Post

The Rebirth of Black Rage

August 28, 2015

There are two quotes from September 2, 2005, that  have become fixtures in our cultural and political language, and each sums up the ways in which Americans with differing perspectives came to view the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. The first is from George W. Bush: Five days after Katrina tore through the Gulf Coast region, the president landed in Louisiana facing heavy criticism for his administration’s slow response to the devastation. Touring the state with FEMA director Michael Brown—the only person who’d been more heavily criticized for the government’s inadequate response—Bush turned to the man he’d placed in charge of disaster relief and said, “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.” Part of Bush’s appeal had always been his folksiness, but it offered no solace here. His comment only served to further exemplify his ineptitude.

The other quote—what Bush would later call the worst moment of his presidency—came at an unexpected time from a rather unexpected source.

Later that same evening, after Bush’s “heckuva job” comment, NBC did what television networks do during times of disaster and hosted a celebrity telethon. Faith Hill, Harry Connick Jr., Claire Danes, Hilary Swank, Lindsay Lohan, Leonardo DiCaprio, and others stood before an audience of millions, accompanied by the pictures of despair that were still streaming from the gulf—New Orleans in particular.

Also invited was Kanye West, one of the more popular entertainers in the country at the time. He was paired with Mike Myers, famous for his performances as Austin Powers and as the voice of Shrek. Myers read from a teleprompter about the suffering in New Orleans, attempting to build up sympathy before the big ask. When it was West’s turn, he deviated from the script and started speaking from his heart.

“I hate the way they portray us in the media,” Kanye said. “You see a black family, it says, ‘They’re looting.’ You see a white family, it says, ‘They’re looking for food.’ And, you know, it’s been five days because most of the people are black…. America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible.”

Myers attempted to rebound, returning to the teleprompter script. The folks in the control room at NBC must have been hoping that West would do the same. Perhaps they weren’t familiar with his brash reputation, or perhaps they thought he would rein himself in, in service of charity. But Kanye wasn’t done: He still needed to deliver what would become one of my generation’s greatest moments of live television. Speaking as if he were reading from the teleprompter, his cadence straddling the line between stiff and natural, he looked straight into the camera and said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

Had this happened even five years earlier, it would have been newsy fodder for comedians and might even have made its way into some year-end retrospectives. But it would also have receded more easily into a cultural footnote, a had-to-see-it-to-believe-it moment in television. In September 2005, however, millennials were already taking more direct control of our media diets; we were deciding for ourselves which moments were fleeting and which were definitive. YouTube had launched earlier that year and was already starting to catch on; the idea of the Internet providing video on demand was becoming more of the norm. I was back on campus for my second year of college when this telethon aired, and for weeks afterward, if someone mentioned that they had missed Kanye’s declaration, another person would open a laptop, conduct a quick Google search, and pull up the video for a crowd of onlookers. Facebook, founded the previous year, didn’t yet support video links, but we could all post on one another’s walls some variation of jokes involving West, Bush, or not caring about black people. With these new technological possibilities, and the most succinct political statement of the year, West was able to further ingratiate himself with a generation of young people who already loved his music, but who now had, in him, our first relatable expression of black rage on a national stage.

Continue reading at TheNation.com

Ethnicity, Hurricane Katrina, race

Annual Meeting

A Movement Lab in New Orleans

August 26, 2015

The evening of Wednesday, May 20, was a night like any other  in a town that, despite its near-demise a decade ago, persists as this country’s beating heart of creative chaos. By 6:30, the bars on Frenchmen Street were clinking to life. Around the city, Walter “Wolfman” Washington, the TBC Brass Band, and Delfeayo Marsalis were among the world-class musicians preparing for weekly gigs. Tourists were already filling the strip clubs and daiquiri shops of Bourbon Street and the trendy restaurants of the recently gentrified Bywater neighborhood. And in Mid-City, in front of the First Grace United Methodist Church, a couple of women stood beside tables selling tacos and mondongo (pork-belly soup) to an intergenerational mix of Latino families.

The families were on their way to the church for the weekly gathering of the Congress of Day Laborers. El Congreso, as it’s called for short, fights for equal treatment for the city’s recent Latino immigrants, and every Wednesday as many as 400 members come together to discuss ways to solve problems as varied as wage theft and deportation. As they settled into the pews, Leticia Casildo kicked off the meeting with a fiery call to action: “¡Fuera la migra de Louisiana!”—or, “Kick the immigration-enforcement agents out of Louisiana!”

