. We suggest that the now empty plinths where these statues once stood are signs of promise not despair. They are part of the process of memory-work that must occur to broaden one form of spatial justice in the landscape.
Peter Meusburger, a professor of human geography at the University of Heidelberg, died on December 18, 2017. He was 75 years old.
Peter was born on March 14, 1942 in Lustenau, Austria and earned his doctorate in geography from the University of Innsbruck.
Meusburger’s research interests were on the geographies of education and skills, labor market research, and regional women’s research. As a scientific advisor to the Vorarlberg state government, Peter studied the emigration of highly qualified people from Vorarlberg. He also examined the state’s educational history.
Peter was appointed to the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg in 1983, serving as chair in economic and social geography at the Institute of Geography until he retired in 2007. He was named the university’s first Distinguished Senior Professor after his retirement. Meusburger held many positions at the University of Heidelberg, including Dean of the Faculty of Geosciences in 1987-1988 and 1988-1989, Vice-President in 1991-1992 and 1992-1993, and Member of the Senate from 1999 to 2006, as well as Senate spokesman and curator of the University of Heidelberg. He has been a visiting professor at various universities in Japan, China and Brazil.
Between 2001 and 2003, Peter served as president of the German Geography Society. His awards and honors include the 1968 Johann Hampel Prize of the Austrian Geographical Society, 2006 Franz von Hauer Medal of the Austrian Geographical Society, and 2010 Vorarlberg Science Award. In 2010, Peter was named Honorary Doctor of Eötvös Loránd University and Honorary Member of the Hungarian Geographical Society. That same year, Peter was awarded the 2010 AAG Presidential Achievement Award from the American Association of Geographers.
Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related areas. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books.
Publishers are welcome to send new volumes to the Editor-in-Chief (Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803).
Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should also contact the Editor-in-Chief.
AAG President Highlights Civil Rights at Ohio University Colloquium
On November 3, 2017 AAG President Derek Alderman addressed the Ohio University Geography Department through its Colloquium program. His talk, entitled “Civil Rights as Geospatial Work: Role of Counter Mapping and Radical Place-making in the African American Freedom Struggle”, engaged the audience in a critical look at how geographers can play a role in discussing and practicing civil rights. He emphasized that geographers now have an opportunity to be active in a second wave of Civil Rights movements, making specific note that there is a chance to feature not only civil rights struggles, but the ways in which we talk about them. Coinciding with the Geography Awareness Week theme of the geography of civil rights movements, Alderman highlighted how geographers can interact with new grassroots movements and ways of knowing about race and place.
A key moment of Alderman’s talk called attention to the next generation of geographers. “Students will be our planners and mappers for the future–but you won’t be doing that alone, you’ll do that as part of a larger history of [geospatial and civil rights] work,” Alderman remarked. The statement captures an idea at the heart of his presentation– civil rights and geography are fundamentally linked and have a deep history which can and should be explored further. Examples of the geospatial work Alderman discussed included The Green Book, a tool which helped black travelers during the height of segregation in America, and the importance of data during sit-ins and bus boycotts. One way of looking at these important topics is to view them as part of a longer, broader civil rights movement beyond the common narratives many of us are familiar with today.
The Ohio University Geography Colloquium is a four-part, semester-long series. Chosen by the OU faculty and a graduate student representative, the colloquium speakers connect students with a variety of areas of geographic research. Many Geography departments regularly host similar events with guest speakers sharing information on topics, study areas, or research initiatives they are passionate about and ways they filter into popular culture. For students, these events can help them explore new areas of geographic thought and inspire new research ideas. For faculty in attendance, it presents an opportunity to branch out into other geographic subfields and become energized for their own research.
One way that the AAG supports colloquium programs and the sharing of geographic ideas is through the Visiting Geographical Scientist Program (VGSP). Funded by the Gamma Theta Upsilon Geography Honor Society, the program is geared towards small departments with limited resources to bring in notable geographers as guest speakers. The VGSP helps to identify potential visitors and assists with costs for travel.
Additionally, the AAG has kicked off a brand new resource to highlight geographers interested in and available to give presentations on various aspects of geographic thought and research. The Geography Speakers Bureau is designed to facilitate connections between speakers and those hosting events such as department colloquia, or media contacts seeking a geographer perspective on a topic. The Speakers Bureau, still in development with more speakers to be added, highlights distinguished geographers and their research interests and encourages a culture of public speaking within the field. Not only does the Speakers Bureau aim to connect geographers to each other, but it also seeks to increase public engagement to help communicate all that geography has to offer the world.
