The views and opinions expressed in op-eds published in the AAG Newsletter are those of the author(s) and do not imply endorsement by the American Association of Geographers. The AAG accepts submissions of op-eds for AAG news content consideration. Authors must be current AAG members. The decision to publish op-eds is at the discretion of the AAG with consideration of how the topic contributes to relevant and important discussions among and interests of the AAG membership community. Questions or submissions can be sent to efekete [at] aag [dot] org.
I was a thief. A mild thief, but a thief nonetheless. In 1996, the Binghamton Geomorphology Symposium held a series of talks on the topic of “The Scientific Nature of Geomorphology.” As a young 23-year old graduate student, I registered and then covertly audio-recorded the talks from a cassette recorder hidden in my jacket pocket. Even though it wasn’t stated explicitly, I guessed that doing this would probably constitute theft of intellectual property. But I did it anyway.
I did it because I had no intention of using the recordings other than for my own private education, which I felt I had paid for when I paid my registration fee. I wasn’t going to scoop the speakers on some published content, and I wasn’t going to give out the recordings to friends. I knew that the content of the talks would be new to me, complex, and that I wouldn’t understand everything the first time I listened, and that it was material I wanted to master as I worked towards a “Doctor of Philosophy.”
The recordings were horrible quality, but they were adequate. I could hear to the degree necessary to be able to listen over and over and gradually understand what was being communicated. I had purchased the symposium special issue, so I had many of the figures to go with the talks. I also had the luxury of being a very fast note-taker and figure-drawer, a luxury many lack. Like many presentations, the talks were far more informal as compared with the written articles. It was the audio tapes I understood far more readily. Today, I am often asked to teach classes and address groups on philosophical issues subjects raised in that symposium. My theft was worth it.
Today, every major association that my students and I frequent has banned recordings of any kind at their meetings – the AAG, AGU, EGU, and others. These bans exist for many reasons – to protect presenters’ intellectual property, to foster a “safe” environment where researchers can present new ideas, to encourage people to come to (and pay registration to) meetings, and others. These are noble and justifiable reasons, and I am not surprised by them.
But these bans are problematic. First, they seem to be becoming increasingly futile. Technology that nearly every attendee carries in their pocket can record hours of audio and video. Many people, in spite of the bans, are involved in some aspect of recording – taking pictures of slides or posters, videorecording talks, or whatever. Not one or two people here and there, but a huge number of people. For every person asked to stop a recording, ten seem to spring up. Sometimes the price of being caught is to be publicly told to stop. Rarely, it is to be cast out of the conference.
Second, a generation is entering the profession that have been required to take fewer notes, and instead have been given pre-made educational materials to a larger degree. They are asking to be able to record lectures on campus, thus they wonder: why shouldn’t they be able to do so at a conference? Some are able to process and record presentations much better than others (especially those for whom English is not a first language), why should they not get further opportunities to understand what is being presented?
Third, there appear to be partially conflicting ideas of the purposes of a conference. Rather than simply being a safe forum for trying out new ideas, associations are making increasingly vocal calls for these conferences to be visible public forums. Major lectures are publicized in the press. Science journalists report findings from the conferences. The development of e-posters, live tweeting, and other alternative modes of delivery seem to be reaching towards maximum visibility of the presentations. Anyone can pay to enter and hear any presentation they wish. If ten people tweet reactions to parts of a particular talk, how much intellectual property has been “given away”? Moreover, these presentations (or, at least their abstracts) are citable. On a related note, I can’t guess how many times I have heard in conversation from junior and senior researchers alike: “I really wish we had a recording of Professor M giving that pivotal talk from way back when.” If that is really what we want, why do we ban doing so?
Fourth, a revolution of open access, data, and publication is underway. The incoming generation of scholars perhaps is more knowledgeable and comfortable with the idea that results from publicly-funded projects are not completely “their own,” and that sharing of data and ideas is a basic expectation. Interim reports are still shared, usually with the proviso that they should be treated as draft reports. Are not conference presentations a type of draft report?
The argument of intellectual property protection as the basis of these recording bans is important, and I do not advocate wholesale recording and distribution of every conference talk. But I’d like to offer an alternative to these total bans. I think that it should be up to each individual presenter to decide whether they would like to allow recording of their talks, posters, and other modes of communication. It seems reasonable to me that at the beginning of a talk a speaker might say “these results are too preliminary for me to feel comfortable with their being recorded,” or “the research is to the point where you may record for your own personal use.” In the cases where presenters are comfortable with the audience-made recordings, it might be with the proviso that this privilege comes from a mutual understanding that the recordings or materials derived from them would not be shared or circulated.