There was no chanting at the BreakOUT meeting just over a mile away, in a former produce warehouse that is now a collection of artists’ studios and offices, but there was laughter. BreakOUT is an LGBTQ criminal-justice reform organization, and on this evening, a dozen transgender and gender-nonconforming young people were working and gossiping, creating a safe space behind a door with a welcome mat that read: come back with a warrant. The room felt like a mix of social club and office. A meeting started with a countdown exercise that looked like a free-form dance party, but soon those gathered got down to the business of assigning tasks for an event on the coming weekend. “Sometimes, I’ll just be so blown away to see how strong these youth are and how they constantly just keep fighting,” says Milan Nicole Sherry, 24, one of BreakOUT’s founding members and now a staffer. “They don’t take no for an answer.”

The rebel spirit continued about half an hour later and a few miles uptown, as roughly 100 people sat in a wide circle inside a Unitarian Church. The multiracial group, called Gulf South Rising, had come together to discuss grassroots responses to the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Its members were frustrated with the official commemorations, which are designed to highlight the city’s resilience and which, critics say, work to obscure and conceal the systemic injustices at play.

That’s a theme that was picked up, like a relay baton, at another meeting back in Mid-City, of a group of mostly young white activists from an antiracist organization called European Dissent. Founded in the 1990s, when Klansman David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana, the group has more active members now than at any point in its history. Many of its members moved here in the past few months and are concerned about their contribution to the displacement that’s defined the city since Katrina. On the evening’s agenda: strategies to fight gentrification.

This is New Orleans 10 years after Hurricane Katrina—a town of ferment and possibility, open wounds and agitation. It is whiter, wealthier, and smaller than it was on August 28, 2005. Around 100,000 black residents are still displaced, scattered to places unknown; housing prices continue to rise rapidly, pushing out those trying to get by on jobs in the city’s low-paying tourism economy. But despite the violence represented by these changes, or perhaps because of them, New Orleans has also seen a rise in coordinated resistance. More people have been organizing, taking to the streets, and risking arrest than at any other time in recent history.

Continue reading at TheNation.com

Activism, Hurricane Katrina

Annual Meeting

Why the Lower Ninth Ward Looks Like the Hurricane Just Hit

August 24, 2015

A block and a half separate Henry Irvin’s  house from the bayou that serves as the northern border of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. Modest single-family homes used to line both sides of the street, before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Today, it’s all but empty. Irvin, a 79-year-old widower with two bad knees, has no neighbors between him and the bayou. Facing in the other direction, Irvin stares into a similar solitude: There’s a falling-down house two lots away and a small Baptist church at the end of his block, but otherwise Irvin—a man often called the “mayor of the Lower Ninth Ward,” even by the city’s current mayor—lives here alone. One block over, on Tricou Street, there are six occupied homes, a veritable metropolis in this corner of the community. In whatever direction Irvin points his red truck, he traverses entire blocks choked with vegetation, devoid of both houses and people.

Ten years have passed since a series of catastrophic  levee breaches caused the Lower Ninth Ward, along with most of New Orleans, to flood. The city, state, and federal governments have invested more than $600 million in the Lower Ninth, a relatively compact community that measures 20 by 25 blocks. Foundations have contributed tens of millions of dollars to the area. Brad Pitt alone has raised nearly $50 million through the Make It Right Foundation. Tens of thousands of volunteers have done work in the community. All of which raises the question: Why do large stretches of the Lower Ninth still look as if the levees failed only a year ago?

Simple economics has played a big part. Prior to Katrina, the Lower Ninth—a community sometimes referred to as “Backatown”—was home to many of the housekeepers, kitchen workers, and others who kept the tourism industry going in New Orleans. Another large share of its people were retirees who, like Irvin, lived on a fixed income. The average resident survived on $16,000 a year, and more than one in every three residents lived below the poverty line.

But more than economics is at play in the stalled recovery of this community, which was more than 98 percent black at the time of Katrina. The Lower Ninth has always been a place apart from the rest of New Orleans, a small village rather than one neighborhood among many. Much of that is geography. The community is downriver from Uptown and the French Quarter—as downriver as it is possible to be while remaining in New Orleans. The only way to get there is by bridge. The community’s personality before the storm felt more Mississippi Delta than big-city jazz. Residents raised chickens in the yard. They grew vegetables and fished for dinner. They tended to be country folks who went to bed a lot earlier than their city kin. “Before Katrina,” Irvin says, “I could tell you the name of everyone all the way from the bridge on down.”

