President's Column

In Denver and Beyond, Moving Toward More Just Geographies

March 10, 2023

Aerial view of downtown Denver with mountains in the background. Credit: CANUSA Touristik via denver.org

Our annual meeting is just around the corner, and I am excited. This is our first opportunity to meet in person since 2019, and AAG members are showing up! In March, more than four thousand geographers are going to descend on Denver, CO, the Mile High City, bringing with them the “spirit of Geography” More than fifteen hundred geographers will join remotely. Together, this means that well over 50% of our membership will be gathering to share research, ideas, and catch up, with one another for our largest gathering since 2020.

The theme of the meeting, Toward More Just Geographies, sprang from the ideas espoused in my nomination statement, back in 2020 when I talked about what we needed to do to create a stronger, more just AAG and discipline, and in the process, make Geography a force for positive social change. The heart of the theme is that the reality of a just geography is on the horizon, something that we must work towards, continually, but perhaps something that we never fully achieve. This is not setting us up for failure but a recognition that justice is not a finite, unchangeable thing, rather it is something that is constantly evolving towards an ideal. Hence, it’s towards a just geography. Member response to this theme has been heartwarmingly high — 471 of our 1,283 sessions are Just Geography themed.

Set against a backdrop of the numerous responses submitted to the appeal for member ideas on what a just geography means to them, the Presidential Plenary, scheduled for Friday, March 24 at 6:30 PM Mountain Time, is structured as a panel, featuring Tianna Bruno of UT-Austin, Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes of Pomona College, and Kelly Kay of UCLA. Our speakers will reflect on how we can approach a Just Geography in the tools that we use (GIS), in the framing of our research questions, and in our mentoring of students and early-career geographers. These reflections are not intended to represent the only ways in which we can approach a Just Geography, indeed, the member responses are rich with ideas on that subject.

Our intention is for these discussions to continue beyond the time allotted to the plenary and across all the days of the meeting. To facilitate this, AAG staff are creating at the meeting site, space where a curated set of the ideas discussed at the plenary as well as those contained within the member responses to the appeal are projected so that people could come in, sit or walk around and see the statements and spark conversations.

And there’s more! Beyond the immediate Presidential Plenary plans, in this meeting there are clear examples of the ways in which the AAG is moving towards a Just Geography. We are changing the way in which AAG’s conferences interact with the community, becoming less extractive while moving towards long- and short-term community engagement. This goes beyond the customary, popular offerings among our members to encourage mentoring, career development, and professional celebration and recognition. This year AAG also moves to connect with our host community, for example by once again offering a land acknowledgment on our website and during the meeting, and for the first time providing free registration to any member of the 48 tribes and nations with ancestral ties to the land defined by the state boundaries of Colorado. Several participants have taken up this offer. AAG works with and will make a monetary contribution to the work of the Denver Indian Family Resource Center (DIFRC), which works to protect the rights and serve the needs of Native American and Alaskan Native families in the Denver area. The DIFRC will also be on a panel of other Indigenous-led Denver advocacy groups on Friday, March 24 at 11:45 AM MT to discuss Denver as an Indigenous place. This session is co-sponsored by the Indigenous People’s Specialty Group.

The move towards justness is everywhere in AAG 2023’s programming. As noted above, one in three sessions is devoted to our theme of Toward a More Just Geography. A focus on just geographies is also a factor in our choice of honorees such as this year’s Honorary Geographer, Rebecca Solnit, who has worked conscientiously from an intersectional view of activism for climate action. AAG has given one of its highest recognitions to a person whose work arguably centers on justness. You can see Ms. Solnit alongside AAG members Farhana Sultana and Edward Carr on Saturday, March 25, at 10:20 AM MT, discussing the new book to which Sultana and Carr are contributors, Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Narrative from Despair to Hope. Ms. Solnit will deliver the Honorary Geographer lecture on Sunday, March 26, at 11:45 AM MT. Local independent bookseller Boulder Book Store will sell copies of Ms. Solnit’s books onsite for signings.

