President's Column

The Online Revolution: New Knowledge Geographies?

February 27, 2013

Eric Sheppard Last month, I advocated decentering the production of geographical knowledge. This month, I explore online revolutions in information flows, and the tensions these pose for decentering geographical knowledge. At the heart of these is a tension in the power-geometries of cyberspace itself—which is far from the flat world/global village visions of its most ardent proponents. This is the tension between those advocating net neutrality, envisioning cyberspace as a virtual place of communicative action where all participate and mutually engage, and those seeking an ordered cyberspace, aligned with existing economic and political power: Anonymous vs. a corporate-state complex.

On the visionary end of this spectrum, cyberspace (particularly the increasingly georeferenced Web 2.0) is a massive, online distributed geographic information system—replete with multifaceted, multi-media georeferenced information, connecting seemingly objective data with views of and opinions about the world. Cyberspace problematizes what counts as data, belief and knowledge, empowering all to contribute to such discussions and representations, in ways that are simultaneously emancipatory and problematic. At the other end, are the Intranets that partition cyberspace, surveillance technologies and cyber-warfare. At one end, self-organization, multiplicity and emergence: decentered knowledge production and volunteered geographical information. At the other, a hierarchy, shaped by the usual geographical suspects (powerful Anglophone institutions, concentrated in elite spaces of the global North).

These tensions also characterize the online production and dissemination of academic knowledge. Two aspects have received considerable recent attention: Open access (OA) publishing and massive open online courses (MOOCs). I imagine that, like me, you regularly receive email solicitations from OA publishers and journals, offering to publish your scholarship or pedagogic writing or place you on their editorial boards. Sorting out the merits of OA publishing is a challenge: As for cyberspace in general, crowd sourcing is simultaneously pathbreaking and hazardous. MOOCs have resulted in hundreds of courses with casts of tens of thousands, with Geography virtually absent: I have found just two MOOC Geography courses, on GIS and mapping. On the one hand, is our visceral belief in academic knowledge as a public good (once largely publicly funded) that should be freely available to anyone. On the other, are concerns about emergent hierarchies of knowledge/power favoring those who can position themselves to persuade others.

With respect to OA publishing, we can distinguish between a ‘green’ vision and a ‘gold’ model. In the green vision, digital repositories make scholarly manuscripts immediately publicly accessible at no cost. In the gold model, authors pay an article processing charge (APC) to a publisher that releases the latter’s copyright control so that the publication can become OA: “Pay to say.” The gold model is rapidly trumping the green vision. The UK Government accepted recommendations from the 2011 Finch Report, that all (particularly public funded) published research be OA, preferring the gold model. The UK Research Councils now require this for their funded research, triggering similar initiatives in North America, the European Union, Japan, Australia and Brazil. In response, Anglophone journals are quickly implementing the gold model: The APC for the Annals and The Professional Geographer will be $2,950. Harvard University instituted a policy under which faculty authors grant Harvard the right to distribute their scholarly articles ‘for any non-commercial purpose.’ While the Harvard ‘dash’ repository is green, Harvard’s right to deposit an article published in a major journal may push its faculty to pay APCs. Such moves toward the commodification of open access, shaped by major players in the production and dissemination of knowledge raise major questions: Who has the money to pay APCs? This disadvantages geographers whose research neither attracts nor requires external funding, and less resourced academic institutions. If funding agencies pay APCs (as envisioned in the UK), how will they decide which scholarship deserves such funding? What are the opportunity costs of setting aside money for this purpose? Will this enhance the influence of funders, and the private sector more generally, over academic research?

Here, as elsewhere, commodification challenges academic freedom. Since most academic publishers are already supported by the pro bono labor of authors, referees and (decreasingly) academic editors, one alternative is to invest this labor in journals that are freely available (e.g. ACME), or non-profit (e.g. Human Geography). Yet displacing the highly profitable private-sector journal publishers will remain difficult. This is particularly the case because of the question of determining the quality of information in cyberspace. Here, academics are more comfortable with hierarchies, whereby expertise certifies quality. Yet, as our institutions seek quick fixes to the self-appointed task of measuring (indeed, commodifying) scholarly output, adopting citation and impact scores popularized by ISI Thomson or Google, it is vital to critique and reimagine such measures.

MOOCs have exploded since the term was coined in 2008, exhibiting the same tensions. As originally envisioned, the cMOOC (‘connectivist’) is an open, online educational experience in which all participants contribute knowledge, engaging with and learning from one another. But the xMOOC has come to dominate: a top down educational model, whereby an MIT course, say, (one of the most active providers) is offered to all comers. There are now half a dozen cyberfirms coordinating free xMOOC offerings from an increasing number of universities, worldwide. The challenge, as for OA and cyberspace in general, is making money: xMOOCs have yet to crack the commodification barrier, whereby students would be willing to pay to enroll. Key to this, again, is demonstrating quality, by persuading those institutions currently trusted as quality education providers to endorse or accredit xMOOCs.