While this separation made the Lower Nine, as residents tend to call their neighborhood, a distinct and vibrant place, it also left it vulnerable when disaster struck. The shame is that a mix of misperceptions and racially informed myths about the Lower Ninth Ward set the stage for one misguided policy choice after another, at all levels of government. Despite the well-meaning efforts of thousands of volunteers and hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations and public aid, the desolation of Henry Irvin’s community today is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Continue reading at TheNation.com

Hurricane Katrina, inequality

Gary S. Dunbar

Gary Dunbar, Professor Emeritus of the University of California at Los Angeles, who made notable contributions in the history of geography, passed away on August 16, 2015, at the age of 84.

Gary Seamans Dunbar was born on June 8, 1931 in Clifton Springs, New York. By 1948 he was valedictorian of Avon Central School graduating class. Further academic credentials came from the University of Virginia where he earned a bachelor’s degree with distinction (1952) and a master’s degree (1953).

In 1956 he completed his doctorate at Louisiana State University with a thesis entitled “Cultural Geography of the North Carolina Outer Banks.” This was later published as a book: Historical Geography of the North Carolina Outer Banks (1958).

After a year teaching at Longwood College in Farmville, VA, he returned to the University of Virginia where he remained from 1957 to 1967. He began as assistant professor, later becoming chairman of the geography department. During this time he also taught at the University of Dacca in East Pakistan (now Dhaka in Bangladesh) as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar (1962-1963), and spent two years at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria (1965-1967). In the summers he taught at various Canadian universities: University of Manitoba (1961), Queen’s University (1962), McMaster University (1963), and York University (1968). In 1967 he joined the department of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, remaining there until retirement in 1988.

Dunbar published considerably with special reference to intellectual history. He was particularly interested in the history of both U.S. and French geography. His books included: Elisée Reclus, Historian of Nature (1978), The History of Geography: Translations of Some French and German Essays (1983), The History of Modern Geography: An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Works (1985), Modern Geography: An Encyclopedic Survey (1991), A Biographical Dictionary of American Geography in the Twentieth Century (1992; second edition 1996), and Geography, Discipline, Profession and Subject since 1870: An International Survey (2001).

Additionally, he published a number of articles relating to the history of geography, including essays published in Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies. Other articles related to historical geography, history of exploration, and cultural geography. He also gave a number of lectures in both the U.S. and abroad, and provided notes and reviews in several geographical periodicals.

He was a member of several professional societies including the Association of American Geographers, which he joined in 1953. From 1981 to 1992 he served as President of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers. He also served on several editorial boards.

During his career, Dunbar traveled through North and South America, the West Indies, Europe, Africa, and Asia, often involving his wife and children in his adventures.

On early retirement at the age of 58, he moved to Cooperstown, NY, an area he had first visited in 1952 as a graduate student. While researching the cultivation of hops for his Master’s thesis, he was captivated by the village, Otsego Lake and the surrounding countryside. It became his home for the last 27 years of his life and he much appreciated the quietude of offered by the Cooperstown environment, where he was involved in various local community organizations.

Gary Dunbar was a kindly person, quite given to helping others, and happily productive in the genre of the history of geography. He leaves behind his beloved wife of 62 years, Elizabeth, their three children, Emily, Elihu, and Esther, and four grandchildren.

Contributed by Geoffrey Martin, and with thanks to the Dunbar family for the photograph

See All Memorials

Julian Bond

Julian Bond, renowned civil rights activist and recipient of the AAG’s prestigious Atlas Award, passed away on August 15, 2015, aged 75.

Horace Julian Bond was born on January 14, 1940, in Nashville. Both parents were academics: his father an administrator at historically black colleges and his mother a librarian. The family moved to Pennsylvania when he was five after his father was appointed the first African-American president of Lincoln University. Bond was expected to follow in his footsteps as an educator but the young man was more attracted by journalism and political activism.

Aged 12, Bond was sent to George School near Philadelphia, a private Quaker-run establishment. There he first encountered racial resentment when he began dating a white girl, incurring the disapproval of white students and the school authorities.

Another five years later, his father was appointed as Dean of Education at Atlanta University and the family moved south again. Bond was enrolled at the prestigious Morehouse College where he attended a class taught by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. However, extracurricular activities drew his attention more than academic studies.

In 1960 he co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a student activist group that gave young black Americans a revolutionary loudspeaker during the civil rights movement and executed some of the movement’s most dangerous work in the Deep South. Dozens of his friends went to jail during his time with SNCC but he was arrested only once when he led a sit-in at the City Hall cafeteria in Atlanta, part of a wave of protests across the South against segregated public facilities.

