New Books for Geographers

New Books: October 2017

October 15, 2017

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.

October 2017

American’s West: A History, 1890-1950by David M. Wrobel (Cambridge University Press 2017)

Bike Lanes Are White Lanes: Bicycle Advocacy and Urban Planningby Melody L. Hoffmann (University of Nebraska Press 2016)

Black Dragon River: A Journey Down The Amur River Between Russia and Chinaby Dominic Ziegler (Penguin Books 2016)

The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering by Nicholas De Genova (Duke University Press 2017)

Cities For Profit: The Real Estate Turn in Asia’s Urban Politics by Gavin Shatkin (Cornell University Press 2017)

Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene by Clive Hamilton (Polity Books 2017)

Delicious Geography: From Place to Plateby Gary Fuller and T.M. Reddekopp (Rowman and Littlefield 2017)

Dialogues on Power and Space by Carl Schmitt (Polity Books 2015)

Diplomatic Material: Affect, Assemblage, and Foreign Policyby Jason Dittmer (Duke University Press 2017)

Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino (eds.) (Rowman and Littlefield 2017)

Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment by Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing (eds.) (Rowman and Littlefield 2016)

Historical Geographies of Anarchism: Early Critical Geographers and Present-Day Scientific Challenges by Federico Ferretti, Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre, Anthony Ince, Francisco Toro (eds.) (Routledge 2018)

In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker: Affect, Materiality and Meaning Making by Luke Bennett (ed.) (Rowman and Littlefield 2017)

J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: A Cultural History by Josef Benson (ed.) (Rowman and Littlefield 2018)

Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Placeby Dara Downey, Ian Kinane, and Elizabeth Parker (eds.) (Rowman and Littlefield 2016)

The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literatureby Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira (eds.) (University of Minnesota Press 2017)

Life in the Age of Drone Warfare by Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan (eds.) (Duke University Press Books 2017)

Limits of The Known by David Roberts (W. W. Norton & Company 2016)

Oil, 2nd Edition by Gavin Bridge and Philippe Le Billon (Polity Books 2017)

The Red Atlas: How The Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World by John Davies and Alexander J. Kent (University Of Chicago Press 2017)

Scaling Identities: Nationalism and Territoriality by Guntram H. Herb and David H. Kaplan (eds.) (Rowman and Littlefield 2017)

Sugar by Ben Richardson (Polity Books 2015)

Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globeby Sumathi Ramaswamy (University Of Chicago Press 2017)

Theorising Literary Islands: The Island Trope in Contemporary Robinsonade Narrativesby Ian Kinane (Rowman and Littlefield 2016)

Transnationalism and the Jews: Culture, History and Prophecy by Jacob Egholm Feldt (Rowman and Littlefield 2016)

What’s in a Name?: Talking about Urban Peripheries by Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms (eds.) (University of Toronto Press 2017)

Annual Meeting

2018 AAG Annual Meeting Presidential Plenary Announced

October 13, 2017

The AAG announces the 2018 annual presidential plenary session from its current president, Derek Alderman, as well as a panel of esteemed scholars. The presidential plenary is currently slated to take place during the 2018 AAG annual meeting on Tuesday, April 10, 2018 in the Grand Ballroom at the Sheraton Hotel from 6:30 -8:30 p.m.

Alderman will present When the Big Easy Isn’t So Easy: Learning from New Orleans’ Geographies of Struggle. Beyond merely providing hotels, restaurants, and bars, the hosting cities of AAG meetings offer important moments to delve into the scientific value of these locations and to learn about the historical and contemporary forces and tensions that shape their communities and spaces. Doing so not only advances our intellectual understanding of place but also has the potential to create a more responsible and empathetic visitor and academic conference citizen—someone who can appreciate, analyze, and be affected by the people and places that exist beyond tourism brochures found in hotel lobbies.

When the Big Easy Isn’t So Easy creates a space to explore the role of struggle in the making, unmaking, and remaking of New Orleans. The city’s development has long been a power-laden process in which multiple identities, histories, and social interests converge, mix, but also clash. A wide range of racial, ethnic, class, and environmental struggles have shaped New Orleans in complex ways, making it a site of vulnerability, inequality, and displacement and at the same time a place of resourcefulness, creative surviving and living, and social justice activism.

Panelists, all of whom are civically engaged scholars and gifted geographic storytellers, will highlight not only the (Post) Katrina experience but also the deeper historical and geographic roots of struggle in New Orleans. They will take the audience to evocative spaces and moments, using the opening session to open broader discussions of issues such as black lives and geographies, disaster response and recovery, food justice, water-society relations, the politics of public memory, and urban political economy. Panelists will reflect on the larger academic-political lessons from New Orleans, offer ideas for (re)imagining the future of this city and others, and demonstrate how geographers can learn from and with the host cities for our AAG meetings.

Register now.

In addition to President Alderman, panelists will include:

Laura Pulido, University of Oregon. Noted black geographies scholar and editor of recently released edited book on New Orleans.

Craig Colten, LSU. One of the perennial experts on NOLA and Louisiana history of human-environment/water-society relations.

Richard Campanella, Tulane University. Author of AAG’s ongoing features on NOLA and widely published local expert.

Michael Crutcher, Jr, Independent Scholar. Long-time expert on NOLA and author of book on Treme neighborhood.

Catarina Passidomo, University of Mississippi. Emerging scholar in southern studies, food geography/justice, and wrote dissertation on post-Katrina NOLA.

Rebecca Sheehan, Oklahoma State University. Has worked extensively as of late on the controversial removal of Confederate monuments from NOLA.

2018 AAG Annual Meeting, AAG 2018 New Orleans, Derek H. Alderman, presidential plenary

Post

A Glance at New Orleans’ Contemporary Hispanic and Latino Communities

October 2, 2017

Las Acacias, a Latino market located in the revitalized Freret Street District in Uptown. Photo credit: James Chaney

Situated near the mouth of North America’s largest river, New Orleans has long served as a major port that advantageously connects the United States’ heartland to the rest of the world. Proximity and access to the Gulf of Mexico strategically place the Crescent City between the large consumption economy of the United States and the extraction economies of Latin America, which have historically been key purveyors of raw materials and commodities to the markets of their northern neighbor. Also, New Orleans served as a jumping off point for numerous military expeditions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that altered the political landscape of Latin American countries. Yet, even before becoming an “American” city, New Orleans was governed by the Spanish via Cuba (1762―1803). These economic, political, and historical linkages to Latin America and beyond have facilitated the transnational flows of people, products, and cultures over the course of four centuries and have cultivated the unique multinational ethnic kinship the port city holds today with Latin America and Spain [1]. Evidence abounds of these Hispanic and Latino ties in the cultural landscape, especially in one of the Big Easy’s most notable cultural productions: music [2]. Similarly, visitors with a keen eye will be able to discern the Latin American imprint woven into the urban fabric stretching from the French Quarter to the western suburb of Kenner and the riverbanks of St. Bernard Parish [3].

