I grew up in the Chicago area, where we have an annual lakefront, summer music festival known as Lollapalooza, featuring an eclectic collection of genres and artists. This event is fun, experimental, inflected with regional traditions, and brimming with youthful, creative energy. More generically, lollapalooza refers to something extraordinary and a way I have come to think about our AAG regional meetings. This fall I had the pleasure of attending four AAG regional division meetings: Pacific Coast, Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, Southwest, and Middle States (see figure). These encounters have been tremendous opportunities for me to meet and learn from our members. Here I reflect on some broad themes across all of the meetings, as well as some key take home messages that I gleaned from each region.

Cutting across all of the regions, I was deeply impressed by the presence, energy and insights of geography students, both graduate and undergraduate. If you are ever feeling down about the headwinds facing our discipline, just spend time with our students and you will come away feeling inspired and optimistic about the future. From their scholarly endeavors shared in talks and posters, to their competitive zeal at geography bowls, to their willingness to engage in hallway conversations, I was captivated.  I also have even greater appreciation for the contributions of international students to our discipline (even beyond what I have written about previously). Their presence was notable in all of the regional meetings and they help ensure that a broad range of life experiences are brought to bear on the emerging research produced by our discipline.

I also continue to be struck by the limited presence of R1 faculty at many regional meetings. Of course, there are notable exceptions to this broader trend and I also understand that this is a not a new phenomenon. I further understand some of the reasons for this (and I am also guilty of such transgressions). Many faculty are stretched in terms of time and/or resources to attend a second or third academic conference. As such, they prioritize a national meeting where the largest number of people in their subfield are sharing their latest research findings. What is lost is stronger bonds between different types of institutions in a region as well as an opportunity for undergraduate and master’s level students to potentially meet a future advisor.

Beyond these broader themes, I was really struck by the individual character of each region and some unique lessons I learned in each place. The meeting of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers (APCG) took place at the College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, CA. There our outdoor barbecue on the second evening was graced by the presence of a dancing dinosaur (see Figure 2) and later that night a person in a gorilla costume briefly entered the auditorium for the keynote lecture (attesting to the fun and quirky ambiance of APCG meetings). More seriously, I was really struck by role that community colleges play in this region as a critical pipeline for future geographers (and something the discipline could build on more broadly). Some of the fastest growing geography programs in the region, such as San Diego State University, source many of their majors from surrounding community colleges. The APCG meeting also took place on a community college campus, College of the Canyons.

This year’s Great Plains Rocky Mountain (GPRM) regional meeting in Omaha, NE was a joint meeting with the National Council for Geographic Educations (NCGE), our sister organization that counts many high school geography teachers among its ranks. This innovative experiment of two meetings in the same place with some cross over events created a space for bridges to be built between the parallel universes of high school and college geographers. It allowed myself and two members of the AAG taskforce on geography undergraduate education to run a workshop on the high school-to-college geography pipeline for secondary school teachers and university instructors, to speak to a mixed audience at an evening banquet, and to have dinner with the leadership of the NCGE. I could see the NCGE meeting joining with other regions in the future and I believe we could do even more to bring college faculty and high school teachers together.

The meeting of the Southwest Division of the AAG (SWAAG) took place in Las Cruces, New Mexico and was hosted by New Mexico State University. In addition to a keynote address, I participated in several panel discussions, including one on academic freedom. There I learned of state government initiatives in Texas and Oklahoma to audit course syllabi and reading lists. I further came to understand that certain words and topics are being advised against in course titles, such as decolonizing, liberation and resistance. This situation is alarming to me both personally and professionally (e.g., I have publications using several of these ‘trigger’ words). More significantly, maintaining academic freedom is a core value of the AAG and something it fights for on the national level. Nonetheless, at this regional meeting, I was deeply impressed by the way faculty were sharing experiences and advice on how to navigate such challenging circumstances. It also served as a reminder that our local experiences of speech suppression, censorship or freedom can vary greatly (and we need to be sensitive to the fact that the actions and decisions of the AAG might play out differently across regional contexts).

Lastly, the Middle States Division of the AAG (MSAAG) met at Montclair State University in Montclair, NJ. There I was impressed by the presence of deeply engaged high school teachers and their students, many of whom presented research posters. The quality of their research was striking and I believe this is an innovation that could be experimented with in other regions. What could be a better recruitment tool than to have high school students attend research presentations by grad students, or to have a professor engage with a high schooler about their project and encourage them to think about a geography degree in college.

My journey across these events left me feeling inspired by the energy and insights of our students, encouraged by the experimentation in each division, and better in-touch with political currents and challenges. This is not to say the fall AAG regional meetings are flawless, some suffer from low attendance or limited organization, but I see these as vital encounters to be improved up, not dismissed or marginalized. Fortunately, the support of AAG staff for the regions has begun to bear fruit, building on the recommendations of an AAG task force report released on the topic some five years ago. Just like a summer music festival, these are fun spaces to experience the diversity, energy and creativity of our discipline.

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 [email protected] to enable a constructive discussion.

Free speech and academic freedom are increasingly under siege in the United States, with the scope and scale of speech repression nearly unprecedented. At the same time, the U.S. government is currently engaged in a vast array of domestic and foreign policy shifts, from changes in environmental regulations and naming conventions at home, to the closing of USAID operations and retreat from multilateralism abroad. Despite efforts to silence critics, these policy and program shifts deserve thoughtful public conversations that involve geographers. We need geographers as public intellectuals to continue to voice their perspective on the policies and programs of our government and others.