In 1961, Bond dropped out of college to focus exclusively on civil rights efforts. He served as the SNCC’s communications director for five years and deftly guided the national news media toward stories of violence and discrimination. He organized campaigns to register black voters, and led student protests against segregation and Jim Crow throughout Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas.

On the strength of his personality and quick intellect, he moved to the center of the civil rights action in Atlanta, the unofficial capital of the movement, at the height of the struggle for racial equality in the early 1960s.

During this period, Bond and some fellow black students visited the Georgia House of Representatives. Having deliberately sat in the whites-only visitors’ section, they were escorted out by Capitol police, but he was destined to return to the House.

Following the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Bond was part of the inaugural group of seven African-Americans elected to Georgia’s House of Representatives. However, furious white members of the Legislature blocked him from taking his seat, accusing him of disloyalty, primarily because of his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War. It took a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1966 for him to finally take his seat.

Bond went on to serve in the state Legislature for four terms, mostly in conspicuous isolation from white colleagues who saw him as an interloper and a rabble-rouser. As a lawmaker, he sponsored bills to establish a sickle cell anemia testing program and to provide low-interest home loans to low-income Georgians. He also helped create a majority-black congressional district in Atlanta.

In 1968 he attended the Democratic National Convention, where he was a co-chairman of a racially integrated challenge delegation from Georgia. His public profile shot up when he gave a rousing speech in favor of peace candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy and his name was even placed into nomination for vice president. He declined to pursue a serious candidacy because he was too young to meet the constitutional age requirement, but from that moment on he was a national figure.

In 1971, Bond was a co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a legal advocacy organization in Montgomery, AL, serving as its first president until 1979 and remaining on the board for the rest of his life.

Bond was also elected six times to the state Senate. In 1986 he ran for a seat in the US House of Representatives, standing against his old friend John Lewis, a fellow founder of the student committee and its longtime chairman. When he lost, he resigned from the Senate, spending the next two decades focused on education and media work. He was a favorite on the college lecture circuit, teaching at universities throughout the north and south.

His wit, cool personality, youthful face, dashing looks and natty dress sense lent themselves to media exposure. He became a regular commentator in print and on television, including as host of “America’s Black Forum,” then the oldest black-owned television program in syndication, and his face became familiar to millions of television viewers. His most unusual television appearance was in April 1977, when he hosted an episode of “Saturday Night Live.” He also appeared in a handful of movies, including as himself in the Ray Charles biopic “Ray” (2004).

In addition, Bond was also a writer. From a book of essays published in 1972 entitled “A Time to Speak, a Time to Act”, to poetry on the pained point of view of a repressed minority. He also wrote articles for publications as varied as The Nation, Negro Digest and Playboy.

In 1998, he was chosen as the chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at a time when the organization was mired in debt and seemed woefully dated. He continued in the role until his resignation in 2010.

Despite dropping out of college in the early 1960s, Bond returned a decade later to complete his English degree. He became a celebrated educator, holding appointments at several leading institutions including Harvard University, Williams College, Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania. In later years, he was based in Washington, DC, serving as a distinguished scholar in residence at American University in Washington, and a professor of history at the University of Virginia, where he was co-director of the oral history project “Explorations in Black Leadership.” He was awarded more than 20 honorary degrees throughout his career.

In 2014, Bond was awarded the Association of American Geographers’ prestigious Atlas Award, designed to recognize and celebrate outstanding accomplishments that advance world understanding in exceptional ways, whether in science, politics, scholarship, the arts, or in war and peace. At the Annual Meeting in Tampa, he delivered a presentation on “Race Around the World,” focusing on how civil rights figures and organizations shaped and changed American foreign policy, before being presented with his award by AAG President, Julie Winkler. Watch video

Julian Bond played a central role in America’s civil rights movement, spanning student protest and activist politics to institutional leadership and academia. Although his fight for social justice was focused on race, he also campaigned for peace, gay rights and the environment, among other issues. He was a charismatic figure with a reputation for charm alongside his persistent opponent of the stubborn remnants of white supremacy. In the few days before his death, after he was suddenly taken ill, his wife reported that he remained ever the optimist, finding reasons to laugh.

Following the announcement of his death, President Obama said: “Justice and equality was the mission that spanned his life – from his leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to his founding role with the Southern Poverty Law Center, to his pioneering service in the Georgia legislature and his steady hand at the helm of the NAACP… Julian Bond helped change this country for the better. And what better way to be remembered than that.”