A taco truck on Claiborne Avenue near The Home Depot still serves Latino laborers more than a decade after Hurricane Katrina. Photo credit: James Chaney

Contemporary Latino migration and settlement in the southern United States have received considerable scholarly attention―particularly from geographers―over the past three decades. The “Nuevo South” moniker was coined to describe this supposedly new migratory phenomenon taking place. However, before Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans was often left out of discussions on southern destinations for Latinos, even though it was home to one of the oldest and most diverse Latino populations in the country. Perhaps the lack of attention was because the metropolitan area’s Latino population was relatively stable and mostly integrated. Of the 58,545 Latinos enumerated in Census 2000, four out of five were U.S citizens, more than half were born in the United States, and Latino household incomes were only slightly below the region’s average [4]. Therefore, New Orleans’ Latinos didn’t fit the narrative of a “New Latino South” so often applied to describe emerging Latino communities made up of and sustained by recent immigrants looking for new opportunities. But, in the wake of Katrina, New Orleans gained national attention seemingly overnight as Latino immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and as far away as Brazil and Peru flocked to southeast Louisiana to participate in the reconstruction efforts. Many arriving laborers were undocumented, taking advantage of the temporary suspension of federal and state enforcement of employment eligibility verification. While a study conducted by scholars from Tulane and Berkeley estimated that 14,000 Latinos laborers arrived within the first few months after the storm, local community leaders, social workers, and others engaged in the reconstruction efforts suggested much higher figures. In any case, this demographic phenomenon caught the attention of local officials, denizens, and national media. A Newsweek article posed the question, “Will Latino day laborers locating in New Orleans change its complexion?” [5]. Then-mayor Ray Nagin infamously asked himself in front of a town hall audience, “How do I ensure New Orleans is not overrun with Mexican workers?”. Indeed, Latinos became a prominent fixture in the metropolitan area in the years following Katrina. As laborers gutted and rebuilt flooded homes, taco trucks appeared throughout the city, and new tiendas, taquerías, pupuserías and Latino-themed night clubs opened across Orleans and Jefferson Parishes. Likewise, numerous Latino-focused nonprofits and religious organizations launched legal and language services designed to help arriving Latino immigrants settle and integrate into southeast Louisiana.

New Orleans certainly emerged more Latino than before the storm. Census 2010 counted 91,922 Latinos in the seven-parish metropolitan statistical area―an increase of 57 percent since 2000. But, as reconstruction effort came to an end, the surge of Latino workers that arrived after Hurricane Katrina appears to have receded. According to the Mexican consulate―which reopened in New Orleans in 2008 amid a new demand for administration and diplomatic functions for Mexican nationals in Louisiana and Mississippi―consulate employees were handling 80 to 100 appointments a day in the first years after the storm. Lines regularly formed outside the consulate’s location in the central business district, as Mexican immigrants waited to renew passports or matriculas, or to access other services. A decade later, however, appointments average between ten and fifteen daily which has led the consulate to scale back its number of employees. As demand for construction workers declined, some Latino laborers moved elsewhere within Louisiana such as Baton Rouge, Gonzales, and Alexandria while others relocated to states like Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida and still others returned to their countries of origin.

Taquería Chilangos Restaurant shares a small shopping center with Las Carnitas Restaurant which specializes in Central American and Peruvian food. Photo credit: James Chaney

Although the initial intensity of post-Katrina Latino migration may have subsided, it certainly reinvigorated existing Latin American communities. This is most evident in the metropolitan area’s four core parishes of Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard, and Plaquemine which are home to 76,129 Latinos as identified by Census 2010. The settlement and integration of post-Katrina Latinos have put new emphasis on Latin American culture, which has led to new restaurants, stores, festivals, and radio programs that cater to an established ethnic community. Yet, many of the new Latino establishments have found success serving a larger non-Latino clientele. For example, David Montes de Oca, a Mexico City native, came to New Orleans via Houston with a taco trailer in tow. His first patrons were day laborers living and working in suburban Jefferson Parish. Yet in 2007, Jefferson Parish officials began passing measures to restrict street venders. Montes de Oca responded by opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant called Taquería Chilangos in a shopping center home to other Latino-owned businesses in the 2700 block of Roosevelt Boulevard in Kenner. Taquería Chilangos built a strong customer base by serving typical Mexican fare and earning a reputation for the best authentic tacos in New Orleans. Another example is Norma’s Sweets Bakery at 2925 Bienville Street in New Orleans’ Mid-City neighborhood which opened following Katrina to serve the growing number of Latino residents in the area. The bakery’s menu includes a variety of Latin American pastries and lunch options, but Norma’s Sweets becomes a favorite destination for non-Latino customers during Carnival season for its Cuban-style king cake filled with cream cheese and guava paste.

The Hispanic and Latino Population of New Orleans as a proportion of the total population of each census tract 2010. Map credit: Case Watkins

Perhaps one of the more interesting facets of New Orleans’ post-Katrina Latino geographies is the resurgence of Honduran population. New Orleans and Honduras share a long history starting with the once-ripe banana trade. The port city also served as a gateway for Honduran immigration. By the mid-twentieth century, Honduran immigrants residing in the Lower Garden District’s Irish channel neighborhood reached a critical mass, and, within the Latino community, the area became known as the Barrio Lempira (named after Honduras’ currency). By the 1960s and 1970s, upwardly mobile Hondurans were moving to the Mid-City neighborhood and by the 1980s and 1990s many relocated to suburban communities of North Kenner and Metairie in Jefferson Parish. Although the mid-century decennial censuses did not disaggregate persons of Honduran origin, Hondurans were considered the prominent Latin American nationality in the metropolitan area―so much so that erroneous claims of mythic proportions stating that 100,000 Hondurans lived in New Orleans or that New Orleans was home to largest the Honduran community in the United States, became commonplace. Of course, later censuses that enumerated Hondurans proved these assertions false. Census 2000 counted only 8,112 Hondurans in the metropolitan area, more than two-thirds of which were found in Jefferson Parish. In fact, the metropolitan area’s Mexican population had grown larger, numbering 10,202. But following Katrina the number of Hondurans soared. By 2010, Hondurans could accurately claim to be the largest Latin American nationality with a census count of more than 25,000—around 4,000 more than the enumerated 20,729 persons claiming Mexican origin at that time. Although visible residential and small business clusters are found in Jefferson Parish, which is now home to three-quarters of the area’s Honduran population, many newcomers settled in other sectors of the metropolitan area, even venturing into eastern New Orleans neighborhoods like Village de L’Est home to the city’s Vietnamese community and extending as far as St. Bernard Parish. (Figure 5)

Latino Businesses and Services in the William Boulevard, North Kenner. Map credit: Andrew Sluyter

Today New Orleans’ Honduran identity and sense of place manifest themselves in various ways. St. Teresa de Avila Catholic Church on Erato Street, which served the Hondurans and other Latin Americans Catholics who lived in the Barrio Lempira, features a statue of Our Lady of Suyapa, the patron saint of Honduras. The church hosts an annual festival in her honor on February 3rd celebrating the virgin as does the Immaculate Conception Church in Marrero on the West Bank where children perform national dances in traditional dress. More frequently, Hondurans gather each weekend in public parks, most notably City Park in Mid-City, to play soccer. For those looking for authentic Honduran cuisine, numerous restaurants can be found throughout the metropolitan area; however, Casa Honduras at 5704 Crowder Boulevard in New Orleans East is noteworthy. Not only does Casa Honduras offer typical Honduran dishes, it serves traditional Garifuna food and drink such as sopa de caracol con coco (coconut curry conch soup) and gifiti (a drink made with rum, herbs, and spices). Casa Honduras has become a de facto cultural center for New Orleans’ Garifuna community and periodically hosts Garifuna musical performers and events [6]. For visitors interested in Afro-indigenous culture from Central America, a meal at Casa Honduras is worth the trip.