I welcome discussion on this topic. Whether the bans stay or are modified, one thing is for sure – there will be those audience members who decide that the benefits of recording will outweigh the risks of being caught doing so.
For information about current AAG Annual Meeting policies, including the use of video or recording technology, please visit the Annual Meeting Guidelines web page.
As educators, we are always faced with challenges on how we structure our curriculum activities to ensure that we are in line with modern industry practices. This is easier said than done—for one, there is likely no consensus on what a “modern geographic information system (GIS)” means; and two, it takes a tremendous amount of time to do curricula updates. As an instructor of a variety of courses on Web GIS, programming, and spatial analytics at Johns Hopkins University, I am relentlessly faced with course updates. However, my being a Solutions Engineer at Esri as well provides me with a unique perspective into the technology and helps me stay focused on what is important in the geospatial industry.
What will the next generation GIS curriculum look like? We may call it Web GIS or something else, but we will have to address the need for this forward-looking curriculum and embrace it as educators. GIS graduates are telling us this, as seen in this Esri Young Professionals Network (YPN) survey.
Below is an attempt to outline a few important topics amid the massive digital transformation we have experienced. For now, these topics are meant to serve as points of discussion—a means for self-assessment and reflection—to make us think about what we teach today and what tomorrow will bring. Yes, it is a bit IT heavy, but in today’s GIS environment, IT is much needed. These topics come from feedback we received from students and graduates, who pointed out that we may not be placing a strong enough emphasis on the software and application development competency of the Geospatial Technology Competency Model (GTCM).
GIS Today—GIS is not just a desktop technology anymore. We need to think about the trends that have influenced GIS evolution, such as cloud computing, mobile devices, big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), and machine learning. An important point to discuss here is the use of the technology to solve problems as well as facilitate access to information—anywhere, anytime, on any device.
GIS as a Service—The industry is shifting rapidly from specific software implementations to services in which the underlying technology is less visible–and probably less important—to the user of this technology. While the enterprise deployments providing some of these services will be important to understand, we probably need not focus on that in these early stages. Information products are fueled by services—ready-to-use services or those we can create—and there are different protocols and capabilities we can expose through these services, which would be important concepts to discuss. Understanding the notion of hosting, whether through the cloud or on-premises infrastructure, and demonstrating how GIS is web-oriented architecture (without necessarily calling it that) are key.
GIS in Your Apps—People use simple, focused apps to access information at home, and this same trend is now in the workplace. The industry is moving away from long development cycles to the use of apps that are easily configured, which allows organizations to stay current with technology. How people experience GIS through apps that are ready to use, configurable, native, web based, etc., also emphasizes the notion that information can be made available in many possible ways to those who need it. These apps are fueled by underlying maps, layers, and services provided by server technology, to which access is facilitated through a portal. Access, of course, could be dictated by identity and credentials.
GIS APIs and SDKs—GIS, as an information system, is built with SDKs and APIs. As GIS has become embedded into all aspects of business, the need for developers has grown. Understanding that GIS capabilities can be extended and having knowledge and experience with software libraries, APIs, and SDKs will afford students opportunities to grow into their careers. Graduates have expressed a strong desire and employers have expressed a strong need for this programming knowledge, whether it is Python, JavaScript, or any other language that emerges in the future.
GIS in Your IT—This also falls under the “software and application development” competency of the GTCM, specifically, to design a geospatial system architecture that responds to user needs, including desktop, server, and mobile applications. Understanding what it means to architect and manage a GIS, using an organization’s infrastructure, whether in the cloud or on-premises, is a must. The focus is on the management of the networks, portals, map servers, web servers, databases, and data stores and on the understanding of how these components work together. Graduates entering today’s workforce will be needing these skills.
GIS in the Field—Organizations are employing field GIS workflows, whether through crowdsourcing, citizen science, secure data collection, or maintenance. Content can be delivered in many ways in the field, such as via a public-facing, highly available app or by supporting an internal-facing, intermittently connected, field collection app. Teaching a variety of approaches is important.
More Types of Services—Other services provide additional capabilities—whether through client- and server-rendered services or by simply enabling users to access specific functionality, such as real-time GIS capabilities, to solve a problem.
GIS as Geospatial Data Science—Careers that include data science are expanding. Geospatial technology curricula ought to better mesh with data science/analytics curricula, infusing traditional geospatial technology topics with data science methods. This should include big data analytics platforms/databases, machine learning, Python and R data scientific libraries, business intelligence (BI) technologies, NoSQL databases, and mapping APIs. A program might promote these as data analytics, data engineering, machine learning, artificial intelligence, or in other ways.