Bond leaves behind his second wife, Pamela Horowitz, a former lawyer whom he met at the Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as five children and eight grandchildren. He is also survived by a brother and sister.

Main sources

Links

Southern Poverty Law Center

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Explorations in Black Leadership

See All Memorials

Newsletters

Newsletter – August 2015

August 6, 2015

PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

SWB_december-4

Survival in a Time of Disruption in Higher Education

By Sarah Witham Bednarz

This is a challenging time to be engaged in scholarship in higher education. Shrinking state budgets and rising tuition raise concerns about the affordability—and importance—of college. Support for scholarly organizations such as the Illinois State Museum are threatened in budget battles (update). Skepticism by some members of Congress about the value of social and behavioral sciences threaten research funding at the same time universities are placing increased importance on grantsmanship for promotion and tenure. A cornerstone of education, tenure, is under attack in both K-12 (the Vergara case is rippling across the country) and higher education (Wisconsin anyone?). Fundamental notions of shared governance and academic freedom are under reconsideration with numerous examples of faculty being censored for public statements (be careful what you tweet). Increasingly our status as individual scholars and collective departments is measured and benchmarked by external organizations such as Academic Analytics using criteria we may not even be aware of—or value. Continue Reading.

Recent columns from the President

AAG Harm J. de Blij Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Geography Teaching

Awards_luncheon_small This new annual award recognizes outstanding achievement in teaching undergraduate geography including the use of innovative teaching methods. The award is generously funded by John Wiley & Sons in memory of their long-standing collaboration with the late Harm de Blij on his seminal geography textbooks.

Eligibility: Individual faculty or instructors who are current members of the AAG and for whom teaching geography is a primary responsibility are eligible to receive the award.

Nominations: To make nominations for the AAG Harm J. de Blij Award, you must be a current member of the AAG. Please include the complete name, affiliation and address of the nominee(s), their curriculum vitae, and a concise (500 words maximum) yet specific description of the accomplishments that warrant their selection. Digital submissions are encouraged.

Deadline: December 31, annually

Learn More.

ANNUAL MEETING

Registration, Call for Papers are Open

Join Us in San Francisco

Join the AAG and your colleagues and friends in San Francisco for the 2016 AAG Annual Meeting. The registration and abstract management sites are open. Register Now.

Researchers, scholars, professionals, and students are welcome to present papers, posters, and panel discussions on all topics relevant to geography.

Abstracts are due by Oct. 29, 2015, but may be edited through February 18, 2016. Call for Papers.

For additional information about the AAG Annual Meeting, visit www.aag.org/annualmeeting.

Mona Domosh’s Past President’s Address on Genealogies of Race, Gender, and Place

In her Past President’s address at the 2016 AAG Annual Meeting, Mona Domosh will explore the interconnected historical geographies of race, gender, and place. She will consider how race and racisms have been entangled with spatial imaginaries and place-based materialities throughout much of American history and geography, and how these entanglements continue to shape raced lives today. Learn More.

MORE ANNUAL MEETING

FOCUS ON SAN FRANCISCO

gallery_The_Hetch_Hetchy_Valley_California_by_Albert_Bierstadt_undated_-_Museum_of_Fine_Arts_Springfield_MA_-_DSC03988-300x225-1. Landscape painter Albert Bierstadt visited the Sierra in the 1860s and 1870s and found Hetch Hetchy Valley smaller than the more famous Yosemite Valley but quite as beautiful.

San Francisco Water: Environmental Sensibilities v. Environmental History

San Franciscans pride themselves on their progressive environmental sensibilities, but there are tensions between these sensibilities and the city’s environmental history. The story of the city’s quest for water makes this clear.

As San Francisco grew on its narrow, hilly peninsula, the city quickly depleted its artesian aquifers. Once residents polluted the city’s creeks with industrial and domestic waste, the need for water imports was clear. In the early 1860s, the newly-chartered Spring Valley Water Company developed wells in two East Bay farm districts, dammed a coastal stream that drained a wooded watershed on the San Francisco peninsula, and built a 32-mile flume to deliver water northward to San Francisco. The system’s vulnerability was apparent in April 1906, when the earthquake severed the flume and 80% of the city burned. Learn More.

[Focus on Chicago is an on-going series curated by the Local Arrangements Committee to provide insight on and understanding of the geographies of Chicago]

ASSOCIATION NEWS

Upcoming AAG Award Applications and Nominations Due in September

Deadlines for a number of AAG awards are approaching in September. If you would like to nominate someone or apply on your own behalf, please follow the links highlighted in each award description below to the submission information on each award description page.