Despite Hondurans being the largest Latino group in the metropolitan area, they account for only a little more than a quarter of the total contemporary Hispanic and Latino population. New Orleans has long been home to an assorted Latin American population. Through commerce, social networks, and geopolitics, or due to natural disasters, different groups have arrived to make the city their home, beginning with Los Isleños who first settled in the area in 1778. Indeed, most groups are less conspicuous when compared to the Hondurans and Mexicans, yet they have all contributed the creation of a distinctive pan-Latino identity in the city. While some national-origin groups populations have waxed and waned through the years, others have continued to grow. Between 1980 and 2010, the number of Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, and Salvadorans doubled, and the number of Cubans has slightly increased to 6,440 since 2000. Brazilian immigration to New Orleans began with the coffee trade in nineteenth century. The number of Brazilians in the city, however, was small until post-Katrina reconstruction efforts attracted thousands of Brazilians from other U.S. cities like Boston and Atlanta as well as Brazil. The surge was brief, and many Brazilians left within the first few years following the storm. Nevertheless, those who stayed have established a Brazilian community anchored in Kenner and Chalmette in St. Bernard Parish. A notable establishment for those seeking authentic Brazilian fare such as Feijoada is the Brazilian Market and Café at 2424 Williams Boulevard in Kenner.

While each national-origin group seeks to maintain its own traditions and character, a pan-ethnic identity has emerged to unify those of Hispanic and Latino heritage. Media outlets such as Jambalaya News, Radio Tropical Caliente, and LatiNola.com provide news and entertainment programming in Spanish and work to connect local Latinos with the larger New Orleans community. The Hispanic Heritage Center sponsors Latin American-themed cultural activities and artists in the region and provides scholarships to promising Hispanic high school students. Other annual Latino festivals like Que Pasa Fest, Kenner’s Hispanic Summer Fest, and Carnival Latino attract large numbers of both Latino and non-Latino visitors. Finally, nonprofit and religious organizations like Puentes, Congreso de Jornaleros, and the Archdiocese of New Orleans Hispanic Apostolate advocate on behalf of Latino immigrants (particularly undocumented) and, in turn, help to foster a stronger sense of a pan-Latino community. Thus, as the composite and size of New Orleans’ Hispanic and Latino community will undoubtedly continue to fluctuate, it will remain a significant and dynamic component of New Orleans’ society and unique culture.

— James Chaney, Middle Tennessee State University

DOI:10.14433/2017.0016

[1]. “Hispanic” designates an individual or group of Spanish-language heritage. “Latino” identifies an individuals or groups from Latin America of Spanish- or Portuguese-language origin. For a more detailed analysis of New Orleans’ Hispanic and Latino populations and heritage see Hispanic and Latino New Orleans: Immigration and Identity since the Eighteenth Century. (2015) Andrew Sluyter, Case Watkins, James P. Chaney, and Annie Gibson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press

[2]. See Case Watkins’ two-part essay Essential Geographies of New Orleans Music in the September 2017 AAG Newsletter for an overview of the evolution of New Orleans’ music culture. DOI: 10.14433/2017.0013

[3]. For a little help finding and understanding New Orleans’ Hispanic and Latino landscapes see Andrew Sluyter’s article in the August 2017 AAG Newsletter. DOI:10.14433/2017.0011

[4]. Anita I. Drever (2008): New Orleans: a re-emerging Latino destination city, Journal of Cultural Geography, 25(3): 287-303. DOI:10.1080/08873630802452632

[5]. Arian Campo-Flores (2005) A New Spice in the Gumbo: Will Latino Day Laborers Locating in New Orleans Change its Complexion? Newsweek. 147(23): 46.

[6]. The Garifuna (or more correctly the Garínagu) are mixed-race descendants of African, Island Carib, European, and Arawak peoples who are found mainly in Honduras, Nicaragua, Belize, Guatemala, the island of St. Vincent and, since the twentieth century, the United States. For more information about New Orleans’ Garifuna community see James Chaney (2012) Malleable Identities: Placing the Garínagu in New Orleans. Journal of Latin American Geography 11(2): 121-144. DOI:10.1353/lag.2012.0049

AAG 2018 New Orleans, Hispanic, Latino

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Shane Colgan Interns at AAG for Fall Semester

September 26, 2017

Shane Colgan recently completed his bachelor of science in Geographical Sciences from the University of Maryland, College Park. He will be attending the University of Maryland, College Park to pursue his masters in GIS starting this upcoming Spring semester. His geographic research deals with vegetation indexes and tree top canopy analysis to document the habitat of bats in Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware.

When not at work or doing research Shane enjoys watching the Capitals ice hockey team.

AAG intern, intern, Shane

Frank Boscoe

Education: Ph.D. in Geography (Penn State University), M.A. in Geography (Kent State University), B.S. in Civil Engineering (Carnegie Mellon University)

Describe your job. What are some of the most important tasks or duties for which you are responsible?
I would describe my primary responsibility as finding interesting and useful applications of the vast amount of cancer data collected by the State of New York. These tend to revolve around several themes: Why are there different cancer rates in different places? What makes some people live longer with cancer than others? Which cancer treatments work better than others? In pursuing these questions, I get to work with many outside researchers from hospitals and universities.

What attracted you to this position/career path/organization/industry?
As with so many careers, there was an element of chance. In 1999, before my Ph.D. was even completed, I applied for a number of jobs from government to private industry to academia. The job I landed is the one I thought I was least likely to get. But at the time, New York was interested in producing some detailed cancer maps, and my graduate school work on the design of a digital disease atlas made me attractive for the job.

How has your education/background in geography prepared you for this position?
What has been most valuable has not been the specific technical skills (I don’t do a whole lot of GIS, in fact), but the repeated application of geographical thinking: repeatedly asking the question, why does something exist more in one place than in another place? Approaching problems from that angle often leads to an insight no one else has had before.