The tradition of the public intellectual (a form of public geography) may be contrasted with that of the ivory tower academic. Public intellectuals are scholars who take the time to address an important public debate or policy issue when they have relevant expertise and an informed perspective to offer. The public intellectual practice is more well developed in Europe, where academics regularly participate in policy discussions and are considered normal actors in public discourse. In fact, many European universities expect their faculty to comment on public issues and acknowledge this is in tenure and promotion criteria. In contrast, this practice is less well developed in the United States, with such engagement sometimes viewed as inappropriate. This distance between the American academy and public policy discussions has contributed to the ivory tower phenomenon, arguably making it more challenging for the U.S. public to feel connected to universities, their faculty and students.

To the extent that academics do participate in public policy discussions in the U.S., some disciplines tend to be over-represented, most notably economics and political science. That said, analysis that a student and I undertook over a decade ago showed that for a small discipline, geography was punching above its weight, outpacing allied disciplines such as anthropology, geology, and biology in terms of op-ed productivity per member. The geographic perspective is critical for adding to public policy discussions, be it in terms of nuance regarding spatial patterns, scale, coupled-human-environment systems or deep regional knowledge. As former AAG president Alec Murphy has argued: “our understanding of issues and problems will be impoverished if geographical perspectives are not part of the mix.”

The AAG considers the support of free speech and academic freedom to be core to its mission and has offered programming to this end. For example, in 2023, the AAG initiated the Elevate the Discipline cohort of 15 geographers to receive year-long support and training in techniques for public scholarship to inform public policy. In late October of this year, the AAG hosted a panel for department and program chairs seeking to support their faculty in terms of academic freedom. Furthermore, I am happy to report that we still have many geographers who continue to offer their perspectives on the issues of the day. Herewith three examples.

In early October, Christopher F. Meindl, associate professor of geography at the University of South Florida, published a commentary entitled “Florida’s 1,100 natural springs are under threat — a geographer explains how to restore them.” In this piece, Meindl drew on his own research as a human-environment geographer, and recent book on Florida springs, to provide context and recommendations for restoring these important natural assets.

Second, while we often think of public scholarship appearing in the form of commentaries, some geographers also write books that are more accessible to a public audience. A good example of this is Yolonda Youngs’ recent book, Framing Nature, about the social construction of nature in Grand Canyon National Park. Hearing Youngs present on her book at the recent meeting of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, I appreciated how she explained deliberately writing the book for a public audience, even tearing up portions of a previous draft and re-writing it in a way that would be more accessible.

Lastly, geographer and cartographer Margaret Wickens Pearce was recently recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (aka genius award) for her groundbreaking work “creating maps that foreground Indigenous Peoples’ understanding of land and place.” Her approach highlights another form of public scholarship, working respectfully with communities to bring their perspectives into conversation with broader publics. As a Potawatomi Nation tribal member, Pearce was well positioned to undertake this work.

Today, we need the geographer as public intellectual more than ever. Engaging in this manner requires a certain amount of backbone and privilege, the ability to write for broader publics, and good timing.

Writing for a general audience has always required some willingness to endure negative feedback. Now we have an added layer of hostility and professional risk to anything perceived as critical. In mid-September, the U.S. president argued that television coverage that is critical of him or his administration’s policies is illegal (a point that was unsubstantiated and challenged). Several academics, including geographers, have also lost their jobs or been put on administrative leave for comments they made on social media following Charlie Kirk’s murder. While the climate of fear these comments and actions have engendered is palpable, and some members of our community are in more precarious positions than others, now is not the time for those in privileged positions to be silent.

The unfortunate reality is that tenured and U.S.-born professors in blue states are often in less precarious positions than others. As such, at this time I would especially encourage those with privilege to contribute as public intellectuals where appropriate. When writing, it is always important to stick to positions and perspectives that are informed by one’s scholarship. Doing so makes one’s arguments more defensible.

Writing for broader publics is also quite different than writing for academic audiences. While we generally learn to write for academic audiences as graduate students, most of us are not taught to write for non-specialists. Writing for a general audience is a skill that needs to be developed. As mentioned previously, the AAG’s “Elevate the Discipline” program offered media and advocacy training to a group of geographers working on climate change and society. Some departments and faculty members have also been more proactive than others in mentoring and collaborating with students in this approach to writing. For example, former AAG president Derek Alderman, as well as Jordan Brasher, worked alongside Ph.D. candidate Seth Kannar, who was first author on a 2025 commentary for The Conversation entitled “From Greenland to Fort Bragg, America is caught in a name game where place names become political tools.” This was no doubt a valuable experience for an early career geographer, showing that it is possible to make connections between our research and current policy discussions.

Lastly, unlike most academic articles, the timing of many (but not all) commentaries is critical so they dovetail with the news cycle. This is challenging for many academics, as it means dropping what you are doing and writing something quickly so that it is relevant to a burning, public debate. Reporters may also call for background information or perspective on an issue, and one needs to set aside their current work to think through a thoughtful response. Even more challenging are live media interviews on radio or television. A good example of this is former AAG president Glen MacDonald who was interviewed widely by major news outlets, including on the nightly news in 2018 in L.A. about the Camp Fire ravaging the state at that time. This is hard but important work, and geographers almost always add critical depth and perspective to the conversation.

While academic freedom is under siege in the United States today, we now need geographers as public intellectuals more than ever. Fear is a powerful weapon and those in less precarious positions need to push back in support of a robust civil society and the power of the fourth and fifth estates. In so doing, geographers bring valuable perspectives to the debate, bridge the gap between academia and the public, and demonstrate the vitality and relevance of our discipline.

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 [email protected] to enable a constructive discussion.