What do OA and MOOCs suggest for decentering the production of geographical knowledge? If commoditized models predominate, then order and hierarchy will displace the participatory mutual engagement and learning central to such decentering. The same hierarchies, voices, institutional locations and languages will prevail.

Let me know what you think.

–Eric Sheppard

DOI: 10.14433/2013.0004

LeRoy Myers

LeRoy Myers, a former professor of geography and city planner, died Feb. 17, 2013. A native of Pennsylvania, Myers studied at Penn State where he earned his bachelor’s degree. He later graduated from the University of Michigan with a master’s in geography. As a professor of geography, he taught at Slippery Rock University and WVU. Myers also worked in city planning for the cities of Williamsport, Meadville, and Lima in Ohio.

LeRoy also served in the army during World War II. His love of travel took him to all of Europe and much of East Asia, Africa, and Australia. Myers had a talent for photography and served as a member of the Masonic Lodge.

He is survived by two step children (Susan Miller and David Swanson) and relatives in the Clintonville, Pa., area.

See All Memorials

New Books for Geographers

New Books: February 2013

February 15, 2013

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.

February 2013

A Place We Call Home: Gender, Race, and Justice in Syracuse. Ducre, K. Animashaun. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 2012. $24.95 Cloth (ISBN 978-08156-3306-8).
A Theory of Grocery Shopping: Food, Choice and Conflict. Kock, Shelley L. New York, NY: Berg 2012. $34.95 Paper (ISBN 978-0-8578-5151-2).
Ageing and Youth Cultures: Music, Style and Identity. Bennett, Andy and Paul Hodkinson. New York, NY: Berg 2012. $34.95 Paper (ISBN 978-1-8478-8835-8).
Brazilian Food: Race, Class and Identity in Regional Cuisines. Fajans, Jane. New York, NY: Berg 2012. $29.95 Cloth (ISBN 978-0-85785-042-3).
Captial Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age. Beckman, Erika. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 2013. $25.00 Paper (ISBN 978-0-8166-7920-1).
Car Country: An Environmental History. Wells, Christopher W. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press 2013. $40.00 Cloth (ISBN 978-0-295-99215-0).
Changing Lanes: Visions and Histories of Urban Freeways. DiMento, Joseph F.C. and Cliff Ellis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2013. $34.00 Cloth (ISBN 978-0-262-01858-6).
Cities, Regions and Flows. Hall, Peter V., and Markus Hesses. New York, NY: Routledge 2013. $145.00 Cloth (ISBN 978-0-415-68219-0).
Climate Change and Social Ecology: A New Perspective on the Climate Challenge. Wheeler, Stephen M.. New York, NY: Routledge 2012. $39.95 Paper (ISBN 978-0-415-80987-0).
Climate Change in the Midwest: Impacts, Risks, Vulnerability, and Adaptation. Pryor, Sara C. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 2013. $65 Cloth (ISBN 978-0-253-00682-0).
Development, Security, and Aid: Geopolitics and Geoeconomics at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Essex, Jamey. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press 2013. $24.95 Paper (ISBN 978-0-8203-4454-6).
Digital Anthropology. Horst, Heather A. and Dniel Miller, eds. New York, NY: Berg 2012. $29.95 Paper (ISBN 978-0-85785-290-8).
Essential World Atlas, Seventh Edition. Oxford. New York, NY: Oxford University Press 2012. $24.95 Paper (ISBN 978-0-19-97155-8).
GIS Tutorial 2: Spatial Analysis Workbook, 10.1 edition. Allen, David W. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press 2013. $79.95 Paper (ISBN 978-1-58948-337-8).
Gods of the Mississippi. Pasquier, Michael, ed. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 2013. $27 Paper (ISBN 978-0-253-00806-0).
Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders. Redfield, Peter. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 2013. $29.95 Paper (ISBN 978-0-520-27485-3).
Liminal Landscapes: Travel, experience and spaces in-between. Andrews, Hazel and Les Roberts. New York, NY: Routledge 2012. $146.00 Cloth (ISBN 978-0-415-66884-2).
Making Borders: Engaging the threat of Chinese textiles in Ghana. Axelsson, Linn. Stockholm, Sweden: Stockholm University Library 2012. $114,48 SEK Paper (ISBN 978-91-86071-99-8).
Mallorca: The Making of a Landscape. Buswell, Richard. Edinburgh, UK: Dunedin Academic Press 2013. $55 Cloth (ISBN 978-1-78046-010-9).
Metropolitan Governance in the Federalist Americas: Strategies for Equitable and Integrated Development. Spink, Peter K., Peter M. Ward, and Robert H. Wilson. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 2012. $38.00 Paper (ISBN 978-0-268-04141-0).
Museums: A Visual Anthropology. Bouquet, Mary. New York, NY: Berg 2012. $29.95 Paper (ISBN 978-1-8452-0812-7).
Ownership and Appropriation. Strang, Veronica and Mark Bussee. New York, NY: Berg 2011. $34.95 Paper (ISBN 978-1-8478-8685-9).
Python Scripting for ArcGIS. Zandbergen, Paul A. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press 2013. $79.95 Paper (ISBN 978-1-58948-282-1).
River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Johnson, Walter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2013. $35.00 Cloth (ISBN 978-0-674-04555-2).
Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies. Delanty, Gerald, ed. New York, NY: Routledge 2012. $225.00 Cloth (ISBN 978-0-415-60081-1).
Space, Place, and Sex: Geographies of Sexualities. Johnston, Lynda, and Robyn Longhurst. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press 2010. $29.95 Paper (ISBN 978-0-7425-5512-9).
The Anthropology of Alternative Medicine. Ross, Anamaria Iosif. New York, NY: Berg 2012. £55.00 Cloth (ISBN 978-1-84520-801-1).
The Interview: An Ethnographic Approach. Skinner, Jonathan, ed. New York, NY: Berg 2012. $99.95 Cloth (ISBN 978-1-84788-940-9).
The Right to Water: Politics, Governance, and Social Struggles. Sultana, Farhana and Alex Loftus. New York, NY: Routledge 2012. $53.95 Paper (ISBN 978-1-84971-359-7).
The Routledge Handbook of Tourism and the Environment. Holden, Andrew and David Fennell, eds. New York, NY: Routledge 2013. $225.00 Cloth (ISBN 978-0-415-58207-0).
The White Rose of Stalingrad: The Real-Life Adventure of Lidiya Vladimirovna Litvyak, the Highest Scoring Female Air Cace of All Time. Yenne, Bill. Long Island City, NY: Osprey Publishing 2013. $27.95 Cloth (ISBN 978-1-84908-810-7).
Time and Memory in Indigenous Amazonia: Anthropological Perspectives. Fausto, Carlos, and Michael Heckenberger, eds. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida 2013. $29.95 Paper (ISBN 978-0-8130-4479-8).
Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field. Chattopadhyay, Swati. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 2012. $30.00 Paper (ISBN 978-0-8166-7932-4).
Worldwide Destinations: The Geography of Travel and Tourism, 6th Edition. Boniface, Brian, Chris Cooper, and Robyn Cooper. New York, NY: Routledge 2012. $49.95 Paper (ISBN 978-0-08-097040-0).
Territory, the State and Urban Politics: A Critical Appreciation of the Selected Writings of Kevin R. Cox. Jonas, Andrew E.G. and Andrew Wood. Farnham, England: Ashgate 2012. $ Paper (ISBN 978-0-7546-7998-1).