What geographic skills and information do you use most often in your work? What general skills and information do you use most often in your work?
I find that if an effect is strong enough to matter to public health, it will be evident through maps and scatterplots and straightforward regression models. More sophisticated methods can help tease out subtle differences, but while these may be statistically significant, they are rarely clinically significant. In other words, we needn’t worry too much about differences of 10% when there are enough 50% and 100% differences to go around. Accordingly, I still rely quite heavily on the spatial analysis techniques and methods I learned in my master’s level courses, in particular.

A general skill that I use daily is the seemingly simple one of counting and categorization. Do these two different records represent the same person, or not? Did this patient have cancer, or was it pre-cancer? Did these people actually live in New York during the study period? Is this person still alive, or just lost to follow-up? Ignore these questions, as many researchers do, and your study will be biased. But spend too much time on them, and you’ll never finish anything. The trick is to make quick but defensible decisions, something that sounds easy but really benefits from years of experience.

Are there any skills or information you need for your work that you did not obtain through your academic training? If so, how/where did you obtain them?
I use a commercial statistical software package called SAS every day; it is ubiquitous in public health. I had to teach myself on the job. During graduate school, I had done some coding in other (now obsolete) languages, so it was not too difficult of a transition.

Do you participate in hiring, screening, or training of new employees? If so, what qualities and/or skills do you look for?
I am involved whenever a junior research scientist position opens up, typically once every few years. I have found the most useful part of an interview is to show the candidate a cancer map and ask them to speculate on what might be causing the patterns and trends they see. No one has ever given an especially accurate answer; we choose the ones who generate the most interesting hypotheses.

What advice would you give to someone interested in a job like yours?
Take an introduction to public health or introduction to epidemiology course while pursuing your geography degree. If these disciplines are not available at your school, there are outstanding courses available online through sites like Coursera. Don’t worry that it will not appear on your official transcript; I have never looked at anyone’s official transcript.

What is the occupational outlook for career opportunities in your field/organization, esp. for geographers?
It is still strong despite some current short-term funding pressures. The average age within my field is in the 50s, and retirements are outpacing recruitment. I myself am almost 50 and still occasionally find myself to be the youngest person attending a meeting. There has been some progress against cancer during my career, but there is still much more that we don’t know than we know. We will need plenty of smart people to help collect and interpret cancer data for the foreseeable future.

See All Profiles

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AAG Statement on Charlottesville Tragedy and White Supremacy

August 21, 2017

The American Association of Geographers is deeply saddened and disturbed by the recent deadly and violent events in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Rallies supported by white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members led to the killing of one counter-protester, the wounding of at least 19 other protesters, and the deaths of two law enforcement officers doing surveillance of the rallies by air. On behalf of its almost 12,000 members, the AAG expresses heartfelt sympathy to the victims of the Charlottesville tragedy and their loved ones.

The AAG also wishes to use this statement to offer the strongest possible condemnation of white supremacy and the perpetrators of this recent violence. The AAG calls upon US federal, state, and local government officials to be unequivocally anti-racist in their denouncement and investigation of white supremacy—not only in Charlottesville but also in the many US communities long harmed by racism in both highly publicized and everyday ways.

Enhancing diversity, promoting inclusion, and advocating for historically marginalized social groups are central to the AAG and its mission. Recent events in Virginia strike at the heart of these values. Moreover, geographers are making important contributions to studying the social and spatial foundations and consequences of racism, violence, and inequality. Yet more can and should be done in the discipline of geography and by academicians and professionals in other fields to address these critical issues.

Members of the AAG are encouraged to use their research, teaching, professional practice, community outreach, and channels of public communication to oppose racism and violence and advocate for a constructive national dialogue about white supremacy and race relations in general. This advocacy can come in many forms based on the abilities and sensitivities of AAG members, but it is vital that the discipline’s informed and committed voices are heard, whether that is through the media, at government and policy meetings, in classrooms, teach-ins and educational forums, or among grass roots community organizing.

See AAG’s Policy page

Annual Meeting

Some Hispanic and Latino Landscapes of New Orleans

August 1, 2017

If you have a penchant for landscape, be warned: you will be tempted to spend more time outside of the hotels than in the paper sessions of the upcoming AAG conference in New Orleans. Many aspects of the New Orleans landscape might seem generically American, especially within the compact Central Business District (CBD) upriver from Canal Street, where the conference hotels are located.[1] The CBD and adjoining, gentrified Warehouse District do retain some fine examples of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture. But venture downriver, across Canal Street into the French Quarter, and you will enter an urban landscape that remains more attuned to the Mediterranean and Caribbean than the North Atlantic, as A. J. Liebling pointed out half a century ago in The Earl of Louisiana. Those interested in the Hispanic and Latino aspects of this compelling landscape might consider the following sampling of spots to visit, mainly oriented toward the city’s historic status as a Spanish colonial capital and U.S. neo-colonial entrepôt for Latin America. For more contemporary Latino and Hispanic landscapes, you will mainly have to venture into neighboring Jefferson and Saint Bernard Parishes.[2]

Figure 1. United Fruit Company building with a White Fleet taxicab in front. Credit: Andrew Sluyter

For a first, convenient stop among the sampling of spots to appreciate this particular dimension of the urban landscape, simply begin two blocks upriver from the Sheraton, at the corner of Saint Charles Avenue and Union Street in the CBD.[3] There the headquarters of the infamous United Fruit Company has become a bank, the company long since defunct. But during the early twentieth century, from behind the unforgettable façade of fruit laden cornucopia spilling down from the cornice of the ornate entrance, Sam “The Banana Man” Zemurray controlled the main flow of bananas into the U.S. from plantations in half a dozen countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (Figure 1). La Frutera or El Pulpo, as Latinos variously referred to the company, controlled everything in its supply chain from the banana trees to the White Fleet freighters that carried them, as well as the politics of the Central American countries that thereby became known as banana republics. The White Fleet has also persisted in a way, although no longer steaming up the Mississippi River with loads of bananas and Honduran immigrants; instead, you will see its name and pennant emblazoned on the doors of one of the city’s fleets of taxis.

Two blocks further upriver along Saint Charles Avenue, crossing Poydras Street toward the Warehouse District, now being rebranded as the Arts and Museum District, Lafayette Square invites relaxation in the largest greenspace near the conference hotels. In the nineteenth century filibusters rioted in Lafayette Square to burn the flag of the Spanish consulate after hearing of the defeat of an expedition to wrest Cuba from colonial rule. Filibusters, in fact, launched many of their campaigns against Caribbean and Latin American targets from New Orleans, and in 1847 U.S. troops mustered in the port before sailing for Veracruz during the Mexican-American War. A few blocks from Lafayette Square, where Poydras Street intersects Loyola Avenue, stands the monument to those soldiers who half a century later went to fight on Cuba and Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War and did not return, but did help turn New Orleans into a major, neo-colonial refiner of Cuban sugar. You could also head in the other direction, toward the river, if interested in the Banana Wharf at the foot of Thalia Street or the Coffee Wharf at the foot of Poydras Street, but you would be disappointed because twentieth-century redevelopment for the Riverwalk Mall, Morial Convention Center, Crescent City Connection bridge, and Cruise Ship Terminal has obliterated the wharves that used to funnel commodities from the tropical Americas into the Crescent City and, from there, up the Mississippi River to the Midwest and beyond. Many Latinos who settled in the city because of the neo-colonial networks associated with bananas, coffee, and sugar initially lived just a few blocks upriver, in the Irish Channel neighborhood, before increasingly joining the “white flight” to suburban neighborhoods that began in the 1960s.