Reducing our carbon footprint: Working with AAG’s Climate Action Task Force, we are applying the lessons we’ve learned to a less carbon-intensive meeting this year. The past three years have forced us to become more adept at organizing the virtual experience and now we are learning how to manage a more travel-intensive experience while continuing to reduce our carbon footprint. This is in line with a key commitment made by the AAG in 2020 to estimate and report the carbon footprint of the annual meetings, using the baselines that were established then. Our goal is to reduce the carbon footprint of our meeting by 45% by 2030, relative to 2010 values. Our meeting in Denver is likely to be on track for meeting that goal, something that unfortunately, is not as likely with our planned meeting in Honolulu. As laid out by AAG executive director Gary Langham recently, this is another aspect of the work we have been doing, which includes divesting from fossil fuels as well as making sustainable choices for our management and office space.

This year, AAG is investing significant resources in making the Denver meeting hybrid, increasing accessibility to members. At a time that many other organizations are pivoting back to in-person-only meetings, AAG has made a commitment to continue to offer virtual and hybrid experiences so that presenters and participants could take part without traveling to Denver, thereby increasing accessibility to the meeting. AAG has worked with other institutions to test “nodes,” the most active of which will be at Montreal, but there are others forming in other locations, such as UC-Fullerton in California. The organizers of these nodes are trailblazing for future meetings; as technology improves and costs drop over the years, we can look forward to these approaches becoming the norm for AAG meetings. Find out more about this year’s nodes.

Personal choices also matter. AAG is encouraging our meeting participants to make low-carbon travel choices to attend the meeting, and low-carbon transportation choices on the ground. We encourage you to signal us about your travel decisions using the #AAG4Earth hashtag, or to reach out to us at helloworld@aag.org.

All of these steps towards making a meaningful and memorable meeting, while small individually, move us along the path towards a Just Geography.

Visit the AAG 2023 website to learn more, register, or plan your participation.

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 raphael [at] geog [dot] ucla [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

William “Bill” Koelsch

William “Bill” Koelsch, 89, professor emeritus of geography, retired University historian, and a longtime activist for LBGTQ rights, died on Nov. 5, 2022.

Koelsch, who established the modern Clark Archives, was well known on campus as the author of the highly regarded “Clark University, 1887-1987: A Narrative History,” a chronicle of Clark’s first 100 years, researched and written over five years and published to coincide with the University’s centennial celebration in 1987. The volume graces bookshelves across campus and remains an invaluable repository of Clark’s early history.

In a 2012 story in Clark magazine, Koelsch recalled that he convinced then-President Mortimer Appley to grant him some time off from teaching to craft the book, which he insisted would be a robust, accurate, and honest accounting of Clark’s past.

“Non-Clark people are more interested in the University’s early years, and Clark people tend not to know about them,” he said. “I tried to get the record reasonably straight about those years. It wasn’t a public relations piece — I attempted to call the shots as I saw them.”

Photo of William Koelsch in the stacks of Goddard Library at Clark University — William Koelsch in the stacks of Goddard Library, Clark University

Koelsch scoured the academic landscape for sources. According to the story, in the 1970s, he’d crossed the country looking for original manuscripts related to early Clark, conducted interviews with former faculty and administrators, and culled from the unpublished memoirs of former presidents Howard Jefferson and Appley.

“By the time I wrote, I was in a secure position against anyone who might want to squawk about something,” he remembered. “I can defend every sentence using the backup material.”

He earned a bachelor’s degree from Bucknell University (1955), a master’s from Clark (1959), and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1966), and served several years in the U.S. Army Transportation Corps. He joined Clark as an assistant professor of geography in 1967 and later became a tenured professor known for his incisiveness, erudition, and wit.

“Bill was my first adviser when I entered Clark. He was a walking encyclopedia, but not in an intimidating manner,” recalled Jeremy Tasch, Ph.D. ’06, professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Planning at Towson University. “My classmates and I valued his long list of chronological reference lists he shared in his class on the history of geographic thought — he introduced all of us to Clarence Glacken. Because of Bill, I went into Cambridge to find ‘Traces on the Rhodian Shore’ — we weren’t using Amazon in those days. He was kind and gracious, quietly knowledgeable, and ready to give his time.”

Clark Geography Professor Rinku Roy Chowdhury told the Worcester Telegram & Gazette that when she was pursuing her doctorate at Clark, she took a course with Professor Koelsch, who created a “welcoming and fun space in a really, really intense Ph.D. program and department,” allowing the students to “establish rapport and camaraderie, not just with the professor, but with each other.”

Koelsch, who retired in 1998, moved to San Diego, where he wrote more than 20 scholarly articles and essays, including articles about G. Stanley Hall and about the influence that Jonas Clark’s strong abolitionist beliefs had on the formation of Clark University. His book “Geography and the Classical World: Unearthing Historical Geography’s Forgotten Past” was published in 2012.