President's Column

Public Geographies

January 23, 2013

Eric Sheppard How should geographers engage with the world? Building on an initiative of Michael Burawoy, ex-president of the American Sociological Association, I propose that more disciplinary effort be put into public geographies.

One of the great features of geography is that it is grounded—not just because we study the earth, but in the sense that geography is intimately related to everyday life. Almost everything people (and other beings) do on a daily basis engages consciously or unconsciously with the geographies that both find themselves within, and create. (This is why emergent digital technologies shaping communication and interaction are increasingly geographical: Web 2.0.) As academic geographers, we find ourselves quite removed from these everyday geographies. Our expertise, and social credibility, stem from academic credentials, but self-referentiality and abstraction for abstraction’s sake make it harder to transcend the ivory tower. Some seek to make geography more socially relevant by applying academic knowledge to policy issues. Applied, policy-relevant geographies are important, and we should lament any dearth of these and the lack of impact of geographers’ policy recommendations. But how else can we engage with the world, and to which effect? Policy geographies tend to feed into social hierarchies. Often they are directed toward the socially influential, addressing their agendas, priorities and perspectives on society and nature. As policy geographers know all too well, recommendations that are tangential to the concerns of, or address questions not posed by, those paying for advice, run the risk of being filed away. Yet, even well-intentioned elite priorities and perspectives are often distant from the priorities of what the Occupy movement dubbed the 99 percent. (Consider how peoples’ frustration with politicians has become endemic worldwide, as elected politicians’ actions seem increasingly irrelevant or impotent.) Taking advantage of our groundedness, public geographies would engage directly with such alternative priorities.

Public geographies take many forms, but always involve pedagogy, whether in research-oriented universities, community colleges, K-12 classrooms, or alternative teaching initiatives (like the Experimental College of the Twin Cities and Freedom University). Teaching brings geography directly to the diverse populations making up our societies, a vital opportunity not only to provoke critical geographic thinking about socionature but also for us to learn from these students’ diverse perspectives and experiences. Other important venues for prosecuting public geographies include opinion columns, blogs, video documentaries, and social networking tout court. One neglected geographical opportunity to reach the general public is producing ‘trade’ books that engage with and provoke reflection by the general public. Economists and physicists have had much success and influence this way: Why not us? We also should consider the rapid emergence of MOOCs—massive open online courses—an initiative dominated in the U.S. by universities that do not offer geography.