And, of course, one should not neglect traditional topics, such as mapping and visualization, spatial analytics, and data management, being infused with the above.
Now how do we learn and how do we teach GIS? GIS is a changing field, and change is accelerating. Transformation is occurring not just in the curriculum but also in how we learn, the resources we use to teach, and pedagogic approaches. The way one learns GIS in class should probably equate with how one learns it in the workplace. We ought to be considering a shift in the traditional resources we’ve used so far in our classrooms; a single book that covers a whole class may not be enough anymore. Also, a book that was written six months ago may likely be outdated.
Modernized Curriculum → Shift in Resources Used and Pedagogy
Classes need to be agile, which means that writing and following cookbook exercises are not sustainable ways to teach rapidly changing technology. The Internet and the wealth of information available provide ways for users to find answers fast. Relying on recently updated online documentation, blogs, and other freely available web-based resources and channels is key.
An important concern persists, though—how do we know what information is good to include (i.e., truly current and worthy material)? There is a lot of information to weed out. “Less is more” is a generally appropriate approach; when in doubt, leave it out. A less desirable approach is a disclaimer of “keep in mind that . . . ” or “use at your own discretion.” In the workplace, students will also come across a staggering amount of information, so it is important to learn how to discern what is quality content (with guidance, if need be) and applicable to solving a problem.
At Johns Hopkins, we follow some of the above approaches to keep content current and foster a culture of collaboration and peer-to-peer interaction among students, which, in turn, encourages community building; this is particularly important for fully online courses. As an instructor, standing back, observing, and providing guidance before things go off track, and challenging students to take more responsibility for their learning when solving a problem, has worked well.
There certainly are many other approaches to handling some of the challenges in teaching modern GIS. The AAG Annual Meeting and the Education Summit @ Esri User Conference (Esri UC) sessions on “Modern GIS Practices in Your Curriculum,” along with various other online tools such as GeoNet or Esri’s HIGHERED-L LISTSERV, could be great venues for continuing this discussion.
Louisiana’s Turn to Mass Incarceration: The Building of a Carceral State
Louisiana’s prison and jail incarceration rates from 1978 to 2015 showing the number of people incarcerated in state prisons and local jails per 100,000 people; https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/jailsovertime.html#methodology
The history of the Louisiana penal system is marked through crisis. For the majority of the 20th century such crises revolved around the state’s singular prison, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly referred to as Angola. Having long been known as the “bloodiest prison in the nation,” the prison entered into an unmatched crisis of legitimacy in the 1970s. Conditions were wretched and stabbings and escapes were monthly affairs.[1] Within this climate, scores of incarcerated people filed lawsuits against the penitentiary. In 1975, U.S. Magistrate Frank Polozola found in favor of four Black prisoners at Angola, Arthur Mitchell Jr., Hayes Williams, Lee E. Stevenson, and Lazarus D. Joseph, who had filed a lawsuit against Angola in 1971 for numerous constitutional issues including medical neglect, unsafe facilities, religious discrimination, racial segregation, and overcrowding. Polozola declared the penitentiary to be in a state of “extreme public emergency.”[2] Massive changes were ordered in the name of restoring incarcerated people’s constitutional rights.[3] For the next several years, the Louisiana penal system, including parish jails, were under the jurisdiction of federal court orders.
