Mapping Mindfully: Community-Based Data Collection and Visualization Through a Trauma-Aware Lens

April 6, 2022

Best Practices for Qualitative Research on Sensitive Topics

April 5, 2022

News

AAG Early Career and Department Leadership Webinar Series Continues in Fall 2021

July 29, 2021

By Julaiti Nilupaer, Mark Revell, Ken Foote and Shannon O’Lear

This May marked the culmination of a year-long series of webinars developed by the AAG in partnership with past president Ken Foote (University of Connecticut) and current council member Shannon O’Lear (University of Kansas). The Early Career and Department Leadership webinar series launched in fall 2020 as part of the AAG’s COVID-19 Rapid Response initiatives also represents a broader effort at the AAG to expand year-round programming for members and the wider geography community. Read on for results from this year’s series and news about the series that will kick off this fall. To access the series, click here for Early Career webinars and here for Department Leadership webinars.

The series has featured two distinct but interconnected themes: (1) building and sustaining strong academic programs and (2) helping students and young geographers navigate their early careers. The department leadership thread has covered a wide range of topics, from the impacts of COVID-19 on the future directions of graduate programs, to questions about rebranding, renaming, merging or blending geography with other programs, to creating inclusive courses and curricula, facilitating respectful workplaces and being a good colleague. Early career-themed webinars have focused on articulating career pathways and helping young geographers build strong professional networks, as well as the value they bring to a diverse range of business, government, and nonprofit sector careers.

Locations of 536 attendees from Spring 2021 webinars. Approximately 84% of them were in the United States.

Over the whole year, the series has so far attracted 2,454 registrations. This spring, 536 live attendees across 23 countries (see Map 1) participated in at least one webinar. AAG survey data found that most audience members were either employed in higher education or were graduate students pursuing a master’s degree or PhD; 77 percent of them identified themselves as human geographers. Regarding their overall experience (on a scale of 1-5), 72 percent of audience members rated a 4 or 5 (see Graph 1) and were looking forward to more opportunities to engage with panelists and other audience members. Graph 2 below highlights some of the attendees’ experiences.

Graph 1. Feedback on attendees’ overall experience for Spring webinars

The AAG thanks those from across the discipline who volunteered to help lead the webinars. Altogether 42 panelists and presenters were involved during the year, including faculty, students, and professionals from a wide range of universities, organizations, and businesses. The organizers benefited greatly from suggestions made by panelists and the audience about topics to address in future webinars. We are sincerely grateful for every attendee who participated regardless of time zones, offered insightful comments, asked thoughtful questions, and provided honest feedback that will make the upcoming events even better.

Graph 2: Feedback from attendees for Spring webinars.

This Fall, More of a Good Thing

AAG is pleased to announce the continuation (and expansion) of the Early Career and Department Leadership webinar series through 2022 and beyond. We are excited to find new ways to serve our members. Based largely on audience feedback, here are some ideas we are using to create webinar events that we hope will address the needs and interests of AAG members, from students to department chairs and everyone in between:

More sessions on early career topics: The AAG will continue to provide webinars on careers in geography, including on academic career paths for geography PhDs; strategies for funding, grant writing and publishing; and active pedagogy.
More sessions on department leadership: The AAG will continue next year on topics related to diversity, equity and inclusion; leadership styles and strengths; and supporting non-tenure track faculty.
More career mentoring opportunities: The AAG recognizes the strong need for attendees to receive timely and high-quality mentoring from panelists. Our early career webinars this fall will feature extended time for open discussion and career-oriented mentoring.
More networking space for each session: The AAG will update the webinar format to make it easier for attendees to network with one another virtually.

An exciting collaboration opportunity this fall will be the AAG Regions Connect meeting in October, a first-ever convening of several AAG Regional Divisions’ fall meetings over a span of a few days, with a climate-forward model for sharing virtual content along with in-person gatherings. The AAG is working with the regional meeting organizers to provide career and professional development sessions during AAG Regions Connect. Registration and details for AAG Regions Connect will follow soon.