On the societal end of the discipline, public geographies might also involve revealing peoples’ landscapes of living and protest, erased in the name of development (cf. The Peoples’ Guide to Los Angeles). They might involve narrating more broadly peoples’ geographies as an antidote to official accounts, or supporting community geographers. They might involve participant action research, working with communities and collectivities on issues identified by them, empowering their members as co-researchers. They might involve work about and in conversation with diverse economies, social and environmental justice, indigenous and (more-than) human rights.

For those whose scholarship focuses more squarely on biophysical and nature/society issues, public geographies would contest perspectives shaped by market-friendly, state-oriented and corporate agendas. These might include focusing on the biodiversity of places and the sustainability of species marginalized in dominant societal agendas. They might document the climatic and geomorphological effects of such agendas, assessing their viability or desirability. They might connect with societal issues of environmental justice as well as justice for the more-than-human world. For those focused on cartography and other geographical information technologies, public geographies might include community and critical cartography, public participation GIS, or the development of alternative geographic information architectures to facilitate the influence and livelihood possibilities of disadvantaged communities.

Undertaking public geographies entails attending to the challenges and opportunities of working in a geographically differentiated world: e.g., those of working with proximate vs. more distant groups; in places that vary dramatically in terms of culture, ecologies, etc.; at scales ranging from the household to the globe (acknowledging the heterogeneity and inequality at every scale); and working through (and shaping) the connectivities linking places and scales together. Public geographies should be well attuned to such differentiations, by their very nature, yet critically engaging across them remains a major challenge. The ambition should be global, but from the bottom-up rather than top-down.

Public geographies cannot stand alone: Academic and applied geographies are every bit as important, each gaining strength from the others. Without a basis in academic geographies, we have little legitimacy to bring to public issues. In my experience, communities look to geographers for expertise as much as we look to them, and our academic training is the foundation for what we can offer. By the same token, applied/policy geographers offer real-world expertise that can be vital for shifting policy agendas toward public priorities, and for facilitating engagement with existing policy priorities.

The time seems propitious for public geographies: In the United States, community-university partnerships and public engagement are all the rage. Nevertheless, there remain few incentives for students and faculty to pursue public geographies. Academic success is tied to research with impact, measured in citations and policy influence, with teaching also shaped by institutional priorities. Elite universities’ rhetoric talks the talk of public scholarship without walking the walk: It remains too often a pro bono activity, to be undertaken in addition to everything else. Here is where smaller universities and colleges have a real advantage: They are often more directly connected with non-elite communities and their students. In my visits to regional AAG meetings last fall, with elite institutions generally conspicuous by their absence, I was impressed by the kinds of public geographies presented there. Advancing public geographies, then, may require leadership from outside the elite geography programs.

Let me know what you think.

Eric Sheppard

DOI: 10.14433/2013.0003

Louis C. DeVorsey

Louis C. DeVorsey, professor emeritus of geography at the University of Georgia, has died at the age of 83.

DeVorsey received a B.A. from Montclair State University in New Jersey and an M.A. in geography from Indiana University. He earned a Ph.D. in geography in 1965 from the University of London. DeVorsey entered the U.S. Navy Officer Candidate School in Newport News, Rhode Island, in 1954, where he was commissioned as an Ensign. At his death he held the rank of Commander, USNR-Retired.

DeVorsey worked at East Carolina University from 1962 to 1965 and at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill from 1965 to 1967. He then spent the following 21 years at University of Georgia, where he was promoted to professor in 1973. He retired in 1988.

DeVorsey produced an extensive list of impressive publications in the fields of exploration and discovery and the history of cartography. Some of the better known works he authored or edited include The Georgia-South Carolina Boundary: A Problem in Historical Geography (1982, reprinted 2008), The Indian Boundary in the Southern Colonies, 1763-1775 (1966), The Atlantic Pilot (1974), De Brahm’s Report of the General Survey in the Southern District of North America (1971), In the Wake of Columbus: Islands and Controversy (1985), and the award-winning Keys to the Encounter: A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of the Age of Discovery (1992).

As an expert witness, DeVorsey appeared in at least five original actions before the U.S. Supreme Court in regard to litigation concerning sea and land boundaries. He conducted research for the U.S. Department of State in connection with the U.S.-Canada seaward boundary dispute in the Gulf of Maine. This case was adjudicated by the International Court of Justice at The Hague in the Netherlands, where he was one of three geographers who served as consultants to the U.S. Litigation Team.

The Association of American Geographers (AAG) presented DeVorsey with the AAG Award for Meritorious Contributions to the Field of Geography in 1975. In 1980, the University of Georgia Research Foundation presented him its Medal for Research Creativity in the Social Sciences. DeVorsey served the Society for the History of Discoveries as Vice President/President from 1979 to 1982, and he was named a fellow of the society in 2005.

Louis C. DeVorsey (Necrology). 2012. AAG Newsletter 47(6): 28.