Figure 2. Spanish Plaza with a riverboat and a cruise liner behind. Credit: Andrew Sluyter

But head back downriver to where Canal Street meets the Mississippi River and you will encounter two prominent memorials of when New Orleans was a city in the Spanish colonial empire during the second half of the eighteenth century. Spanish Plaza, a large fountain built for the city by the Spanish government in 1976 is surrounded by a circular bench backed by the tiled crests of Spain’s provinces, a great spot atop the levee from which to enjoy the vista of the busy shipping of one of the world’s largest ports (Figure 2). On the other side of the World Trade Center, which so prominently marks the foot of Canal Street, another gift to the city from Spain also commemorates the 1776-1976 Bicentennial: an immense equestrian statue of Bernardo de Gálvez, the governor of Spanish “Luisiana” during the Revolutionary War, that celebrates how his troops defeated the British at the battles of Baton Rouge, Natchez, Pensacola, and Mobile.

Figure 3. A street sign in the French Quarter. Credit: Andrew Sluyter

To get a better sense of what the city was like when a colonial capital, before the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, all you need to do is head downriver and cross Canal Street into the Quarter, which comprised the entire city during French and Spanish rule and, in some ways, remains unchanged. At every corner you will see the tiled signs that give the street names during Spanish times (Figure 3). The Plaza de Armas, now Jackson Square, provides the focal point, the river on one side and Saint Louis Cathedral on the other. The two buildings that flank the cathedral remain the most prominent vestiges of Spanish colonial architecture in the city: the arcaded Cabildo, or city hall, retains its Spanish name; the matching Casa Curial, or priests’ residence, has become the French Presbytère. The Mansard roofs added in the nineteenth century might deceive you, but if you imagine the two buildings without them, you might be looking at the colonial cabildo in Buenos Aires or some other city of the former Spanish colonial empire, fronted by an open plaza where troops could be mustered, overlooked by the cathedral and residences of prominent citizens.

The opposite, lakeside margin of the Quarter comprised the outskirts of the city during colonial times but also echoes the city’s lengthy connection to the Hispanic Atlantic. Along Basin Street, a block north of the Quarter in the Iberville neighborhood, Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 was built in the eighteenth century during Spanish rule, its above-ground tombs similar to many throughout Spain and Latin America. The nearby Congo Square, now a part of Louis Armstrong Park, in the Tremé neighborhood provided a Sunday gathering place for the city’s enslaved residents, among the thousands brought from Africa to Louisiana aboard French and Spanish ships. There, on their day off, they could socialize, plot resistance, sing, and lay the foundations for what would become blues, jazz, and rock-and-roll.

Figure 4. The Simón Bolívar statue in the Garden of the Americas. Credit: Andrew Sluyter

The Garden of the Americas occupies the Basin Street neutral ground, a term that originated when the median of Canal Street formed a neutral strip along the acrimonious frontier between the colonial Creoles who lived in the Quarter and the new, American residents who swarmed into the city after the Purchase and settled mainly upriver from the colonial core. After the Second World War, as part of a campaign to reassert itself as the North American “Gateway to Latin America” in the face of increasing competition from Houston, the city collaborated with local Latino organizations to establish the Garden of the Americas and its three enormous monuments to republican heroes of the Americas: Simón Bolívar for South America, Francisco Morazán for Central America, and Benito Júarez for Mexico (Figure 4).

Heading back toward the river, wander the narrow streets of the Quarter where Júarez and many other Latin American revolutionaries lived while in exile during the nineteenth century, plotting their various coups. In 1853, a young Élisée Reclus, who would become one of the foremost geographers and anarchists of the nineteenth century, also passed through the Quarter. He was headed upcountry to become a tutor to the children of his cousins at their Félicité plantation, about halfway to Baton Rouge along the Mississippi River, but he stopped long enough to observe that New Orleans at that time already had a lot of bars that were always full—some 2500 of them, apparently.[4] After more than two years in Louisiana, the experience of which helped shape his opposition to slavery and capitalism, Reclus left for Central and South America before returning to Paris in 1857 to write his La Terre: Description des Phénomènes de la Vie du Globe.

Figure 5. Spanish colonial residential architecture in the French Quarter. Credit: Andrew Sluyter

Not many houses remain from the colonial period due to the conflagrations that periodically swept across the Quarter. Compared to the residences built during French rule in the first half of the eighteenth century, those constructed during the succeeding Spanish period proved more fire resistant due to their stuccoed brick walls and flat roofs, but only a few examples have survived the construction boom of the nineteenth century that replaced almost all the colonial houses with ones built in neo-classical and Victorian styles. One of the few good examples of a typical Spanish house remains at 707 Dumaine Street (Figure 5). Otherwise, various balconies retain some fine examples of Spanish iron work, such as one at the corner of Royal and Conti Streets. Despite the disappearance of residential Spanish architecture over the nineteenth century, though, at least one Mexican sojourner of the time—Justo Sierra, in his 1895 book En Tierra Yankee—felt that New Orleans could still be counted among “those Gulf cities that all seem like sisters, but very large, very developed; Tampico, Veracruz, and Campeche would all fit within it, and it has something of all of them within it, of Veracruz above all.”

Other places of note for connoisseurs of Hispanic and Latino landscapes include the Bourbon Orleans Hotel, on Orleans Street immediately behind Saint Louis Cathedral, which served as the site of the 2017 Conference of Latin American Geographers. The Instrument Men fountain, located near the Dumaine Streetcar Station, depicts a classic jazz band and serves as a reminder that the city’s distinctive musical styles came into being partially through the influences of musicians who visited from Latin American and the Caribbean as well as local musicians who performed there and returned with innovations. As one dramatic example, albeit little known, the Mexican Military Band introduced the saxophone as well as the technique of plucking the bass violin when they played at the 1848 New Orleans World’s Fair.

Although more common in suburban neighborhoods like North Kenner, the Quarter has some Latino restaurants in which to gather to discuss how the city’s diverse roots have resulted in a “cultural gumbo,” to use the local metaphor. El Libre Cuban Café, for example, located near the foot of Dumaine Street, will serve you anything from a Cubano pressed sandwich or a guayaba pastry to a mojito cocktail or a cortadito coffee.

— Andrew Sluyter, executive director, Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0011

[1] Once you arrive you will understand why upriver, downriver, riverside, and lakeside have long replaced cardinal directions in the Crescent City, although that sobriquet should already provide something of a clue.