To attend a free session, visit the AAG Early Career Webinar series here, and the AAG Department Leadership webinar series here.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0097

Have a great idea for an Early Career or Department Leadership webinar? We’d like to hear from you. Send your suggestions to Mark Revell, Manager of Career Programs and Disciplinary Research.

President's Column

Moving Forward on Climate Change and Professional Ethics

June 29, 2021

A few weeks ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that atmospheric CO2 concentrations, at 419 ppm, have now reached 150% of their pre-industrial levels – the highest in more than four million years, when sea levels were about 24 meters higher, the global average surface temperature almost 4ºC warmer than today, and the first modern humans had more than three million years yet to appear on earth. The world-historical COVID-19 pandemic, still wreaking havoc across the mostly unvaccinated globe, temporarily decreased emissions, but not enough to be detectable in rising atmospheric CO2 levels. NOAA has recently defined new “normal” temperatures that are significantly higher than those in the past.

As I write, a hazardous and extreme heat wave has gripped the Southwestern US, stretching power grids to their limits and threatening heat deaths. The entire Western United States is also in the throes of a severe drought that is expected to last all summer. Indeed, global warming has contributed significantly to changing what would have otherwise been a moderate drought in the Southwestern US into a megadrought worse than has been seen for almost a millennium. This year, drought is predicted to lead to another ruinous, record-breaking fire season, on the heels of nightmarish 2020 fire season in the Western US – and around the world. It is also affecting access to safe drinking water and forcing farmers to make difficult decisions about what crops to keep, which will likely lead to higher food prices.

None of this is news to geographers, so why start my first column as AAG president with a reminder of the ongoing climate devastation? There are several reasons, beyond my embodied experience of consecutive days of record-shattering heat in my home state of Colorado. (These days, my kids and I have taken to sleeping in a tent on our back porch – itself a privilege.) First, geographers have been at the forefront of research on climate change, adaptation, resilience, and climate justice, but our research as geographers is often not acknowledged in the press or known to the public; this is relevant to the visibility, and ultimately health, of the discipline. Second, climate change is one of four primary policy campaigns that AAG will be undertaking over the next 1-2 years. Through the release of the new AAG website, expected later in 2021, geographers will be able to more easily engage with legislation and policy related to climate change.

Third, I want to use this opportunity to highlight the work of the Climate Action Task Force, which has been led by Professor Wendy Jepson and which I joined in 2020. As a reminder, this task force was formed by Council to undertake the task of realizing the goals of a 2019 member petition: to reduce CO2 emissions related to the Annual Meeting commensurate with what the IPCC states is needed to limit warming to 1.5 C — that is, a 45% reduction (from 2010 levels) by 2030. In doing so, the Task Force is seeking ways to position AAG as a leader and model of how large organizations can respond to climate change in a manner that both meets the needs of their members and is environmentally and socially just.

A 45% reduction is not a trivial change; it’s not a tweak around the margins of business as usual. Achieving this goal would mean a radical transformation in how the AAG stays financially solvent, and perhaps how we form our identities as geographers. As such, AAG can only move forward through extensive member participation and dialogue about what this means and how we might get from here to there. These conversations have already begun. At the virtual meeting this spring, the Task Force hosted a collaborative keynote panel of anthropologists who shared their creative and inspiring reflections and experiences on climate-friendly and accessible conferencing, as well as two roundtables of dialogue amongst geographers representing different types of institutions, career stages, and social identities to consider the meaning of annual in-person meetings to their careers, and share ideas for future formats that would be less carbon intensive and yet meet geographers’ needs.

Going forward, The Professional Geographer will soon publish a Focus Section that presents a variety of perspectives on low-carbon annual meetings. The Climate Action Task Force is looking forward to community commentary on these contributions and further brainstorming through the new AAG website. Looking down the road, AAG will also be performing a financial analysis of different future meeting models, working collaboratively with the AAG Regions on a climate-forward initiative, encouraging the formation of meeting nodes, and further soliciting all members’ input through a survey. I will revisit these important issues in future columns.