Map of Louisiana State Penitentiary-Angola, Creative Commons
While many issues were brought to the forefront through this legal ruling, overcrowding became the central issue for the Department of Corrections (DOC) and the broader state. The federal courts ordered that Angola’s prison population be reduced from over 4,000 prisoners to 2,641 prisoners within a few months time.[4] In response, the DOC advocated for the “decentralization” of Angola through creating small rehabilitation focused prisons and the potential for shuttering Angola altogether. With time at a premium, the DOC scrambled to find and convert a wide range of surplus state property from schools, to hospitals, to even a decommissioned navy ship into new prisons.[5] Recent infusions of federal funds in the form of Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) grants and the exponential increase in state revenues do to the global jump in oil prices following the 1973 OPEC price hike meant that funding such conversions was of little concern to the state. However, the DOC had extreme difficulty in attaining the support of local residents who routinely protested new prison plans.[6] Mobilized via fears of “dangerous criminals” that they believed would not only make their communities unsafe but would also lower their property taxes, communities from Caddo Parish to Bossier City to New Orleans East were successful in keeping out new satellite prisons.[7] At the same time, parish jails throughout Louisiana entered into their own state of emergency as they were forced to accommodate the hundreds of prisoners prohibited from being transferred to Angola inciting anger in local sheriffs statewide.[8] In response to these challenges, DOC Secretary Elayn Hunt and Angola Warden C. Paul Phelps, who had long been concerned with the rise of “lifers” at Angola, joined the call led by Angola’s incarcerated activists for a different solution to the overcrowding crisis: the early release of prisoners.[9]
Harry Connick Campaign Ad 1973, The Times-Picayune
However, the New Orleans D.A. Harry Connick was adamantly against such proposals. At the time, Connick was in the process of building his career upon the racialized tough on crime politics sweeping the nation. He routinely attacked DOC officials in the press for advocating early release and alternatives to incarceration.[10] In fact, in the same months the federal court orders were coming down, he successfully pushed for more punitive policies and practices through working with the NOPD to attain LEAA grants to expand policing powers.[11] In addition, he personally drafted dozens of draconian crime bills that instituted mandatory sentencing and reduced good time and parole eligibility, which the increasingly law and order state legislature was more than happy to pass.[12] With arrest rates going up,[13] sentencing becoming harsher and the number of people being paroled steadily dropping, overcrowding pressure intensified across the state.[14] Thus, Louisiana was confronted with a range of different pushes and pulls, from federal court rulings, to parish level politics, to active disagreement among state and city officials, to global political economic realignments and new federal monies, as state leaders attempted to figure out the future direction of the penal system.
By the decade’s end, it was clear that Louisiana’s politicians were attempting to build their way out of the overcrowding crisis. Three new prisons had been built with more on the way and thousands of new beds were added to Angola more than doubling the state’s prison population from 3,550 people in 1975 to 8,661 people in 1980.[15] This unprecedented carceral state building project was emboldened and buttressed by the 1980 election of David Treen to governor who had explicitly campaigned on a tough on crime platform and by Polozola, now a federal judge, who began to mandate that Louisiana deal with its continual overcrowding crisis through expanding the prison system.[16] Yet, as incarcerated activists with The Angolite and the Lifers Association as well as free world prison reformers argued at the time, growing the state’s carceral apparatus did not solve the crisis but propelled further overcrowding.[17] The ongoing overcrowding at the prisons further increased pressure on dozens of parish jails as they were yet again, relied on to house thousands of state prisoners, leading to overflowing jails from New Orleans to Lafayette.[18] In the case of New Orleans, the situation became so dire that in the summer of 1983 then Sheriff Foti erected a tent jail in the face of overcrowding at the city jail, Orleans Parish Prison (OPP).[19]
Editorial cartoon; Sept. 24, 1989, from the Times-Picayune
While sheriffs everywhere were frustrated by this situation, their response to such overcrowding was markedly different in the early 1980s than it had been in the mid-1970s. When parish jails had filled to capacity in response to the 1975 court orders, sheriffs lobbied to get state prisoners out of their jails.[20] But only a few years later, while sheriffs collectively petitioned the state to get so-called “violent offenders” out of their jails they also pushed for funds to renovate and expand the parish jails to make space for both folks awaiting trial as well as state prisoners.[21] We can understand this shift from a number of vantage points. While in 1975 the overcrowding crisis appeared to be temporary, by the early 1980s there was no sign of incarceration rates letting up as Governor Treen and the state legislature continued to press for the passage punitive crime bills. In addition, when parish officials had been compelled to release people to stay within the population limits set by Judge Polozola, the media attacked them for letting “criminals” loose into the streets.[22] With both politicians and the media employing such fear-mongering tactics, political will was on the side of jail expansion versus early release or alternatives to incarceration as a solution to the overcrowding. In fact, Governor Treen’s decision to prioritize jail construction over education, healthcare, and levees in the state budget was “not out of a desire to make life easier for these convicts but to make sure that no judge feels compelled to release somebody back into society who should not be there just because prisons are overcrowded.”[23] And indeed, as the Louisiana Coalition on Jails and Prisons would highlight in their decarceration campaigns throughout the 1980s, the atrocious conditions within jails persisted alongside their shiny new renovations.[24]
Sheriffs’ desires to build up their parish jails aligned not only with the dominant law and order politics of racial neoliberal governance, but also with the economic conditions confronted by the state. When sheriffs were first required to take in state prisoners in 1975 it was a financial burden since the DOC was paying sheriff departments a per diem rate of only $4.50/day per prisoner.[25] But as the overcrowding crisis wore on, local parish officials, including sheriffs, successfully petitioned the state to increase the per diem to $18.25 by 1980.[26] The higher per diem rate made sheriffs much more amenable to housing state prisoners as they were able to use the funds to build out their departments’ carceral infrastructure. Sheriffs throughout the state leveraged such jail growth to expand their political power both within their own parishes and through the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association.