[2] Andrew Sluyter, Case Watkins, James Chaney, and Annie M. Gibson. 2015. Hispanic and Latino New Orleans: Immigration and Identity since the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press (https://lsupress.org/books/detail/hispanic-and-latino-new-orleans).

[3] See this online map of the walking tour associated with this essay (https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XdSWYAujBlYR_SNP5daRkflatGo&usp=sharing).

[4] Fragment d’un voyage à la Nouvelle-Orléans, Le Tour du Monde 1 (1860): 177-92 (https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb311854746).

AAG 2018 New Orleans, Hispanic, landscapes, Latino

Anne Buttimer

Anne Buttimer, emeritus professor of geography at University College Dublin, died July 15, 2017.

Buttimer was Fellow of Royal Irish Academy, Royal Geographical Society (UK) and Academia Europaea. She served as Council Member of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) from 1974 to 1977; of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) from 1996 to 1999; and as President of the International Geographical Union (IGU) from 2000 to 2004, the first female and first Irish person to be elected to that role.

During her distinguished career, she held research and teaching positions in Belgium, Canada, France, Scotland, Sweden, and the USA. She was appointed Professor of Geography at University College Dublin (UCD) in 1991, where she remained until she retired in 2003. However, she continued to work relentlessly, attending overseas meetings, giving invited lectures and engaging in debates on the promotion of social science, European cooperation and the world of geographical knowledge production and its circulation.

She has received many awards and honours, including a post-doctoral fellowship from the Belgian American Educational Foundation 1965 1966; Fulbright Hays Visiting Professor in Social Ecology to Sweden 1976; Association of American Geographers Honors Award 1986; Ellen Churchill Semple Award, University of Kentucky 1991; Royal Geographical Society (UK) Murchison Award 1997; Royal Scottish Geographical Society Millenium Award 2000; Member of the Jury for the Prix Vautrin-Lud 1998-2012; Appointed to Board of Science for the Austrian Academy of Sciences 2010; Doctor, honoris causa, University of Joensuu, 1999; Doctor honoris causa, Tartu University 2004; August Wahlberg Medal in Gold from King of Sweden 2009; appointed Chair of the Social Sciences Section of Academia Europaea 2010; elected as Vice-President of Academia Europaea 2012; Doctor honoris causa, University of Grenoble 2012.

Anne’s colleagues Alun Jones and Stephen Mennell write:

She was a powerful advocate of the discipline. She was truly international in her work, vision and activities; a gifted multilingual scholar with a sharp intellect. Her scholarship on place, space and the spirituality of everyday human existence was truly groundbreaking. One paper that had exceptional impact was “Grasping the dynamism of lifeworld”, which appeared in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers in 1976, and has been cited well over 700 times. It drew upon the social phenomenology that was then widely influential in the other social sciences, and applied it to the culturally defined spatiotemporal setting or horizon of everyday life. In her work she promoted the emancipatory role of humanism, and championed calls for Western scholars to seek better communication with colleagues from other cultures to address global environmental challenges. Anne’s work received deservedly numerous international awards and honours. Most recently these included: the Wahlberg Medal of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography in 2009; the Lifetime Achievement honour from the Association of American Geographers, presented to her at the Annual Conference of the AAG in Tampa in 2014; and the Vautrin Lud prize (often referred to as the ‘Nobel Prize’ in Geography) in 2014.

Buttimer conducted her undergraduate studies at University College Cork in geography, Latin, and mathematics. She earned a master’s degree in geography from the National University of Ireland. After earning her master’s degree in 1959, she became a Dominican nun in Seattle, serving in the order for 17 years. In 1965, she earned a doctorate from the University of Washington.

Anne was deeply committed to her family, friends, and colleagues and she will be greatly missed.

See All Memorials

President's Column

Upon Reflection

June 6, 2017

How fast time flies. It is hard to believe that the end of the academic year is upon us, June has come and I am writing my last president’s column. I want to use the opportunity provided by this final column to reflect upon the past year. I also want to look ahead and consider the role of our discipline and the American Association of Geographers as we face the changing and challenging world ahead of us. Finally, I hope with one last act as president to give back a little for all I have received.

I will start by saying what an honor and pleasure it has been to serve as your president. I have met so many wonderful geographers and learned so much. I am in awe of how smart and dedicated our members are. The heartfelt concerns about geography, society at large and the environment that so many of you have communicated to me have helped me focus on what is really important. Personally, the friendship and kindness shown to me at our regional meetings, annual meeting and council meetings leaves me with warm and indelible memories. I am not too proud to admit I have had my share of uncertainties, and a few faltering steps, over the past year. The patience and good humor shown by the membership, council and staff have been much appreciated and kept things on a good course. Thank you all.

Now, here are some candid reflections and ruminations that I want to share.

On Governance, Policy and Communication Between the AAG and the Membership

I was happy to see that in many cases when geographers had concerns about the AAG they felt free to email me, our Executive Director Doug Richardson, or other members of the council and expressed those concerns with clarity and friendliness. That is how it should be. The AAG is not governed by some aloof cabal of “others” or a disassociated elite. The members of council are you — geographers from both large and small educational institutions. Geographers from the private sector and government agencies. Geographers from every part of the country and other nations. Geographers who really care and are willing to spend their time — unpaid and often unheralded — working for our discipline and our association. The members of council with whom I have worked as president are some of the finest and most genuinely caring people I know.

I have seen how the council takes the concerns of our members very seriously and is willing to act upon those concerns when possible. This is not the Titanic — the association can change course when needed. Over the past year we received letters and petitions concerning things such as refund policies in light of U.S. immigration rules or the engagement of the military with geographical education and research. In these cases, the council revised our refund policy and is now developing a committee to examine engagement between the military and geography.

Because public policy issues have increasingly come to the fore for the AAG and require fair consideration and action when appropriate, I asked Past President Sarah Bednarz to strike a small committee and look into how the AAG should handle issues of public policy, particularly when petitioned by our members. Please remember that the AAG has a constitution and articles of constitution that prescribe the policy areas and actions we as an association can embrace. Based upon Sarah’s excellent report, the AAG has put into place a formal mechanism to make sure that such policy-related requests are handled fairly and thoughtfully. The formation of a special committee to examine issues pertaining to the discipline of geography and the military is an example of that process at work.

Alas, I have also encountered a few cases where public statements and invectives were made without actually contacting council members, staff or even reading the information posted on our website and provided in our electronic communications to members. Although I regret such instances, I mean no disrespect here. I realize that there are issues that move people passionately. Some members may not know any of the elected officials or feel comfortable sending a “stranger” an email about a question or concern, and the time to exhaustively search for information online may be in short supply for many of us. In the end, my feeling is it is better to be heard than be silent.