AAG Enhancing Diversity Award honors those geographers who have pioneered efforts toward or actively participated in efforts toward encouraging a more diverse discipline over the course of several years. Deadline for nominations is September 15, 2015.

The AAG Excellence in Mentoring Award is given annually to an individual geographer, group, or department who has demonstrated extraordinary leadership in building supportive academic and professional environments in their departments, associations, and institutions and guiding the academic and or professional growth of their students and junior colleagues. Deadline for nominations is September 15, 2015.

The AAG Honorary Geographer award recognizes excellence in research, teaching, or writing on geographic topics by non-geographers. Deadline for nominations is September 15, 2015.

The AAG Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography is given annually to an individual geographer or team that has demonstrated originality, creativity, and significant intellectual breakthroughs in geography. Deadline for nominations is September 20, 2015.

The J. Warren Nystrom Award supports an annual prize for a paper based upon a recent dissertation in geography. Deadline for applications is September 22, 2015.

FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES

2015-16 ACLS Fellowship Competitions Now Open

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce that the 2015-16 ACLS fellowship competitions are now open. ACLS offers fellowship programs that promote the full spectrum of humanities and humanistic social sciences research and support scholars at the advanced graduate student level through all stages of the academic career. Learn More.

Opportunity Available for Visiting Scholar in Latin American Studies

Columbus State University is seeking a distinguished visiting scholar to fill the Elena Diaz-Verson Amos Eminent Scholar Chair in Latin American Studies for spring semester 2016. The scholar must demonstrate expertise in Latin American studies. Applications in all fields of expertise will be carefully considered. The one semester appointment will begin January 2016. Learn More.

MEMBER & DEPARTMENT NEWS

Glen-MacDonald-Laurence-C.-Smith_thmb-300x210-1. UCLA professors Glen MacDonald (left) and Laurence C. Smith

MacDonald, Smith Elected Fellows of American Geophysical Union

Glen MacDonald, UCLA’s John Muir Memorial Endowed Chair in Geography, and Laurence C. Smith, professor and chair of the UCLA Department of Geography, have been elected to the Class of 2015 Fellows of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). AGU’s Class of 2015 Fellows will be “recognized for their breakthrough achievements and exceptional work” in an honors ceremony and banquet at the AGU fall meeting in San Francisco in December. Read More.

MORE MEMBER & DEPARTMENT NEWS

OP-ED

Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial By Night - Washington DC — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial By Night – Washington DC (Glyn Lowe via Compfight)

Make Civil Rights a Geography Awareness Week Theme

By Derek H. Alderman and Josh Inwood

We have thought for some time now that it would be educationally productive to have a Geography Awareness Week theme devoted to civil rights. Tragically, events over the summer…convince us that such an event is now socially and politically necessary. Across the country…racialized violence, discrimination, and white supremacy demonstrates the power racism has over the lives of our communities, including the students in our classrooms. We encourage the National Geographic Society (NGS) and other prominent disciplinary organizations such as Association of American Geographers (AAG), American Geographical Society (AGS), National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE), and Canadian Association of Geographers (CAG) to seize this moment and organize this initiative. Continued silence not only demonstrates tacit approval of inequity in U.S. society, but calls into question the very relevance of Geography to solve the most pressing social issues in U.S. society. Read More.

POLICY UPDATES

Progress Towards ESEA Reauthorization

The AAG has been working hard to encourage Senators to include dedicated funding for geography as part of any new education law and have had some success to this point. Geography is again included as a core academic subject within the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) bill and there is a new funding program that awards competitive grants “to promote innovative history, civic, and geography instruction, learning strategies, and professional development activities and programs.” Read More.

House Legislation Would Undermine NSF Merit Review Process

By John Wertman

A bill (H.R. 3293) just introduced by the chair of the U.S. House Science Committee would undermine the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) longstanding use of merit review for awarding grants. The Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) and several other organizations have expressed their opposition.

The legislation, which is similar to other bills that the AAG has alerted the geography community about, is portrayed by the Science Committee as helping to weed out grants that are unworthy of federal support. The Committee also asserts that nothing in the bill “shall be construed as altering the Foundation’s intellectual merit or broader impacts criteria for evaluating grant applications.” Read More.

POLICY UPDATES

Progress Towards ESEA Reauthorization

House Legislation Would Undermine NSF Merit Review Process

By John Wertman

PUBLICATIONS

Final Call for Applications: Section Editors of the Annals of the AAG

The AAG seeks applications and nominations for two section editors of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. The upcoming vacancies are for the Nature and Society section, and the People, Place, and Region section. The new section editors will be appointed for a four-year term that will commence on January 1, 2016.