* * *

If AAG action on climate change has seemed a long time coming to some members, so too has an update of the AAG Statement on Professional Ethics, last revised more than a decade ago, in 2009, long before the implementation of the Professional Conduct Policy. Indeed, graduate students have recently argued that it is outdated, too long, confusing, and falls short of providing clear guidance, especially compared to those of other scholarly organizations. I am happy to share, therefore, that at its Spring 2021 meeting, AAG Council unanimously approved a revised Statement on Professional Ethics, which can be accessed here. AAG will soon make it readily available for review whenever a member joins or renews, and during the Annual Meeting registration process.

The impetus for this came from the report of the AAG Geography and Military Study Committee, which was formed in 2017 by AAG Council in response to a member petition calling on the AAG to study the engagement of Geography with US military and intelligence communities vis-à-vis safety, labor demand, curriculum, academic freedom, and ethics, and to offer concrete recommendations based on its report. Both the Report and the timing of the resulting process have subsequently been subject to critique. What I want to focus on here, though, are several of the Report’s recommendations that Council voted in Fall 2020 to accept, including:

Revise the AAG code of ethics statement and policy as it relates to the ethical issues that may arise from military-funded research. This should include comparing the AAG statement (current and proposed) with the codes of ethics related to research developed by other disciplines such as the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the American Psychological Association (APA) as well as the Department of Defense (DoD) statement of ethics as it relates to research.

and

Update and revise the AAG Statement on Professional Ethics (every few years). With new and revised updates, encourage members of the association to read them as part of the membership renewal and meeting registration processes.

In response to this Report, Council also approved the formation of an implementation committee, which I chaired, to update the ethics statement.

The committee began its work by consulting other professional organizations’ statements of ethics and, based on those models, revised the 2009 Statement to focus on practical and easily memorable principles and actions. The committee also integrated references to the 2020 Professional Conduct Policy, removed discussion of issues regulated elsewhere (such as regarding the confidentiality of student grades), updated the language regarding new technologies, and explicitly mentioned the ethics of geographers’ engagements with the military, intelligence, security, policing and warfare where specifically relevant, but with an eye toward a Statement broad enough to cover all ethical obligations. It was a significant undertaking conducted over a short period of time, and I want to sincerely thank the committee members for putting in so much, and such thoughtful, time and effort to this task: Council member Richard Kujawa (Saint Michael’s College), Sue Roberts (UKY), Reuben Rose-Redwood (UVic), and former AAG president Eric Sheppard (UCLA).

Of course, no Statement of Ethics is ever final or perfect, especially as ethics themselves are not a matter that can be settled once and for all. Thus, the AAG should become proactively engaged with the question of ethics, on an ongoing basis. This is already starting to happen, not only with plans for Council to revisit and update the Statement every three years, but also with the ongoing GeoEthics Webinar Series, a partnership between AAG, Esri, and the Center for Spatial Studies at UC-Santa Barbara. Once the AAG’s new website is up and running, we hope to offer a list of links and publications on ethics and geography, and provide a space for feedback for all AAG members, including reactions to the Ethics statement, additional resources, and other discussion.

If ethics are, in part, about doing no harm, then a commitment to act to reduce the future harms of climate change is one in accordance with our stated ethical principles. I also want to point out that both the new Statement on Professional Ethics and the work of the Climate Change Task Force are ultimately the results of member petitions to Council. Both petitions have sparked concrete actions that are moving the AAG forward in a positive direction toward addressing the pressing challenges facing the earth and its peoples in the 21st century.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0094

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at emily [dot] yeh [at] colorado [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

President's Column

Want a Thriving Department? Focus on Undergraduate Success

February 10, 2021

I cannot think of a person in higher education who has not felt the pressure of maintaining and growing undergraduate enrollments. Undergraduates, who make up the large majority of the student body, are the people we devote most of our instructional efforts toward, and—as administrators constantly point out—are university’s primary source of revenue through tuition and fees. At public institutions, undergraduate success is also the primary focus of state legislatures looking at higher education metrics and state funding. Geography departments may literally live or die depending on their ability to maintain robust undergraduate enrollments and recruit majors.