See All Memorials

President's Column

Diversifying Geography

December 19, 2012

Eric Sheppard In my first Newsletter column, I wrote about how important it is for U.S. Geography to diversify the voices that constitute our scholarship. At this time, when departments with graduate programs are deciding on who to admit for 2013, I remind you of one of the main recommendations from the 2006 AAG Diversity Task Force Report: “Each Ph.D.-granting geography department should develop a recruitment program with the agenda to recruit and fund annually (via a graduate assistantship or a fellowship) at least one minority student.” (The Task Force also made recommendations about undergraduate recruitment.)

Diversity is a complex issue. The Task Force defined “minority” in terms of non-white racial groups, using the taken-for-granted categories of the U.S. Census. We know, of course, that these categories are social constructs that reflect U.S. racial formations and discourses, artificially separating individuals whose hybrid genetic racial make-up shows more commonality than difference across such racialized categories. Beyond this, are many other ways in which individuals may find themselves marginalized or excluded from the social and academic mainstream, including gender, sexuality, geographic origin, disability, undocumented status, religion and social class. Some of these are immediately visible traits, engendering visceral responses; others are easier to disguise but no less trenchant in their effects. Some are subject to legal protection, others (notably class) are not. Furthermore, there is the challenge of what feminist scholars call intersectionality: Our individual identities locate us simultaneously with respect to multiple socio-spatial positionalities, which intersect with one another in compound ways. The marginalization faced by someone who is, say, black, female and heterosexual is much more than simply the additive effect of being black, being a woman and being heterosexual. Finally, diversity is increasingly represented as simply a variety of identities to be counted and celebrated. Yet, as Audrey Kobayashi argued in last May’s Presidential column, “before we can celebrate diversity we need to address the ongoing, real, and socially damaging effects of racism” (and, of course, other forms of exploitation and discrimination).

The AAG is undertaking important NSF-funded research under its ALIGNED project (www.aag.org/diversity), some already published, comparing the diversity of U.S. Geography departments with that of the institutions in which they are located, and of U.S. academia in general. Importantly, as noted by the 2006 Task Force and researched subsequently by the AAG, the landscape of diversity varies substantially by regional, urban/rural and institutional location. Geography’s unequal presence across such contexts must be accounted for in any analysis, as this research does. Further, such variability means that uniform diversity goals are unrealistic and unreasonable—Geography matters here, also. Such quantitative assessments are necessarily much blunter and narrower than the conceptualization of diversity above. Data are limited to race, male/female and US/international origin, and intersectionality is not readily quantifiable, reducing diversity to demographic counts (other qualitative ALIGNED and EDGE research attends to these other complexities). Nevertheless, the results compel disciplinary reflection and action. I will not bore you with the numbers, but Geography Departments have a greater proportion of non-Hispanic whites (80-90%) than do the institutions in which they are located (or U.S. academia in general), by ten or more percentage points. Relative to all U.S. students, the median percentage of Geography students who are U.S. students of color is less than half the median percentage for students in the universities where these departments are located (with the exception of Asian-American graduate students). The median percentages of women are also well below those institution-wide or nationwide.

It should be no surprise that we have much to do to further diversify Geography, also beyond these visible demographic categories, and departments are key locales for such initiatives. As I have learned from working with diverse U.S. and international students at Minnesota, including an inter-disciplinary graduate program exemplifying how diversity enhances excellence, structural factors are crucial to successful diversification. Attending to these is vital to taking up the three R’s of recruitment, retention and reproduction.

The Task Force recommendation I quoted at the beginning addresses recruitment, a pragmatic response to what has been a very long and difficult process for the discipline. Efforts by the Association and its members to expand the pool of applicants date back to Saul Cohen’s appointment as AAG Executive Director in the mid sixties. Only in the past decade, through ALIGNED and EDGE, has funding again been raised by the AAG for research into the palette of strategies for recruiting expanded pools of applicants (see 32 Ideas to Enhance Diversity: www.aag.org/ diversity). Some programs are making exemplary efforts, others much less so, and more needs to be done to overcome such structural challenges as the uneven geography of K-12 education, the balkanization of non-white students into under-resourced colleges unable to fund Geography, and perceptions of its irrelevance to the lives of under-represented students. In the meantime, we can only maximize the limited opportunities presented by the available diversity of applicants, as this recommendation suggests.

Recruitment efforts are likely to be wasted, if the right local conditions are missing to enable retention. These include mentors, the willingness to appreciate and work through the capabilities and desires of under-represented students, an actively welcoming climate in the department and institution, courses across Geography addressing race and gender, and the presence of a diverse group of students and faculty. Students arrive with many questions about their place in academia, and will take up other options (at our collective cost) if these are not constructively addressed. For example, EDGE research indicates that non-white and female students are more likely to seek a career where they can affect social change, but PhD programs still expect good students to pursue the academic route to a tenured professorship in the Ivory Tower. Likewise, students look for opportunities to undertake collaborative research, whereas human geography, in particular, continues to prioritize the lone scholar model in which they are expected to prove individual worth (even though many faculty propound the power of collective action).