Documentation should be submitted by August 31, 2015. Read More.

MORE PUBLICATIONS

MORE HEADLINES

EVENTS CALENDER

Regional Studies Association Inaugural Australasian Conference 2015, Melbourne, Australia, August 31-September 2
GIS in Transit Conference, Washington, DC, September 1-3
2015 ILGISA Annual Conference, Springfield, IL, September 14-16
U.S. Board on Geographic Names 125th Anniversary Celebration, Washington, DC, September 18
Digital Earth 2015 Symposium, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, October 6-10
NESTVAL 2015, Bridgewater, MA, October 9-10

Submit News to the AAG Newsletter. To share your news, submit announcements to newsletter [at] aag [dot] org.

GeoHumanities

July 15, 2015

Post

A Posthumous, Open Letter to Jay Harman

June 26, 2015

I remain most sincerely yours,
Dr. Brian Michael Napoletano

You will be proud to learn that I am now, of all things, a geographer (sort of)! I am an associate professor in a tenure-track position at the Center for Investigation in Environmental Geography at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. I still find it hard to believe that I was fortunate enough to be offered such a position at such a prestigious institution. You may know the director of this institution, as he knows several geographers at Michigan State University. His name is Gerardo Bocco.

Two factors have completely transformed my religious beliefs from Christianity to something between an atheism and agnosticism. The first was my growing concern with issues of social justice. Particularly when I became more active in the movement for justice in Palestine, I came to know several Muslims who are as sincere in their beliefs as I was in Christianity, and could find no basis on which to claim that Christianity was the superior of the two religions. Moreover, with time I came to see that many (but certainly not all) of my Muslim friends were far more concerned with and involved in struggles for social justice than their Christian counterparts. In several issues, including Palestine, my Muslim friends were on the correct side of the issue while my church continued to remain silent or, worse, propagate falsehoods. This caused me to begin asking myself, “If the Christian church is indeed God’s physical presence on Earth, how could He have allowed it to deviate so far from the principles that Christ stood for?” The second issue dealt the death blow to my religious beliefs, and was a question that I believe even you had raised. The question was, “If God is all good, perfect, loving, and powerful, how did evil ever come into existence, and why would He have created us knowing that we would succumb to such evil and end up in a world full of suffering?” Only two possibilities presented themselves to account for this: (1) God created evil, in which case He isn’t very good and loving, or (2) evil created itself despite God, in which case He isn’t very powerful. Both options contradict the original claims regarding the nature of God, leading me to the conclusion that God is most likely a product of human imagination.

Another major factor in my religious conversion was my political conversion. For the past 6 or 7 years, I have been examining the works of Marx and other socialist and anarchist scholars and activists, and find myself in agreement with many of their ideas, theories, and conclusions. Politically, I now consider myself mostly on the side of the socialists, although I am also very sympathetic to the anarchists. This transformation was largely driven by the conviction that the global politico-economic order as it is presently constituted is incapable of resolving the social and ecological crises that our generations and their descendants face (climate change been an obvious and well-known example).

As my understanding of Marxist and other strains of socialist and anarchist theory has grown, I have slowly been incorporating them into my academic work. I have found the works of Harvey, Smith, Watts, Peet, and several others particularly interesting, and my primary research focus now seems to fall within the realm of political ecology and political geography. For the last few years, I have been working to situate the explicitly Marxist concept of “metabolic rift” in a geographic context, primarily by combining it with Harvey’s concept of “spatial fix,” to create an avenue for land-change science and other fields concerned with “sustainability” to move into a more critical and transformative position. The somewhat humorous aspect of this is that this academic endeavor was triggered by a minor conflict I had with my advisor regarding a single sentence in my doctoral dissertation. In an early draft of my dissertation, I had included a statement that associated the emergence of biodiversity loss and land change with the growth of global capitalism, and included a reference to one of Marx’s comments regarding the tendency of capitalism to treat nature as a “free gift.” My advisor, Bryan Pijanowski, originally said something to the effect of, “Are you nuts? You can’t include a reference to Marx in your dissertation!” Probably due more to personal arrogance and a lack of wisdom than to anything else, rather than just eliminating the reference, I responded to this by treating it as a challenge and developing an entire chapter describing the historical and potential contributions of Marxist theory to ecology, and making a case for why ecologists should at least consider Marx’s work as a critical analysis of the ecological dimensions of capitalism. Although I agreed in the end to leave this chapter out of my thesis (mainly because all of my committee members stated that they were insufficiently familiar with this line of inquiry to evaluate it, and asking a third party to do so would cost me personally between $500 and $1,000 USD), I consider it a victory that I managed to convince Bryan that critical perspectives such as Marx’s do indeed have much to offer to land-change science and other fields of landscape ecology, and that I was able to devote a portion of my dissertation defense to a discussion of Marxist theory in an institution as conservative as Purdue University without being dismissed outright (although at least one person did walk out during this part of my defense).