What’s more is this per diem system met the financial needs of the broader state as well. Since the Jim Crow regime, the state had been loathe to finance the penal system.[27] To meet mandates of the federal courts, the state was required to increase funding to the Department of Corrections on an unmatched scale. The DOC budget during this time shot up from $20 million in 1974 to $135 million by 1982 with tens of millions of dollars spent on new prison construction which, as previously mentioned, was easily funded for the first several years through unexpected oil revenues.[28] Yet as oil dependent economies are notoriously precarious, Louisiana entered into a fiscal crisis in the early 1980s in response to the global oil slump.[29] With the state’s fiscal crisis and accompanied economic recession deepening throughout the 1980s, state officials sought new solutions for maintaining carceral growth. While state officials turned to debt-financing for new carceral construction, the state’s inability to cover prison operating costs with such debt schemes put the state in a conundrum. Although prisoners and decarceration activists offered the solution of the state curtailing law and order politics and instituting mass parole as other states had in similar situations, Louisiana turned to upping its reliance on the parish jail system as a more politically and financially viable option. [30] As the per diem rate was much lower than the costs of keeping prisoners incarcerated in state prisons, the state forged ahead with creating multi-decade cooperation endeavor agreements between the Department of Corrections and a slew of primarily rural parishes to house the lion’s share of state prisoners. What had started out as a temporary spatial fix had become the long-term geographic solution to prison overcrowding.
By the time Louisiana gained the title of having the highest incarceration rate in the nation in the late 1990s, almost half of the state’s prisoners were behind bars in parish jails with New Orleans’ OPP at 7,000 plus beds, the largest carceral facility in the state.[31] Although when the jail was first enlarged to this mammoth size, its jail population had stabilized to around 5,000. Yet only five years later, the jail was at capacity. Three thousand of those locked away were state prisoners while a combination of people awaiting trial who could not afford to pay exorbitant bail bonds, individuals serving municipal offenses, a growing number of juveniles, and INS immigrant prisoners held through federal contracts filled the remaining 4,000 beds. Many of those held behind OPP’s walls at Tulane and Broad avenues were targets of intensified policing crackdowns during the 1990s. Although officially most crime was in decline during the 1990s in New Orleans, the escalation of fear-based, racially-coded news media made controlling the city’s supposed lawlessness a priority for city leaders who were concerned about the negative impacts of such reporting on the tourist economy.[32] Under the administration of Mayor Marc Morial and his Police Superintendent Richard Pennington, the NOPD implemented a form of “community policing” to saturate the city’s housing projects, the French Quarter, and Downtown Development District with law enforcement.[33] This spatial strategy for law enforcement illuminated the interlaced primacy of “sanitizing” the city’s tourist epicenters of the homeless, youth, queer and trans people, and sex workers as well as containing and controlling Black working class spaces. Such policing tactics served to fill OPP to the brim by the time Hurricane Katrina made landfall in the Crescent City on August 29, 2005 and prisoners were abandoned by the state to flooded cells.[34]
In the dozen years since the levee breaks, attention has finally begun to be given to the crisis of mass incarceration in Louisiana. The sustained community organizing of the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition (OPPRC) successfully campaigned for OPP to be rebuilt on the much smaller scale of 1438 beds in 2010 while the creation of the Independent Police Monitor’s Office and the Department of Justice’s implementation of a consent decree on the NOPD has tempered police misconduct.[35] This past summer organizations such as VOTE (Voice of the Experienced) were successful in getting the state legislature to pass ban the box legislation and raising the age that juveniles can be tried as adults.[36]
French Quarter Security Task Force vehicle; photo by Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, 2017
However, these local gains have never been final victories. Public defenders in Louisiana continue to be woefully underfunded. The current New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu has been pushing a law and order surveillance plan for the city while the New Orleans city council is bending towards the will of Sheriff Marlin Gusman that the city needs to raise the jail cap for a “Phase Three” of construction at OPP.[37] Several front-runners in the upcoming mayoral and city council elections are following old tough on crime scripts in making expanding the NOPD the number one piece of their political platform. The current Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry recently sent his own rogue band of state troopers to police New Orleans and has been working with AG Jeff Sessions to repeal the consent decree governing the NOPD.[38] AAG attendees are likely to catch a glimpse of the French Quarter Management District’s private security vehicles that work in alliance with the NOPD and state troopers. Their explicit mandate from the French Quarter business leaders is to crack down on perceived sex workers, transgender individuals, street musicians, and others they deem “undesirable” to the imperatives of racial capital.