Reproduction of a diverse community of geographers is impossible, of course, if recruitment and retention fail. The racial diversity of many Geography graduate programs, and new faculty appointments, largely stems from recruiting graduate students from outside the first world. Incorporating these voices into US geography benefits us all, but this cannot suffice. Tolerance of diversity can never suffice: It is everyone’s responsibility, notwithstanding any intellectual reservations about the term, to actively diversify Geography.

Let me know what you think.

Eric Sheppard

DOI: 10.14433/2012.0005

See also:

Darden, J., S. Attoh, A. Coleman, L. Estaville, V. Lawson, I. Miyares, J. Marston, D. Richardson, T. Rogers, M. Solem, P. Solís, C. Souch, R. Sumner (2006) The AAG’s Diversity Task Force final report: An action strategy for geography departments as agents of change. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers.

Schlemper (2009) Departmental climate and student experiences in geography graduate programs. Research in Higher Education 50 (3): 268-292. DOI: 10.1007/s11162-008-9117-4

Solís, P., J. Adams, L. Duram, S. Hume, A. Kuslikis, V. Lawson, I. M. Miyares, D. Padgett, and A. Ramirez (2014) Diverse experiences in diversity at the geography department scale. The Professional Geographer 66 (2): 205-220. DOI: 10.1080/00330124.2012.735940

Ashok Wadwani

Ashok and Ishu Wadwani came to the U.S. in 1970 with two bags and $200. Today, the couple own and operate Applied Field Data Systems (AFDS), a company specializing in field-based GPS, GIS, and mapping services, consulting, and training.

After obtaining his master’s degree in physics from the University of Lucknow in 1963, Ashok landed his first jobs in marketing at the Indian partner offices of U.S. companies such as Perkin Elmer, Hewlett-Packard and Honeywell. After he and his wife got visas based on their educational backgrounds and obtained green cards, they relocated to Chicago, where Ashok was employed at Central Scientific, a company specializing in lab equipment. While working full-time, both Ashok and Ishu continued to attend school. After Ashok obtained his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, he moved among locations and jobs for several years, finally ending up in Houston. By 1984, he had started his own business designing handheld computers for the forestry industry – one of the forerunners of modern GPS.

Because GPS technology was still in its infancy in the mid-1980s, Ashok’s entrance into the field came by complete accident. “Early on, I had no clue what GPS even was,” he says. Provisions of the Clean Air Act moved him into the realm of fugitive emissions monitoring by 1986, when his company began supplying rugged handheld computers to refineries and petrochemical companies. His clients soon began requesting geospatial information for their emissions data points. “It was a customer-driven process,” he explains. “GPS technology was developed elsewhere, but AFDS developed the interface not only for petrochemical industries but others.” As the company grew, Ishu decided to join the business, giving up her lucrative job in the health care industry.

Ashok and Ishu stress that their success did not come easily. While they were able to find jobs quickly upon their arrival to the U.S., Ashok notes that the transition can pose a challenge to immigrants not accustomed to American culture. “Asian and European cultures are quite different from American culture, although Americans tend to regard all cultures as similar,” he observes.

In 27 years of running their own business, Ashok and Ishu take pride in the fact that they never had to fire a single employee and have remained debt-free. They strongly believe in encouraging and mentoring students and new graduates, and they continue to hire student interns and offer them flex time so they are able to attend classes. Perhaps most importantly, Ashok and Ishu look for people they can trust. Because running a small business means that often both of them are traveling and are frequently away from the office, they must be able to trust employees to get the job done under minimal supervision.

Small businesses operate with fewer financial resources than a large company, and the burden of accountability ultimately rests on the owners’ shoulders. However, there is also a great deal of personal freedom and flexibility. “You’re the boss – you make a commitment, and that’s it,” Ashok says. For anyone hoping to start his or her own business, he offers some advice: be open to working many hours, be prepared for failures and financial hardships, and be prepared to do odd jobs or “wear different hats” within the company. “We firmly believe there are skills we can teach,” say Ashok and Ishu, “but we can’t teach attitude.”

See All Profiles

New Books for Geographers

New Books: November 2012

November 15, 2012

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.

Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should also contact the Editor-in-Chief.

PLEASE NOTE: Due to current public health policies which have prompted the closing of most offices, we are unable to access incoming books at this time. We are working on a solution during this transition and will continue our new books processing as soon as we can. In the meantime, please feel free to peruse previous books from our archived lists.