He also crafted many longhand, meticulously worded letters to friends and Clark associates over the years, often alerting them to his latest work or to approaching Clark-related milestones.

Koelsch made a memorable return to Clark in 2019 to speak at the invitation of the late Professor Robert Tobin, who had organized an exhibition titled “Queering Clark.” The retired professor recounted his personal experience as a member of the “silent generation” of gay men who came out later in life, recalling that he wrote columns for Boston’s Gay Community News under the pseudonym “A. Nolder Gay.”

In 1975, Koelsch began teaching a course at Clark on the gay liberation movement. In 1982, when the HIV/AIDS crisis was dawning, he incorporated information on the disease into the syllabus of his course Health and Disease in the American Habitat and spoke about HIV/AIDS to church groups.

In his return visit, Koelsch cited reasons for optimism about the future of gay rights in the U.S., noting with satisfaction that same-sex couples can now marry and an openly gay soldier can serve in the U.S. military. “I never expected to see either of those things in my lifetime,” he marveled.

Koelsch’s papers regarding his activism are in the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. An oral history of his Army service is online at the Library of Congress.

He is survived by his partner of over 50 years, William Dennison.

Provided by Jim Keogh, Clark University.

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President's Column

Reflections on the State of Geography

February 1, 2023

Photo of a female graduate wearing cap and gown holding out a rolled up diploma

Credit: Felipe Gregate for Unsplash

Over the last few weeks I have been reading the AAG’s recently released report on the State of Geography. The report observes trends in post-secondary geography education in the United States over the period 1986-2021. These include trends across degree categories, and growth trends among students from populations historically excluded from the discipline. By historically excluded populations, I mean people who have been racialized/minoritized and excluded due to systems of white supremacy. The report confirms some of the concerns about our field’s lack of diversity, offers signs of change, and leaves us with important questions about the nature and constraints of the data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Here I highlight what I think are some of the important takeaways from this report.

What it reveals

A quick overview of the trends shows that the number of geography degrees grew quickly from the 1990s through 2012, but since then, that number has steadily decreased due largely to a decline in bachelor’s degrees. By comparison, masters’ and doctorate degrees have continued to grow. This negative trend in undergraduate geography degree conferral since 2012 reflects a broader downward trend across social sciences, unlike in physical sciences where fields like atmospheric science and conservation are both growing strongly. This is noteworthy because these fields are often found within or combined with geography departments.

Comparative bar chart showing the growth in women graduates across physical sciences, relative to geography; from the AAG State of Geography report, 2022 — Growth in women graduates across physical sciences, relative to geography

While the number of degrees conferred has fluctuated over the years, the field itself remains predominantly male and white, although women are making inroads at the graduate level. The strength of this finding is undermined by the binary representation of gender in NCES’s and other scientific institutions’ data collection. When I use the term “women” on its own here, I’m referring to a data category and not to individual or collective gender identities that the data do not reflect. With that said, the data show that people reported as women remain underrepresented in geography studies. They do have higher representation in graduate studies (particularly PhDs) than in bachelor’s programs, and a higher rate of growth in PhDs than in master’s or bachelor’s degrees. They also show more consistent positive growth in degree conferral than people identified as men. Overall, besides anthropology and sociology, geography is similar to other social sciences in gender makeup, remaining mostly identified as male.

It is encouraging to see that students in historically excluded populations appear to count for most of the new growth in the discipline, especially at the graduate level. Since 1994, growth in the number of geography degree conferrals has more than doubled among this population, and people identifying as Hispanic or Latinx make up the most rapidly growing proportion at the bachelor’s degree level. Geography degrees are not conferred equitably at any level of the discipline. However, this population’s numbers have grown relative to the total number of combined geography degrees conferred. In fact, it appears that people from historically excluded populations are contributing to any growth that geography is experiencing. Despite this trend, representation in geography PhD degrees is similar to that of other higher education fields, lagging in bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Growth overall has not increased among African American, Native American, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander students in recent years.

What it does not reveal

The report gives a picture of the state of geography in the US but also raises questions about the data. The way in which the data were collected/organized limits what can be known. For example, the way the data are organized tends to sidestep intersectional understanding of the discipline and students’ paths through it. Separating out race and ethnicity from gender is a superficial exercise that does not reflect lived reality.