Commemorating the Enslaved Along Louisiana’s River Road
Members of the NSF research team visit the River Road African American Museum in Donaldsonville, Louisiana in June of 2013. (Photo by Amy Potter)
Between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, lies the remnants of antebellum sugar plantations along Louisiana’s famed River Road, named for the Mississippi River that snakes its way through southern Louisiana before spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. Many of the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century plantation homes that still exist along this road have been preserved, and some have been transformed into museums dedicated to retelling Louisiana’s antebellum period. A few of these museums attract as many as 200,000 visitors a year (Oak Alley and Laura, A Creole Plantation, for example). Most of these plantation house museums, however, have traditionally focused their narrative presentations on the planter and his family, which necessitates that tours be spatially arranged in and around the planter’s home (The Big House).
Such narratives have traditionally marginalized, segregated, or even omitted stories of the enslaved persons whose labors made these landscapes and vast fortunes possible (Eichstedt and Small 2002). Instead of focusing on the people who toiled and effectively created these landscapes, visitors to these sites are regaled with stories of romance, wealth, scandal, and entrepreneurship, and are enchanted by elaborately costumed guides and Oak tree-lined boulevards. Narratives and artifacts tend to limit visitors’ engagement with the enslaved to the hyperlocal and the safely distant past. While their traces are to be found throughout the house and across the landscape, the onus is on visitors to seek them out.
Louisiana’s Highway 18 near Whitney Plantation in summer of 2017. Mississippi River levee on the left and sugar cane on the right. (Photo by Amy Potter)
Disturbed by the absence of the enslaved from these museums’ tour narratives, a team of geographers (Derek H. Alderman, Candace Forbes Bright, David L. Butler, Perry L. Carter, Stephen P. Hanna, E. Arnold Modlin, and Amy E. Potter) received a three-year National Science Foundation grant in 2014 to research how plantations in the South present enslavement. The grant allowed the team to continue their work on plantations in the River Road region (Alderman, Butler, and Hanna 2016), as well as expand this work into Charleston, South Carolina and the James River region of Virginia in order to gain an understanding of regional variations among plantation museum landscapes and narratives. Over a decade of research by some members of our team (Butler 2001; Modlin 2011) allows us to reflect on the transformation of the River Road region alongside other plantations in the South as they struggle to engage with the legacy of slavery.
Allées Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, dedicated to the memory of enslaved persons in Louisiana. (Photo by Amy Potter)
The gross neglect of the stories of the enslaved within the region has been challenged through the development of counter narrative sites. One of these early sites in the region is the River Road African American Museum located today in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. The museum, opened in 1994, is the creation of Kathe Hambrick. Kathe, a native of Louisiana, returned from time away in California and toured plantation museums along the Mississippi River in the early nineties. She was concerned with the romanticizing of plantation life and found the narratives of the enslaved omitted from plantation museums’ presentations. Upon realizing this omission Kathe determined she wanted to do something to change that. The River Road African Museum site notes that “she vowed to her herself – We must do something to tell our story…’ Later on, one night, it just came to Hambrick that the answer was a museum.” (River Road African American Museum 2017)
More recently, the region has experienced another monumental shift in its interpretation of slavery with the 2014 opening of Whitney Plantation, financed by New Orleans attorney John Cummings. Whitney Plantation in many ways is the antithesis of the traditional plantation tourist experience. Rather than center a tour on the house and the planter family, Whitney foregrounds the voices of the enslaved. The tour is an inversion of the spatial narrative with much less emphasis on the Big House.
Children of Whitney located on a front porch of one of the original slave cabins on the property. (Photo by Amy Potter)
Our research team partnered with Whitney in the spring of 2015 as part of our larger project. Several of us have returned since its inaugural year to observe the changes taking place over the site.
In an effort to create a plantation tour that prioritizes the stories and voices of enslaved persons, Whitney utilizes resources like the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration Slave Narrative Collection (1936 to 1938). While the oral histories captured by the mostly white WPA interviewers are problematic (Carter, Butler, and Dwyer 2011), Whitney’s use of excerpts from these interviews with formerly enslaved persons, most of whom were children before emancipation, gives expression to those who help create this region and this country.
Visitors receive a lanyard connecting them to the story of a formerly enslaved child. (Photo by Amy Potter)
While most plantation tours begin by crediting white owners for “building” the house and grounds, Whitney turns the visitor’s attention to enslaved persons (particularly children) immediately upon entering the welcome center. Visitors receive a lanyard (to keep) featuring the words and image of a formerly enslaved child. One such example is Hannah Kelly, who was 10 years old when she was emancipated. While waiting for the 90-minute tour to start visitors can explore an exhibit on slavery, which situates the visitor within a multi-scale history that eventually connects to River Road.