I will make two humble suggestions to you. The first is — please do communicate with the association. Take a look at the AAG website for information, and if you don’t find it, feel free to send an email to your regional representative or other members on council for help or to express concerns. This association is governed by members just like you for the benefit of all members. By communicating with us you can affect change. The second suggestion — join in our governance yourself. Serve on regional and national committees. Run for elected office. Yes, you! Not only can you help steer this great association and influence our discipline, but you will meet some of the most wonderful people in the world. I cannot over-emphasize how rewarding this can be, or how much we need our members to pitch-in.

On Communication with the Wider World

Geographers have so much to share with the wider world. I have been pleased to see how the AAG develops statements and communication initiatives on issues that concern the discipline and membership. I have also been pleased by the times I have seen geographers in the media commenting on exciting new research or current events. However, I think we can do more. I look at the great success that the American Geophysical Union has in getting press coverage for research presented at their annual meeting. I commissioned Vice President Derek Alderman to strike a committee and look into how the association can up its game in terms of public communication. Derek came up with some very exciting proposals and I look forward to him as president working with AAG staff and membership to take the association to the next level. I urge our membership and specialty group leadership to work with Derek in identifying and helping broadcast our most compelling research and insights.

As I have written before, better communication about geography and geographers also requires each of us to do our part. Please do get to know your campus communication officers. Don’t be afraid to share your work with the public. When an issue moves you, take to the keyboard and write an op-ed for the newspaper. We all have a lot to tell the world.

The Growth and Internationalization of Our Association

It is gratifying to see our membership climb to a record level of almost 12,000. Fantastic. This growth bodes well for the future of the association and our discipline. However, it does come with some challenges. First, about a third of our membership and meeting attendees are from outside the U.S. The AAG has become a vibrant world marketplace for the discipline of geography. Are we serving both our domestic and international membership well? I was concerned about our international members and our professional non-academic members getting good value from the AAG. I asked council members Stuart Aitkin and David DiBiase to strike small committees to examine how we could improve service to our international and professional members respectively.

Stuart and his team tabled a report that amongst other things pointed out that the exclusionary border and immigration policies propounded by the Trump Administration in the U.S., were posing serious challenges for our international membership. In some cases members were officially excluded from attending the annual meeting and others felt personally uncomfortable traveling to the U.S. In other cases, some international members felt compelled to boycott meetings in the U.S. in solidarity with those excluded by border and immigration policies. The AAG continues to oppose such exclusionary and discriminatory policies and to work for solutions. How do we monitor this situation and accommodate members? How can we influence changes in such policies? We need all your help here.

In addition, some international members felt out of the loop in terms of AAG governance. Although any member can run for office, the term “national councilor” does imply a domestic focused position. After discussion, council would like to remedy this by perhaps focusing one of the present councilor positions on international representation. Perhaps slightly changing the name national councilor to national and international councilor would also better reflect the international scope of the AAG? We would like consensus on how to move forward here. Please do help your with your thoughts and suggestions. Council will continue to work on this at the fall meeting.

David found that for many professional members there was a desire to remain engaged with academic geography, but the annual meeting and our publications were not as industry and applications focused to be of practical value in many cases. Council would like to work on this and needs your thoughts and ideas. One suggestion was twin some of our annual meetings with more applied and professional-oriented meetings.

The Growth of Our Annual Meetings and the Increasing Importance of the Regions

Our annual meeting in Boston was a record breaker with more than 9,400 attendees. Although the growth of the meeting is satisfying in many regards, it is not without costs. With a plethora of concurrent sessions and other events it may seem that one misses more sessions of interest than one actually attends. In addition, I noted that many sessions at the Boston meeting had only a small handful of members there to hear the hard work of the presenters. This is a shame. We have not moved to a model of decreasing oral presentations through vetting abstracts. Should we do so? Can we institute more concise time limits — say 10-minute maximums for most presentations? Is it possible to promote poster sessions more, such as the AGU has done successfully? Can we shift the proportion of poster to oral presentations in a voluntary manner?

A meeting that involves more than 9,000 people also limits the cities that can host us. Many places in which we would enjoy congregating simply do not have the hotel rooms, conference facilities or travel infrastructure to host the meeting. Many of the cities that do offer these services are also expensive in terms of hotel rooms. I have seen firsthand how hard our executive director and the AAG staff work to find suitable venues and keep costs low. I have also learned that arrangements for a meeting this size must be made several years in advance. The logistics are incredible. Of course, aside from the limitation on potential host cities and the costs of attending the meetings, the size of our annual gathering also means something is lost in terms of the intimacy and sense of community that is engendered. Alas, I am not sure there is much to be done about these issues short of shrinking the size of the annual meeting.

In light of this all I want to emphasize the importance of our regional meetings in providing venues at which a wide range of talks can be given and heard effectively. A sense of intimacy and community pervades the regional meetings and interesting new towns and cities can be experienced at often reasonable costs. One of the greatest pleasures of being president was the chance to attend regional meetings around the country. I cannot adequately express how much I enjoyed this and how much geography I learned. My faculty and student hosts were so gracious and the enthusiasm of the attendees about geography was energizing. The AAG should do all it can to promote our regions and their meetings. Alas, in some regions the larger research departments seem very uninvolved with the regional meetings. I think this is a shame for faculty and particularly for undergraduate and graduate students. I will confess that I and my department are as guilty of this as many. I am going to work hard to address this — and plan to rent a van to take some of our UCLA students up to the APCG meeting in Chico this fall. Join us there!

Healthy Departments and a Healthy Discipline

Given the growth of the AAG itself, it came as an awakening to me how many departments are finding it difficult to grow or even sustain numbers of majors. With geographical awareness, perspectives and techniques exploding across the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities we as a discipline should be at an exciting growth point. What is going on? In some states the population size of university-aged people is declining and many departments are having trouble maintaining student numbers. However, this is not universal. It is a fact that geography departments do face competition for student interest from expanding environmental studies, earth systems sciences, sustainability, global studies and development studies departments. We should not castigate these programs, as they seek to produce graduates well-trained to tackle the challenges of the 21^st century. However, we should also not shirk from proudly promoting our own discipline. Part of this must involve thinking about how we market the discipline. What does a course title such as “Introductory Physical Geography 1” denote to a brand new freshman? Not much I would guess. How about considering something like “Our Dynamic Planet — Processes of Physical Change on the Earth’s Surface”? You get the idea. Aside from naming courses — are our courses exciting and compelling in terms of content and student experience? Do we offer courses that speak to the challenges of the 21^st century and the importance of geographical perspectives and methods in tackling those challenges? How often do we as faculty and geography students speak to undergraduate groups and clubs about the discipline? Do we speak and provide resources to high schools and community colleges to get geography on student’s radars? Do we work to get articles about geography in student newspapers? Do we generously provide service courses for other majors? No small number of undergraduate geography majors come to the discipline through elective courses they took while pursuing an earlier major.