I was surprised to find that this critical and admittedly radical perspective was not just tolerated, but warmly welcomed, here at the UNAM, and have been working with two other professors here on a theoretical paper that we expect will shortly be accepted for publication in Capitalism Nature Socialism. If you would like, I would be glad to send you a copy of this paper, and I would greatly value any thoughts you may have on it.

Given this shift towards a more critical position on socio-environmental issues, my research focus has also changed considerably. Although I am still involved in the development of soundscape ecology, my primary research focus is on territorial conflicts between local communities and mining projects in the northern part of a state in central Mexico (la Sierra Norte de Puebla). For me, this has involved a radical shift from “quantitative” to entirely “qualitative” research and analysis methods, and I still feel way behind everyone else most of the time.

One of my greatest joys still comes from teaching, which is just as (or even more so) undervalued here as it was when I was in the USA. One notable difference here, however, is the attitude of many of the students. Here, higher education is much more difficult to obtain and therefore considered much more of a privilege, such that the students tend to be more engaged in the coursework. Moreover, the culture in general tends to be more rebellious, especially with the horrible government here, and so students tend to be more willing to engage critically with their professors. Finally, my personal status as a professor born and trained in the USA tends to make my students more curious about what I teach, to the extent that I often find myself speaking with a class where nobody is sleeping and everyone seems to be listening to everything that I have to say (a situtation that I frankly found rather unnerving initially). I have also found a way to use the fact that I have only been speaking Spanish for three years now as an advantage, as I can frequently check whether the students understand me by stopping and asking them to explain a concept I just described under the pretext that I don’t know whether I explained it properly in Spanish. That I am from the USA and critical of capitalism seems to be doubly fascinating to them, and a few students have already asked me if they can work with me or if I can be their advisor because of their interest in critical scholarship. As the majority of my critical-thinking education came from your classes and our conversations, I believe that you deserve the majority of the credit.

That said, I still feel like a novice in the field of critical studies, and am often intimidated by the responsibilities expected of me as a professor. As I may have mentioned to you previously, I am now divorced (my ex-wife would have never agreed to move to Mexico), and am still struggling to attain a level of maturity consistent with my responsibilities. The good news is that I have also found time to engage in various social movements for a more just world (including Occupy Detroit when I lived there), and have even written a handful of articles for various news media outlets, albeit mostly alternative and dissident media. One piece of advice that you gave me that has been a guiding factor in my decisions is when you told me something to the effect of, “Don’t do it for the money, do it because it’s important to you.” That advice was instrumental in my decision to come here to Mexico, were I earn far less than I would at a University in the USA, but feel that my ability to help change things is much greater. In short, I don’t know if I would consider me a “success story,” but I believe that we can honestly say that what you helped me learn has helped me to choose a course where I sincerely believe that what I do truly matters. In my opinion, that is one of the highest praises that a teacher can receive, and I hope that you can take pride in your efforts as an instructor, mentor, and friend.

I remain most sincerely yours,
Dr. Brian Michael Napoletano

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AAG Members Speak at 5th International Hurricane and Climate Change Summit

June 24, 2015

Five members of the AAG were invited speakers of the 5th International Hurricane and Climate Change Summit held in Chania, Greece June 9-14. Co-organised by Climate Specialty Group Chair, Jennifer Collins, the following AAG members presented on topics such as paleo-tempestology, hurricane intensities and tropical cyclone risk assessments: Kelsey Ellis, Harry Williams, Jennifer Collins, Mark Welford and Jerry Jien.

Over the past several years the topic of hurricanes and climate change has received considerable attention by scientists, the insurance industry, and the media. The summit brought together leading academics and researchers on various sides of the debate and from all over the world to discuss new research and express opinions about what is happening and what might happen in the future with regard to regional and global hurricane (tropical cyclone) activity. The goals of the summit were to address what research is needed to advance the science of hurricane climate and to provide a venue for encouraging a lively, spirited, and sustained exchange of ideas. Thus leading scientists from around the world presented their latest research and participated in discussions on this topic.