While the future of the Louisiana carceral state remains uncertain, it is clear that understanding the multiscalar factors that have produced the current crisis of mass incarceration is a critical starting point to undoing this systematic violence and striving towards the still unrealized project of abolition democracy.
[1] “State Prison Inmate Slain in Stabbing,” State Times (Baton Rouge, LA), July 18, 1974, 9-A.
[2] Williams v. McKeithan C.A 71-98 (M.D.La, 1975), US Magistrate Special Report; Gibbs Adams, “Federal Court Orders State Prison Changes,” The Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA), April 29, 1975. Judge West backed up Polozola in ordering sweeping changes. However, it is worth noting that Polozola had nothing to say about one of the plaintiffs main complaints: solitary confinement. “4 Inmates Ask Changes in Pen Safety Reform Plan,” State Times (Baton Rouge, LA), May 6, 1975.
[3] Williams v. McKeithan C.A 71-98 (M.D.La, 1975), Judgement and Order.
[4]Louisiana Prison System Study, 29, Governor’s Office Long Range Prison Study Files, 1972-1980, Box 1, Louisiana State Archives.
[5] C.M. Hargroder, “7 Prison Sites Proposed,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), September 16, 1975; “World War II Troopship May Be Used As Floating Louisiana Prison,” Monroe Morning World (Monroe, LA), October 26, 1975.
[6]“Executive Budget 1974-1975, Vol. 1,” Box 1: Executive Budget 1975-1980, State Budget Reports 1970-1989, Louisiana State Archives (LSA); “State of Louisiana Budget Fiscal Year 1974-1975,” Box 3, State Budget Reports 1970-1989, LSA; “State of Louisiana Budget Fiscal Year 1975-1976,” Box 3, State Budget Reports 1970-1989, LSA.
[7] Bonnie Davis, “Residents Will Protest Use of Carver School as Prison,” Shreveport Times (Shreveport, LA), July 24, 1975; Lynn Stewart, “State May Seize Site in Caddo for Prison,” Shreveport Times (Shreveport, LA), August 19, 1975; “Bossier Prison Site Reported Ruled Out,” Morning Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA), March 19, 1976; Richard Boyd, “Council Vows to Fight East N.O. Prison Facility” States Item (New Orleans, LA), April 23, 1976; Patricia Gorman, “Homes Closed to Inmates” States Item (New Orleans, LA), April 30, 1976.
[8] Roy Reed, “Louisiana’s Jails Are Being Packed,” New York Times (New York, New York), September 18, 1975; Pierre V. DeGruy, “ ‘State of Emergency’ at Parish Jail—Foti, “The Times Picayune (New Orleans, LA), October 16, 1975.
[9] “Two Year Time Limit Termed Impossible for Angola Changes,” State Times (Baton Rouge, LA), June 17, 1975; Tommy Mason, “Lifer’s,” The Angolite, August 1975, 23; John McCormick, “Legal Action: Our Goodtime Law May Be Changed,” The Angolite, September 1975, 1-2.
[10] Associated Press, “Inmate Release Policy Blasted,” Morning Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA), June 9, 197; Ed Anderson, “Connick Attacks Parole Board Plan,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), October 28, 1975.
[11] “ ‘Career Criminal’ Bureau for N.O.” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), March 19, 1975.
[12] Jack Wardlaw, “Connick Wins Anti-‘Good Time’ Battle in House,” State Item (Baton Rouge, LA), July 2, 1975; 12-a; Pierre V. DeGruy, “Connick Endeavors in Legislature Pay Off: Entire Package is Passed” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), July 31, 1975.
[13] “Jail Overload Credited to Police Work,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), April 17, 1980.
[14] “Criminals Face Harsher Penalties as New Law Takes Effect,” State Item (Baton Rouge, LA), September 17, 1975.
[15]Louisiana Prison System Study, 4, Governor’s Office Long Range Prison Study Files, 1972-1980, Box 1, LSA; Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement, “The Data: Prison Crowding in Louisiana, 1988,” Folder 9: Prison Reform Reports, Remarks, Statements 1987-1988, Box 3, Rev. James Stovall Papers, Louisiana State University.
[16] Treen: ‘Going to Be Touch to Get a Pardon From Me’ “ Alexandria Town Talk (Alexandria, LA), March 9, 1980; Gibbs Adams, “State Prisons Must Expand,” Morning Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA), May 19, 1983.