Interpretation of the data should consider that the emphasis on STEM education in the United States has coincided with a decline in social science and humanities majors. Did this affect students’ choice of a geography degree? Perhaps. Geography is not consistently considered a STEM field in US degree-giving institutions. Thus, the emphasis on STEM may mean that students seeking a science career might not major in geography at institutions where it is not considered STEM. Nonetheless, overall trends for master’s and PhD programs show us that geographers seem to be finding their way to the discipline after they earn other bachelor’s degrees.

We also know that the NCES data categories themselves have limitations, especially as geography is such an interdisciplinary field and so rapidly advancing in GIS and other technologies. Many geography programs, in fact, need to or decide to apply non-geography categories to courses and degree paths. In particular, it’s possible that many geography-related programs, (social sciences, environmental sciences, etc.) are reporting GIS degrees or those with heavy loads of GIS coursework under the Computer Science and IT code. The large number of GIS-centric programs in the new AAG Guide database, paired with relatively low numbers of cartography and GIScience degrees conferred, could be evidence of this.

Where to go from here

Studying degree conferrals alone gives us statistical insights that can create the foundation for understanding the discipline’s trends, but it also inspires more qualitative questions about how a geography program’s design, curriculum, approach to recruitment, and faculty/student support can contribute to attracting and retaining a wider variety of students. The AAG is aware of the need for data that have more comprehensive categories and go beyond the quantitative into factors that are more holistic. For example, the AAG is interested in pursuing data that will provide a more detailed picture of gender identities, racialized and ethnic identities, and the disciplinary experiences and conditions that students are encountering. Later this year we will be asking for the geography community’s input into these data. Please respond when you see the call.

I encourage you to read the Report.

I’d like to thank the AAG staff members who prepared the State of Geography report, notably Mikelle Benfield and Mark Revell, for their data analysis, visualizations, and insights.

President's Column

Toward More Just Geographies

December 14, 2022

Photo of large old tree with many healthy roots by Brandon Green for Unsplash

Credit: Brandon Green for Unsplash

The end of the calendar year can be a time to take stock, to renew one’s vision for the future and to make plans. For me, making plans implies hope, hope for a better, happier year. My plan for this year revolves around Just Geographies.

In the coming new year, I look forward to welcoming our members to our hybrid meeting in Denver this March, the first AAG event in three years to have a strong in-person component. Already, nearly 5,000 participants have registered: more than 1,000 sessions with about 4,500 presentations in all.

So far, at least half of all sessions at AAG 2023 will address the meeting theme, “Toward More Just Geographies.” My presidential plenary will kick off the discussion early in the meeting, and I am working with AAG to create a participatory approach to exploring what it can mean to create a “Just Geography.”

In preparing for the Plenary, I talked about this with some AAG members. We realized that a Just Geography is not simply a condition or place, but rather a goal towards which we should work. It is also not spatially or temporally fixed, nor is it something that we can achieve and then move on. Rather, a Just Geography sits on the near horizon, something we envision and can work to get close to, together.

Because each of us has different ideas about what justness means to us, a Just Geography cannot have a single definition. We need to put our ideas together to arrive at a more meaningful description of what is necessary to achieve justness.

I invite you to send to the AAG your thoughts about how to define and attain a Just Geography.

To this end, I invite you to send to the AAG your thoughts about how to define and attain a Just Geography. This could take many forms, from a couple of sentences, to a meaningful quote and citation, to a short poem, or a short paragraph. Since we have talented mappers and visualizers among us, we invite visualizations of all kinds. We would like your permission to project these different meanings of a Just Geography in the room where the Presidential Plenary is held in Denver, and to share virtually to meeting participants who join us online. We are also looking into setting up a conversation space for sharing these throughout the meeting, a place that also invites people to stay and talk with one another.

Through this work, we seek to share the many different and changing perspectives that each of you can bring to the question of a Just Geography. We would like to encourage the most diverse and meaningful dialogue around this question and its possibilities that we can.

Over the next few months, please send your thoughts on what a Just Geography means to you to helloworld@aag.org, or share on social media using the hashtag #JustGeographies.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0124

Careers

Program Profile: Salisbury University – GIS

October 20, 2022

GIS has been taught at Salisbury University since at least the early nineties, says Dr. Michael Scott, a graduate of the Department of Geography and Geosciences and now a professor in the department and dean of the Henson School of Science and Technology. Continuing the success of their GIS program, in 2007, the department expanded into graduate education with their M.S. in GIS Management (MSGISM).  