The Children of Whitney, a series of sculptures created by artist Woodrow Nash in the Antioch Church. (Photo by Amy Potter)
After an introduction, visitors begin their tour of the property – a tour laid out to first honor the enslaved, then to educate visitors about the everyday lives of slaves along the River Road, and, finally to connect Whitney to both the broader historical geography of slavery and the legacies of slavery haunting us today. Guides first invite visitors to enter Antioch Church where they encounter the Children of Whitney, a series of sculptures created by artist Woodrow Nash who was inspired by 19th century photographs of enslaved children. These same children appear on the lanyards visitors wear around their necks – an intentional effort by the museum to encourage visitors to connect emotionally with the enslaved.
The tour continues to the Wall of Honor, where we learn about Anna, one of 354 enslaved persons connected to the property. Anna, we are told, was just four years old when she was bought on the dock of New Orleans in 1814 (her mother died on the journey from the Chesapeake). As she grew older she was raped by her mistress’s brother. She is the black matriarch of the eminent Haydel family of New Orleans (Sybil Morial, a descendant of Anna, is the wife of Ernest Morial, New Orleans’ first African-American mayor, and mother of Marc Morial, who also served as Mayor of New Orleans).
The Field of Angels is dedicated to the children who were enslaved in Louisiana and died before their third birthday. (Photo by Amy Potter)
Other stops along the tour include the Gwendolyn Hall Memorial and the Field of Angels, dedicated to the 2,200 children who were enslaved in Louisiana and died before their third birthday. The tour winds through the rows of slave cabins, two of which are original to the property, eventually making its way to the “Big House.” In contrast to most plantation tours, just a few minutes of the tour are spent inside the house and even here the narrative treats the house as a place of work for enslaved women and children. Visitors then return to the welcome center where they are asked to reflect on the tour and share their thoughts on a wall.
Contemplating the enslaved at Allées Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. (Photo by Raymond Glasgow)
Since the racially motivated mass shooting of worshippers at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina and the violent gathering of neo-Nazis, KKK, and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, the foundations of white supremacist accounts of the antebellum South are shaken as never before. New Orleans led the way in pulling down monuments glorifying Confederate “heroes” and cities and towns throughout the country are grappling with the challenge commemorating slavery and the enslaved poses to our national mythos. Southern plantation museums like those on River Road, landscapes that traditionally reproduced a Gone with the Wind version of Southern domesticity, are in many ways at the heart of this struggle.
Carter, P. L., Butler, D. L, and Dwyer, O. (2011). Defetishizing the plantation: African Americans in the memorialized South. Historical Geography 39: 128-146.
Eichstedt, J., and Small, S. 2002. Representations of slavery: Race and ideology in southern plantation museums. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
The Disciplinary Data Dashboard site on the AAG website.
Are you interested in trends in geography? Have you been looking for openly available datasets to investigate aspects of our discipline for a report or research project? We have the answers for you in our freely accessible data resource, the AAG Disciplinary Data Dashboard.
It is important for researchers, students, and other information-seekers to have a single place to go to and easily find consistently updated disciplinary facts and figures. To meet this need, the AAG has created the Disciplinary Data Dashboard as a central repository for visitors to easily and freely access and utilize data on geography as a field of study.
The AAG has always gathered and made available annual data in two key areas:
AAG Membership Data. Collected via membership forms which all AAG members have the option to complete when renewing membership or on the online member profile page.
Geography Department Data. Collected via the Guide to Geography Programs and the departmental data form, which is circulated annually to geography departments with the call for Guide updates.
The Disciplinary Data Dashboard can be found under the Projects & Programs tab on the AAG website.
AAG staff have also created, and will continue to create, brief, annual summary reports (white papers) presenting and visualizing the data in charts, tables, and other graphics. These reports, available through the Dashboard, also include some analysis and interpretation of the raw data.
Additional Dashboard Sections. Read the descriptions below for additional sections and data available in the Disciplinary Dashboard.
AAG Membership Data Summary Report downloaded from the Disciplinary Data Dashboard.
AAG Departments Data. Data found in this section comes from The Guide as well as the National Center for Educational Statistics. It includes information about geography programs in departments throughout the Americas as well as figures for the numbers of geography degrees conferred. Results of diversity surveys sent to geography departments are also located here.
AAG Workforce Data. This section is a work in progress, but includes a link to our Salary Data & Trends website featuring data on over 90 occupations related to geography. We also plan to have a report soon on our Jobs in Geography (JIG) website providing analysis of job ads posted to the AAG online job board over time and several other reports related to geographers in the workforce
Special Surveys. This section includes links to non-annual surveys on various topics, usually linked to grant-funded AAG projects.