November, 2012

Alkon, Alison Hope. Black, White, and Green. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012. 206 and 7 pp., $69.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4390-7.
Bridge, Gavin and Billon, Philippe Le. Oil. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. 256 and 8 pp., $49.95, ISBN 978-0-7456-4926-9.
Cionnaith, Finnian O. Mapping, Measurement and Metropolis: How Land Surveyors Shaped Eighteenth-Century Dublin. Portland: Four Courts Press, 2012. 246 and 24 pp., €45.00, ISBN 978-1-84682-348-0.
Clarke, Colin and Clarke, Gillian. Post-Colonial Trinidad: An Ethnographic Journal. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 246 and 22 pp., $89.00, ISBN 978-0-230-62200-5.
Danielsson, Sarah K. The Explorer’s Roadmap to National-Socialism: Sven Hedin, Geography, and the Path to Genocide. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. 304 and 6 pp., $119.95, ISBN 9781-4094-3212-8.
Davies, Damian Walford. Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012. 271 and 16 pp., £29.99, ISBN 978-0-7083-2476-9.
Foote, Stephanie and Mazzolini, Elizabeth ed. Histories of the Dustheap: Waste, Material Cultures, Social Justice. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012. 291 and 6 pp., $50.00, ISBN 978-0-2625-1782-9.
Garfield, Simon. On the Map: A Mind Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks. New York: Gotham Books, 2013. 464 pp., $27.50, ISBN 978-1-59240779-8.
Ioris, Antonio Augusto Rossotto. Tropical Wetland Management: The South American Pantanal and the International Experience. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. 351 and 19 pp., $124.95, ISBN 978-1-4094-1878-8.
Janowski, Monica and Ingold, Tim, ed. Imagining Landscapes: Past, Present and Future. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. 169 and 12 pp., $99.95, ISBN 978-11-4094-2971-5.
Lave, Rebecca. Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012. 170 and 8 pp., $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4392-1.
Light, Duncan. The Dracula Dilemma: Tourism, Identity and the State of Romania. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. 196 and 10 pp., $99.95, ISBN 978-1-4094-4021-5.
Loyd, Jenna M. Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012. 372 and 11 pp., $69.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4412-6.
Mithen, Steven. Thrist: Water and Power in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. 347 and 17 pp., $25.95, ISBN 978-0-674-06693-9.
Motoyama, Yasuyuki. Global Companies, Local Innovations: Why the Engineering Aspects of Innovation Making Require Co-location. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. 163 and 5 pp., $99.95, ISBN 978-1-4094-2146-7.
Rehder, John B. Tennessee Log Buildings: A Folk Tradition. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2012. 192 pp., $29.95, ISBN 978-1-57233-874-6.
Talbert, Richard J.A., ed. Ancient Perspectives: Maps and Their Place in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. 264 and 9 pp., $65.00, ISBN 978-0-226-78973-8.0

President's Column

Is Los Angeles a Cash Cow?

October 1, 2012

Eric Sheppard October 24 is the (current) deadline for submitting a paper or session to the 2013 AAG national meeting in Los Angeles, for which regular members pay a registration fee of $295. Many of the AAG members I talk to find this expensive, assuming that the AAG central Office regards the annual meeting as a cash cow through which to subsidize its other activities. Indeed, I long held this belief. Is it the case?

In August 2011, I attended the five-day International Conference of Critical Geography (ICCG) in Frankfurt (appropriately held on the former premises of the Frankfurt School), paying a registration fee of ?280 ($350) that included buffet lunches and dinners. This also seemed steep (the International Geographical Union conference in Cologne this August cost about the same). Yet practically every session on the program was of interest to me, and part of my registration fee was reallocated to defray costs for attendees with low incomes?a good cause.

As we all know, the annual AAG conference is rather unique by comparison to those held by most mainstream academic associations, because of our commitment to inclusivity: Anyone organized enough to write an abstract or pull together a session, and with the resources to attend, can participate. I am a passionate proponent of this notwithstanding its ?old boy? origins. (My Ph.D. advisor Leslie Curry told me that he instigated this policy in the late 1970s, after vociferously complaining to a program committee that had rejected his typically abstruse abstract.) Our somewhat anarchist approach catalyzes an ever-widening range of participants: not only geographers of every stripe from all kinds of places, but also interdisciplinary groups seeking an open forum to experiment with new conversations. I am repeatedly surprised at the people who not only have become aware of our conference, but now regularly attend.

The conference also feels somewhat anarchic, of course. Notwithstanding the AAG?s wise decision to limit the number of times any individual can appear in the program, there are more sessions than anyone can reasonably even scan (over 6,000 papers or panel presentations last year, organized into 75+ concurrent sessions across five days), covering practically every conceivable (quasi) geographic topic, and of the widest possible quality. While most of what happens falls outside any individual?s field of interest, we each can find more than enough to interest us. The AAG makes multiple efforts to make this smorgasbord legible to conference attendees, but it remains challenging for participants to figure out both how best to reach their target audience and which sessions to attend. Yet the apparent frenzy of the annual meeting also is suffused with an ineffable buzz of energy and ideas, with the ever-present possibility of productive encounters between seemingly discordant areas of scholarship. For those who regard Geography?s diversity and anti-canonical culture as potentially its greatest strength, like myself, who could ask for anything more? The sheer size of the event unfortunately has significantly narrowed to a handful the group of U.S. cities capable of hosting us, but those seeking a more personal atmosphere and a broader set of locales have the AAG regional conferences and a host of more specialized events to choose from.