[17] “Remarks by Jack D. Foster, Project Director Law and Justice Section, The Council of Staet Governments Before The Governor’s Pardon, Parole, and Rehabilitation Commission,” May 9, 1977, Folder 2: Governors Pardon, Parole, and Rehabilitation Commission Remarks and Reports, Box 3, Rev. James Stovall Papers, Louisiana State University; “The Crowded Cage,” The Angolite, November/December 1983, 35-60.
[18] “Orleans Prison Above Inmate Ceiling for 3 Months,” State Times (Baton Rouge, LA), May 17, 1983; Nanette Russell, “District Attorney Angry State Prisoners in Jails,” Lafayette Advertiser (Lafayette, LA), June 28, 1983.
[19] “Foti Gets OK to Put Inmates in Tents,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), June 14, 1983.
[20] Pierre V. Degruy, “Packed Prison Feared,” The Times Picayune (New Orleans, LA), September 12, 1975.
[21] Memo from Carey J. Roussel to Donald G. Bollinger, March 17, 1981, Folder 1: Public Safety 1981, Box 815: P 1981, David Treen Papers, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University; “Sheriff Layrisson Angry Over Jail Fund Postponement,” Vindicator (Hammond, LA), May 25, 1983.
[22] Monte Williams, “Crowded Jails Let Criminals Free,” Daily Iberian (New Iberia, LA), June 12, 1983.
[23] “Comments on Governor David C. Treen’s Criminal Justice Package for Possible Use by President Reagan in his September 28 Speech to the International Association of Chiefs of Police,” Folder 4: Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice 1981, Box 796: L 1981, David Treen Papers, Tulane University.
[24] Louisiana Coalition on Jails & Prisons, “Jail Project Update” pamphlet, 1981, Folder: Louisiana Coalition, Box 2, Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons Records, 1974-1980, The Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Louisiana Coalition on Jails & Prisons, “Louisiana Jails” pamphlet, n.d., Folder: Louisiana Coalition, Box 2, Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons Records, 1974-1980, The Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[25] “Legislative Digest,” The Angolite, September/October 1978, 9.
[26] Memo from C. Paul Phelps to William A. Nungesser, October 3, 1980, Folder 8: Corrections 1980, Box 666: C 1980, David Treen Papers, Tulane University.
[27] Mark T. Carleton, Politics and Punishment; the History of the Louisiana State Penal System (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971).
[28] “Executive Budget 1974-1975, Vol. 1,” 9, Box 1, State Budget Reports 1970-1989, Louisiana State Archives; “Louisiana State Budget 1982-1983,” 39, Box 4, State Budget Reports 1970-1989, Louisiana State Archives;
[29] “Executive Budget Program 1982-1983 Vol 1,” A11, Box 2: Executive Budgets 1980-1985, Louisiana State Archives. For more on the precarity of oil economies at this time see Petter Nore and Terisa Turner, Oil and Class Struggle (London: Zed Press, 1980).
[30] “The Moment of Truth” The Angolite, May/June 1982, 12.
[31] Southern Legislative Conference, Louisiana Legislative Fiscal Office, Adult Corrections Systems 1998, by Christopher A. Keaton, (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1999), 7-8.
[32] Chris Adams, “Tragedy Marks a Night of Crime,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), August 5, 1990; Walt Philbin, “Shooting Sets Murder Record,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), October 23, 1990; Michael Perlstein, “Beyond the Bullet – Murder in New Orleans,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), July 1, 1993; Sheila Grissett, “Murder Rate in N.O. Exceeds One a Day,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), July 17, 1993; Sheila Stroup, “When Will It All End?” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), July 26, 1994. International Association of Police Chiefs, The New Orleans Police Department Revisited, June 29, 1993, 2-8, Marc H. Morial Papers. Box 33, Folder 1: Morial Transition The New Orleans Police Department, Revisited 1993, Amistad Research Center.
[33]Building New Orleans Together: City of New Orleans 1997 Annual Report, 1997, 7, Box 43, Folder 7: Mayoral City of New Orleans Annual Reports, Marc H. Morial Papers 1994-2002, Amistad Research Center.
[36] This is not to be confused with the widely lauded bipartisan package of prison reform bills that passed the Louisiana legislature last summer, which has served to primarily tinker with the penal system rather than make meaningful reforms. “Louisiana’s Parole Reform Law Continues a Positive Trend in Criminal Justice Reform,” Voice of the Experienced, accessed September 26, 2017, https://www.vote-nola.org/archive/louisianas-parole-reform-law-continues-a-positive-trend-in-criminal-justice-reform.
The AAG is excited to have two new interns join our staff for the Spring 2018 semester. Welcome aboard Laura and Hannah!