Photo of Andrea Presotto — Andrea Presotto

“We realized that our students were doing very well in terms of finding employment and working in the field,” said Dr. Andrea Presotto, director of the MSGISM. “But the organizations they worked for were not particularly strategic about managing their GIS implementations.”  

The new M.S. program was conceived as a combination MBA and GIS degree, to better equip students with the skillsets necessary to become not only effective GIS practitioners, but also address this gap in data management and become leaders in public administration, grant writing, enterprise operations management, and a host of other skills beyond the technical level. This outside-the-box thinking and response to employment realities have elevated the program to one of the most respected departments on campus. 

A Regional Approach

On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, agriculture, tourism, fisheries, residential and commercial development all face challenges in response to increasing climate change. The Department of Geography and Geosciences at Salisbury University has positioned itself as a big part of the solution for the communities in the region. In 2004, department faculty formed the Eastern Shore Regional GIS Cooperative (ESRGC), which Dr. Scott directs, to help organize the region’s small towns to pool their resources for much-needed GIS project support.  

“One small town doesn’t have the ability for a GIS staff to do data collection and analysis. If you put seven or eight little towns together, suddenly there are enough resources to hire somebody to actually get that done,” explains Scott.  

[Our students] are able to get this very intensive, on-the-job experience, but the only way that works, of course, is the ESRGC has to know that the quality of the students getting GIS education coming out of the department is great, because they’re going to put them right to work.”

—Michael Scott

An outreach unit of Salisbury University and joint effort between a collection of Maryland Eastern Shore regional councils and the university, the ESRGC has grown to include 10 full-time staff, nine of whom are alumni of the department. In good years, Scott estimates that the cooperative hires anywhere from 25 to 30 interns from the department, where they acquire the invaluable real-world experiences and skills needed to move directly into professional GIS positions, even before they graduate. 

“[Our students] are able to get this very intensive, on-the-job experience,” Salisbury University’s Dr. Michael Scott explains, “but the only way that works, of course, is the ESRGC has to know that the quality of the students getting GIS education coming out of the department is great, because they’re going to put them right to work.”

Photo of students in a Salisbury University GIS class demonstrating mapping on their computers — Photo courtesy Salisbury University

If you build it, they will come…

Students and alumni of the Department of Geography and Geosciences have earned an excellent reputation throughout the region, a credit to the dedication of the department’s faculty, and their student-centered approach. As Dr. Art Lembo, a professor in the department and Technical Director of the ESRGC explains, this starts with the physical building itself: 

“We requested the faculty offices be located in an off-hallway suite that allows our doors to be open all the time, so the students can better interact with the faculty. We made structural changes to accommodate better interaction, because it’s just in our DNA to give the students this kind of experience.” 

It trickles into [our students] bringing their friends, who can become majors as well.”

—Dr. Andrea Presotto

Dr. Dan Harris, a professor and chair of the department, notes that unlike other academic buildings on campus, which typically close at midnight, the Geography and Geosciences faculty years ago made a special request to the president of the university to allow the department lab to remain open 24 hours to provide students with the opportunity to be in the building at any time. This level of attention to detail concerning the physical learning space is representative of the student-first, innovative thinking that has set the program apart.  

“It trickles into [our students] bringing their friends, who can become majors as well,” Dr. Andrea Presotto, Geography and Geosciences professor at Salisbury University. 

“We have faculty who are really good at getting [undergraduate students] in for field courses, and we embed field experiences in their classes. It’s really important to show the students that it’s not just a discipline where we come in and lecture in a classroom, and you walk away and read a textbook. We actually want them to get out and see it,” says Dr. Dan Harris, department chair.

Resources

2022 White Paper on Locational Information and the Public Interest

September 26, 2022

In Denver and Beyond, Moving Toward More Just Geographies

William “Bill” Koelsch

Reflections on the State of Geography

What it reveals

What it does not reveal

Where to go from here

Toward More Just Geographies

Program Profile: Salisbury University – GIS

A Regional Approach

—Michael Scott

If you build it, they will come…

—Dr. Andrea Presotto

Great Plains Rocky Mountains Division 2022 Regional Meeting Program

2022 White Paper on Locational Information and the Public Interest