Yet is it worth the $295, plus transportation, accommodation and food? Several factors push conference costs up, for the AAG Central Office and AAG members: Our laudable policy of favoring union hotels; our equally laudable, recently strengthened policy (like the ICCG) of reducing fees for underemployed and low income registrants?by almost half; the cost of equipping every room with audiovisual equipment; insurance taken out to protect against events triggering large-scale last minute cancellations (e.g. weather); and our geographical restriction to the largest, most expensive, cities. But it?s cheaper than any Anglophone national geography conference I am aware of, except the Canadian Association of Geographers. On a per day basis, it costs on average about 25% less than others, and on a per session basis it is much cheaper. The fee has increased just once in the past five years, unlike many cognate conferences, and there are no hidden fees that others sometimes charge (e.g. for abstract submission or audiovisual equipment rental).

Does the AAG make money from its national meeting? Not directly. I applaud AAG Central?s ability to run such a huge, diverse and tumultuous event so smoothly every year. Its dedicated staff do so very efficiently, with closely monitored cost control, yet direct and indirect costs of the considerable staff time and effort, over six months, amount to about 60% of registration fees. For 2013, AAG Central projects net revenues of just one half of one percent of the fees collected?or about $1.80 of your $295. Of course, the vitality and global footprint of the conference does benefit our organization indirectly–just as it benefits each member.

Let me know what you think.

Eric Sheppard

DOI: 10.14433/2012.0003

Neil Smith

Neil Smith died of liver and kidney failure at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York on September 29, 2012, at the age of 58. He was Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), where he founded and for a number of years directed the interdisciplinary Center for Place, Culture, and Politics.

Smith was born and raised in Leith, Edinburgh, Scotland. He attended the University of St. Andrews (with a year spent at the University of Pennsylvania, 1974-1975), taking a B.Sc. degree in 1977, to be followed by a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 1982, where his advisor was David Harvey. He taught in the geography department at Columbia University from 1982-90 before moving to Rutgers.

Smith was a revolutionary force in the academic discipline of geography and beyond. A polarizing figure, his sharp wit and direct style could be taken harshly by those whose work was the aim of his critiques, while others recognized him as a role model for politically committed scholars. He influenced a generation of critical geographers and was one of the early organizers of the International Critical Geography Group. Smith’s work was widely read outside the discipline of geography, including in such fields as sociology, urban studies, anthropology and cultural studies and contributed to the “spatial turn” in the social sciences and humanities.

Entering a field often considered an intellectual backwater, Smith’s insightful scholarship and cogent arguments would imbue geography with an intellectual – and political – importance it had rarely before possessed. Originally on track to become a glacial geomorphologist (based on his love of Scottish landscapes), Smith’s interests gravitated toward the dynamics of urban change under the influence of St. Andrews lecturer Joe Doherty. Smith’s widely accepted “rent-gap” thesis, first published in a landmark article in the Journal of the American Planning Association in 1979 (based on his undergraduate thesis at St. Andrews), made clear that gentrification was a new strategy of capital accumulation actively restructuring urban space. Extended study of gentrification in New York City led to Smith’s influential book, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (1982), in which he argued that the dynamics of gentrification was rooted as much in culture (“revanchism” or class revenge, as the bourgeoisie sought to take back “their” city) as it was in economics. He linked the rise of zero-tolerance policing and the other “quality of life” initiatives of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to social changes taking place around the globe, jumping scales from a “localized urban anomaly” to a globalized “urban strategy.”

Smith’s arguments about gentrification were part of a much larger project examining the production of both nature and geographical space within capitalism. In Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (1984), Smith shows that nature is not simply transformed but actually produced, an insight foundational for the whole field of political ecology. He argued that to understand the workings of capitalism, we have to understand the way capitalism produces the very spaces that make its existence possible, a concept now central to much geographical work. Together his theories of the production of nature, space, and scale can be said to add up to a new, remarkably cogent theory of uneven capitalist development.

Smith’s later work examined powerful mid-twentieth century American geographer, university president, and advisor to presidents, Isaiah Bowman (a primary architect of Woodrow Wilson’s positions that led to the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations), and led eventually to the publication of American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (2003), for which he received the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography in 2004 and the AAG’s Globe Book Award for Public Understanding of Geography, also in 2004. Drawing together his various insights and a lifetime of Marxist scholarship, his final book was The Endgame of Globalization (2005).

Smith was also very active in organizing or co-organizing conferences and symposia, especially those of CUNY. He was frequently invited to give lectures both in the U.S. and abroad. He recently served as Visiting Professor at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), and in August 2012 he gave the keynote address, “For (Political) Climate Change” at the Geographing the Future Conference, hosted by the National University of Ireland, Galway. Smith was co-editor of the influential journal Society and Space and served on the editorial boards of Social Text and Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, among others.

Neil Smith received distinguished scholarship honors from the AAG in 2000.

Neil Smith (Necrology). 2012. AAG Newsletter 47(10): 22.

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