Here also the AAG has a role to play. The association has long had initiatives on healthy departments and goes to bat for departments in trouble. I think we can do more — but we need help. Given the importance of YouTube as an information source, the council has been considering developing very short online videos about geography. What else can and should the AAG be doing as a central resource to grow geography as a major? How can we better use social media? How do we market geography to the changing demographics of the U.S.? The health of the discipline in our schools must be an important continuing focus going forward.

Diversity

I have written previously regarding the mismatch between the diversity of the U.S. and of the world at large, and the diversity of our membership and the discipline of geography in the U.S. Every member of council takes this issue extremely seriously and seeks for our diversity to be vastly better. I take this as a major concern. I can tell you that this is one area in which the association comes in for continuing criticism from our members. I know that we as an association can do more. We need help and ideas from you. What communication strategies can we undertake to better understand the needs and educational aspirations of our diverse national and international populations and serve these as an association? How can we make a true diversity of populations feel comfortable and empowered within our association as members? How can we encourage and promote greater diversity amongst AAG leadership?

One area I feel strongly about in this regards is our Developing Regions Program. This program helps support participation in the AAG by people from economically disadvantaged regions, largely in the global south. Not only does this help deserving individual geographers, but it grows both the international engagement and diversity of the AAG. It is a triple bottom line. I know though there is more we must and can do — both domestically and internationally. Please give us your ideas and help here.

I also must state that the diversity challenge is one that, in the end, cannot be won solely at the level of the AAG. Substantially increasing the diversity of geography must be recognized as the personal responsibility of every member. The AAG does not create new geographers. They are created by our universities, our departments and by us as individual faculty and students interacting with students. It is through the creation of new geographers who represent the diversity of the U.S. and the world that the AAG will grow to reflect the diversity of the nation and the planet. So, this challenge extends to our members also. What are you personally doing in your university, in your department and in your day-to-day interactions with students and the public to build a more diverse discipline? Increasing the diversity within geography is a challenge that must be taken on by all, working through personal engagement and not just via theory and polemics.

Importance of Geography and the AAG Going Forward

I would not be honest if I did not admit to concern about the state of world affairs as I look forward to the next year and decade. This is a world in which I am sure geography is of vital importance and in which the AAG has a role to play. In practical and applied terms the world is becoming both smaller and seemingly more fragmented. Through electronic communication, trade and transportation, and social networks of a mobile world population, events that are distant from our homes can have immediate and significant impacts. At the same time the grand ideas of a global society and continental to global partnerships and governance for the greater good of all appear to be losing favor. Whether we talk about Brexit and fragmentation of the European Union, the Make America Great Again agenda and regional political divisions in the U.S., or the vicious regional and civil conflicts in Ukraine, Africa and the Middle East, geographical differences have not been erased, but are arguably ascendant. The withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord is one more sign that the fragmenting power of short-term self-interest at the sacrifice of longer-term common-good seems to be gaining traction. The discipline of geography provides geospatial, environmental and socioeconomic perspectives and tools relevant to all of these issues.

But beyond academic and policy-relevant perspectives and tools, I believe geography and geographers have something even more to offer. Geography is about understanding and appreciating the general truths, linkages and differences that play out across the surface of the earth. Any solutions we might hope to find for hunger, poverty, terrorism, war, denial of civil rights or environmental degradation must come from deeper understanding of the world. The understanding I am speaking of is not just something expressed in the academic sense of facts, figures and scholarly discourses, but something that includes a deeper respect, empathy and sense of shared destiny. I believe that of all the disciplines, because of our broad roots in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, geographers have the potential to develop, communicate and implement such holistic understanding. A heavy charge to our discipline? Perhaps. But if not us as geographers, then who?

A Final Act as President in Support of the AAG Developing Regions Program

As should be clear, I believe in a diverse and international AAG acting for the good of individual geographers and for the aggregate good of the planet and its people. I was very impressed to see that a number of AAG members who could not attend the Boston AAG, out of immigration concerns or in solidarity with those who could not attend, contributed their refundable registrations fees to the AAG Developing Regions Program. The program fosters the scholarly and personal exchanges that directly contribute to the type of understanding I describe above. For those members who contributed their registration refunds to the Developing Regions Program, I want to thank and honor you for your generosity and tangible commitment to your values. Therefore my last act as President will be to join you and write a check in the amount of $500 as contribution to the AAG Developing Regions Program on behalf of my wife Joanne (a University of Toronto, Geography alumna) and myself.

I close my final presidential column by inviting you to join me in providing Derek Alderman our best wishes and support as he takes up the presidency of the AAG.

Join the conversation on Twitter #PresidentAAG

—Glen M. MacDonald

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0007

Post

Administration Releases FY 2018 Budget

May 24, 2017

The Trump Administration’s budget proposal, which was released on May 23, includes sharp cuts for Federal science agencies. The document is the first step in the Fiscal Year 2018 appropriations process, and many bipartisan Senators and Representatives have taken issue with multiple aspects of the proposal.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) would receive $6.7 billion – a cut of approximately $800 million (11 percent) from the FY 2017 enacted level of $7.5 billion. The NSF indicated that it would be able to fund 19 percent of grant proposals (as compared to the current 21 percent) under the proposed funding level. The Foundation’s Geography and Spatial Science Program is housed in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences Directorate, which was cut by 10 percent, and the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, which was cut by 7.5 percent. The reduction for the SBE Directorate is not as steep as some social and behavioral science advocates had feared.

For other agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was budgeted at $26.9 billion, a $7.2 billion cut (21 percent) from the current-year funding level. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) was cut by $163 million (15 percent) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is proposed for a $902 million reduction (16 percent). The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Science and Technology program was cut by approximately 40 percent in the budget. The U.S. Census Bureau received a 3.7 percent increase, but there are concerns that this modest amount will not enable the Bureau to fully ramp up its 2020 Census preparations.

The budget also proposes the elimination of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), a long-expected move that prompted the resignation of NEH Chairman William D. Adams on the day of the budget’s release. Adams was an Obama Administration appointee whose term was slated to run until next year. Other programs eliminated in the proposal include the National Endowment for the Arts; the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; the Corporation for National and Community Service; the U.S. Institute of Peace; the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. It is unclear whether Congress will support these moves.

In a significant policy initiative, the Administration’s budget proposes to reduce reimbursement of indirect costs in research grants. Indirect costs, which support salaries, facilities, and other expenses tied into carrying out funded projects, are a crucial component of Federal research grants. Most institutions would face significant difficultly in adapting to such a policy change and it would likely cause many universities and others to rethink their approach to seeking grant funding from Federal agencies.

The final FY 2018 appropriations will not be settled for months. House and Senate leaders are focused on tackling healthcare reform and tax-law changes and will only turn to a full debate on appropriations once those issues have been dealt with. While some science agencies will probably face cuts from current funding levels, it is unlikely that Congress will support reductions on the magnitude of those included in this budget proposal.

As always, we encourage AAG members to reach out to their elected officials about issues that are of importance to them. Stay tuned for updates on these and other important policies by visiting the AAG Policy Action page.