AAG Annual Meetings. This includes raw data and analytical reports on AAG Annual Meetings held since 1904, including venues, attendance, international participants, session/paper topics, Presidential addresses, and more!
AAG Journals Data. This section is also still a work in progress, but will eventually include raw data and an analytical report on the four AAG peer-reviewed scholarly journals: The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, the Professional Geographer, the AAG Review of Books, and GeoHumanities.
AAG Archival Data. This includes information on how to access archival council reports/minutes, records of past AAG Annual Meetings, AAG journals/newsletters, and the “Geographers on Film” series (a collection of interviews with hundreds of influential geographers since 1970).
The Disciplinary Data Dashboard is categorized by source (left column) or by theme (right column).
Important Note about the Disciplinary Data Dashboard Structure. Data is categorized by source in the left column and searchable by theme in the right column. The goal is to make it more intuitive for particular audiences (students, researchers, etc.) to know where to look for specific data resources. The section searchable by theme also includes some externally-collected data and resources from outside of the AAG such as data from The College Board on high school Advanced Placement (AP) programs or The Social Science PhDs-5+ Years Out survey from the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education (CIRGE).
The Disciplinary Data Dashboard is a valuable resource both to those browsing for more information about geography, but also for those pursuing in-depth research on the discipline. The amount of free, raw datasets available could easily support and be the foundation for research projects and publications!
The AAG Snapshots series, first launched at the 2017 Annual Meeting, provides insight on and information about different aspects of the projects, programs, and resources of the association. Do you have suggestions for future Snapshots content from AAG staff? Email cluebbering [at] aag [dot] org.
Robert J. Mason, a professor in the Department of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University, died on November 15, 2017.
Rob was known for his work on environmental policymaking and land use management. He believed in international educational opportunities for students and was passionate about teaching the next generation of environmental leaders. A prolific author, Rob published Collaborative Land Use Management: The Quieter Revolution in Place-Based Planning (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), Contested Lands: Conflict and Compromise in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens (Temple University Press, 1992) and the Atlas of United States Environmental Issues (Macmillan, 1990, with Mark Mattson).
In addition to teaching at Temple University, Rob has taught at Ohio State University, Temple University Japan in Tokyo, and Kobe College in Nishinomiya, Japan. In 2016, Rob taught at Temple Rome. He was serving a three-year term as Regional Councillor of the American Association of Geographers and had previously served as President of the Middle States Division of the AAG. He also served for many years on the Board of Directors of the Kobe College Corporation/Japan Education Exchange including as Co-President.
Rob earned his doctorate in Geography from Rutgers University in 1986, received a master’s in Geography and Environmental Studies from the University of Toronto, and held a bachelor’s in Geography and Environment Studies from the University of Buffalo.
Carol L. Hanchette, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Louisville, died unexpectedly on a hiking adventure in the mountains of Wyoming on October 9, 2017. Hanchette received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 1998 after having worked in a variety of fields including archeology and as a land surveyor for Billings, MT. She joined the University of Louisville in 2002. Hanchette’s work as an applied medical geographer cut across a wide-range of topics which included the links between ovarian cancer and pulp and paper manufacturing in the U.S., and the effects of coal ash on children. Her 1992 study on prostate cancer and ultraviolet radiation, cited over 700 times, was considered an important contribution to the field. More recently, Professor Hanchette had taken an interest in social and environmental justice and the uses of Qualitative GIS. Her work was funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the NIH.
Hanchette was particularly active in the development of the applied master’s program at U. of L. Her vision and passion structured that program from the ground up. Her leadership and popularity with students is well reflected in the many recognitions she received including the Faculty Favorite Award, the Distinguished Service Award and the Community Engagement Faculty Award. Carol was a long-time member and local leader of the Sierra Club. In addition, she loved hiking, ice skating, kayaking and almost any activity outdoors. Her collegiality, professionalism and dedication to geography will be missed by all of the lives she impacted.
AAG Members get exclusive access to publications, prominent journals, unique advocacy, grant, scholarship and professional opportunities with access to industry focus communities, and event discounts, including our annual meeting.
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To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
A massive tax reform package signed into law by President Trump shortly before the holidays drew attention primarily for slashing corporate rates and amending individual filing rules. The legislation, however, was also of significance for the higher education community.
Additionally, the AAG has kicked off a brand new resource to highlight geographers interested in and available to give presentations on various aspects of geographic thought and research. The 