I don’t think it’s pessimistic to suggest that a geography faculty member can’t control national economy, demographics, or tuition costs. So, what is a geography professor or department to do? The answer is simple:

Focus on undergraduate student success.

While many faculty seem to intuitively know how their programs can adapt to changing student needs and are able to naturally connect with undergraduate students, some of the rest of us get stuck in the culture and traditions of how we approach undergraduate education and interaction. So, I sought some pointers from the experts: undergraduate advisors (especially Dr. Leslie McLees, Undergraduate Program Director in Geography at University of Oregon). We identified some key ways in which faculty can address changing needs of students, through curriculum, advising, and experience. I don’t have room to adequately address overall student experience, so I’ll focus on the two areas in which faculty and undergraduate students formally interact.

Curriculum for a Changing Discipline

Students want to know that their degrees matter, and rather than dismissing the question of relevance, we need to embrace it. If we cannot justify why our degree matters, how can we expect students to do so, much less parents and legislators?

To prove relevance, we should teach students about geography and how to be professional geographers. We can continually adapt curriculum to the changing discipline and needs of students through modernized geography classes and sequences, professional development courses, and flexible, personalized major tracks.

Like it or not, a current trend seems to be the blurring of traditional discipline boundaries in favor of problem-based programs. A modernized geography curriculum represents current and future trends in the discipline, the changing physical and human landscapes of our planet, and ways to be professionals addressing the problems and opportunities posed by those changes.

One of the things that frustrates me is holding on to previous curricular sequences and class names. There has recently been a robust conversation about this on the AAG listserve that challenges holding onto course names such as: Human Geography, Geomorphology, GIS… The anthropology department on my campus has an introductory course titled: Pirates and Piracy. What do you think sounds more interesting to an undergraduate student, Pirates and Piracy or Introduction to Human Geography? When my sons were UO students, they took the anthropology version.

A focus on undergraduate success is vital for geography departments. [image: Tamarcus Brown]

Another way to translate the need for a four-year degree is to integrate professional development or career management into the curriculum.

Don’t bristle. We’re not talking about vocational training.

Rather, we’re suggesting professional development through traditional routes such as internship or research experiences. Or, streamlined and direct experiences through a professional development course geared towards geography students. We have such a course in our department at the University of Oregon and it has been popular and successful. Moving beyond simply writing resumes and cover letters, it requires critical reflection on skills that students develop at college, training on how to tell their stories about developing those skills, practice in reaching out to people in the workforce, and development of a portfolio that forces them to articulate their proposed career paths. Think of it as a new-age capstone course that requires students to translate the sometimes lofty and theoretical content taught and learned in traditional geography courses into thinking about what it means to BE a professional, paid geographer.

And choices! Our undergraduate students have grown up with more choice than I could have even imagined. Recently, my husband Andrew and I were discussing network TV. Specifically, we were both complaining that our parents never let us stay up late enough to watch the entire episode of Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday night (turns out we both had to go to bed by 8:30pm). What’s half of the Wonderful World going to do for us? So, we both opted out. Our 8-year old minds couldn’t even imagine on-demand TV. And, yet, that’s how our kids have grown up.

That availability of choice has translated to demands for flexibility in our majors and curriculum choices.

Many colleges and universities are responding and offering programs with: enhanced flexibility, personalization (almost a design-your-own-major), and the absence of bottlenecks (i.e. removal of intense vertical integration that keeps students from completing specific required courses).

Advising and Experience Go Together

Approaches to advising vary considerably, but there has been a national trend towards centralized campus advising, which offers an opportunity to connect students to the many resources available on campuses, ranging from mental health and spaces for minoritized groups to financial aid, as well as classical guidance on major choice and requirements to obtain their degree. However, generating excitement about a relatively unknown discipline—which is unfortunately where geography usually lives—is difficult for a central advisor who lacks knowledge in the discipline and understanding of how a specific student’s interests can integrate with the major to provide skills that help them beyond their degree.

That level of advising takes place in departments.

Many geography programs designate an Undergraduate Director who is the face of the program for undergraduates. This UD is the ambassador and advocate both around campus and within geography. Maintaining strong connections with centralized advising not only helps those central advisors learn more about geography, but also helps identify our majors early, which means less time-to-degree, better within-major advising, and earlier connections with faculty and peers. Within the department, the UD not only understands the curriculum in-depth, but also moves advising beyond the checklist of classes to take. They are able to help students translate their course experiences into real-world relevance.

For many, the advisor is one of the closest relationships students will develop with faculty. Advising is more than classes. It is listening to a student and to students in general, hearing their concerns, and communicating with them to empower them to take charge of their learning and their future.

More than any other discipline, geography represents the dynamically changing physical and human planet. But, faculty and academia have…a bit of a pace problem. If we want geography to continue and thrive, we must keep up. We may have to let go of our ideal traditional geography program and the way we have always advised students.

In exchange, we may find ourselves building rather than simply teaching. And…launching alumni into the world who can think critically, engage responsibly, connect synthetically, and question routinely.

In other words, they’ll become geographers.

But, there is no “they” out there who will do it for us. As one of my senior colleagues once told me,

We are the They.

I’d like to thank Dr. Leslie McLees for providing ideas for this column (particularly in the area of advising). Contact her if your department is interested in learning more about integrating professional development into your geography program or discussing the possibilities of supporting a strong undergraduate program. lmclees [at] uoregon [dot] edu

—Amy Lobben
AAG President and Professor at University of Oregon
lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0086

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

Robert Thomas Kuhlken

Robert Thomas Kuhlken, retired professor of geography and former geography department chair at Central Washington University, died on January 1, 2021. He was 67.

Kuhlken was a lifelong scholar, educator, and tireless observer of the natural world. He was more comfortable outdoors than in, and always eager to explore new terrain. He studied at the University of Virginia at Wise and Oregon State University and was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to study agricultural terracing in the Fiji Islands while earning his doctoral degree in geography from Louisiana State University.

His specialization in human geography and his focus on land management fit perfectly with his desire to learn and explore. He favored traveling via public transportation on excursions throughout Mexico, South America, Polynesia, New Zealand, and Europe to get an unfiltered view of the local culture.

Kuhlken brought the results of these travels to the classroom, sharing his firsthand experience with his students. He taught college geography for more than three decades, spending most of his career at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, where he retired in 2015 as professor emeritus in geography.

He taught thousands of students at CWU. Countless first-year students with little knowledge of the rest of the world were captivated by Kuhlken’s enthusiastic spirit of adventure, his colorful stories, and deep insights into human and physical landscapes across the globe.

Kuhlken also taught courses focused on cultural geography, Oceania and North America, and urban and regional planning. His planning courses drew, in part, on his nearly 10 years of experience as a professional planner in Oregon before beginning his academic career. Quite a few of his students have gone on to successful careers as planners themselves.

As a scholar, Kuhlken’s work emphasized cultural ecology, historical geography, and environmental literature. He co-authored A Rediscovered Frontier: Land Use and Resource Issues in the New West which Rowman & Littlefield published in 2006.

He also published on topics as varied as Pacific archeology, zydeco music, and arson. In more recent years, his passion for fishing led to new scholarship on the geography of recreational fishing and the sport of angling.

More than anything, Kuhlken loved to be outdoors with friends and family—hiking, fishing, sailing, biking, gardening or just feeding the birds in the backyard. In remembrance, please donate to the National Park of your choice.

He is survived by his wife, Cynthia McGill Kuhlken; his stepson, Jeff Acker; and his brothers William Kuhlken, Kevin Kuhlken, and Karl Kuhlken.

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