Laura Akindo recently graduated from Frostburg State University with a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Earth Science with a Concentration in Environmental Science. She also majored in Geography. Laura is in the process of applying to Graduate Programs and hopes to begin working on her Masters of Science in the Fall in GIS and Environmental Management and Policy. In her spare time, Laura likes to read, visit new exciting outdoor parks, and watch soccer.
Hannah Ellingson is a sophomore at The George Washington University, pursuing a B.A. in geography and a minor in geographic information systems. Hannah previously interned for the City of Norfolk’s city planning department, where she used GIS to create a map of street-end water access points in Norfolk, VA, in order to support an initiative to increase public water access throughout the city. After graduation, she intends to pursue a M.A. in geography. She attributes her passion for geography to her mother, who instilled an appreciation for geography in Hannah at a young age. In her spare time, she enjoys exploring D.C.’s art museums and restaurants, traveling with her family, and playing with her black lab puppy, Hank.
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Katelyn Suranovic Interns at AAG for Spring Semester
Katelyn Suranovic is currently pursuing her master’s degree in geography at George Washington University. Her focus is climate change and weather-related phenomena in response to climatic changes. Previously, Katelyn earned her bachelor of science degree from James Madison University (JMU), where she majored in geographic science with a concentration in environmental conservation, sustainability and development.
In 2015, Katelyn became a co-author for a journal article titled “Lightning Characteristics of Derecho Producing Mesoscale Convective Systems.” The article was written under the direction of Dr. Mace Bentley of JMU, along with a group of other students and was published by the international journal, Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics.
As an intern this semester, she will be working on the AP GIS&T project and will also assist with media and member outreach.
In her free time, Katelyn enjoys playing soccer, being outdoors and hanging out with her family.
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AAG Snapshot: AAG Journals
The AAG publishes four scholarly journals – Annals of the AAG, The Professional Geographer, The AAG Review of Books, and GeoHumanities. Each year a total of 16 issues spread among the four journals is produced with the help of AAG Publications Director Jennifer Cassidento. The AAG scholarly journals range from long-standing and distinguished titles to new and innovative publications. All are published by Taylor and Francis. Each journal has a page on the AAG website with an overview of the journal, the names of the editors, and their contact information, plus submission information for authors. The journals are similar, in that their focus is on geography, but there are a some differences to highlight for each one.
Annals of the AAG has been published for over a hundred years, since 1911, and it’s the AAG’s flagship journal. With a 2016 Impact Factor of 2.799 (8th out of 79 titles in geography), Annals is a general geography journal that publishes articles aimed at a broad audience in the discipline. It’s published six times a year, including one themed special issue. For example, in 2017 the special issue was on the topic of mountains.
The AAG began publishing The Professional Geographerin 1949 when the AAG merged with the American Society for Professional Geographers. The Professional Geographer focuses on short articles of academic or applied geography, emphasizing empirical studies and methodologies. It’s published four times a year and was ranked 41st out of 79 titles in geography with an Impact Factor of 1.276 in 2016.
The AAG Review of Books was launched in 2013, when the AAG decided to publish the book reviews formerly in Annals and the Professional Geographer in a separate journal. The journal is published online only, four times a year. There’s also a database with over 300 books that have been reviewed in the journal over the past four years. Anyone can search the database by title, author, reviewer, or theme, and access to the database is through the journals page on the AAG website.
GeoHumanities is the AAG’s newest journal, launched in 2015. The journal brings together the disciplines of geography and humanities. It features full length scholarly articles, and shorter creative pieces in the Practices and Curations section. It’s published twice a year.
Anyone can submit a paper to three of the four journals – Annals, The Professional Geographer, or GeoHumanities. The submission process is very easy – it’s done online through a self-guided manuscript submission site. Articles are evaluated by the journals’ editors, then they’re usually sent out to at least two external reviewers. The review process normally takes about 2-4 months, and then the editor will respond to the author with a decision on the paper, including comments from the reviewers, and the editor’s own assessment of the paper.
Submission to the fourth journal, the AAG Review of Books, is handled a little differently. The book reviews for this journal are commissioned by the editor, Debbie Hopkins, so if you’re interested in writing a book review, you would need to contact Debbie at debbie.hopkins[at]ouce.ox.ac.uk.
As an AAG member, you can receive free print or online access to all current and past issues of the journals. The AAG also offers members a complimentary online-only subscription to one additional Taylor and Francis journal from the following six options: Geopolitics; Gender, Place, and Culture; International Journal of GIS; International Journal of Remote Sensing; Journal of Geography in Higher Education; or Social & Cultural Geography. Members can subscribe as part of the membership renewal process.
Do you have any questions about any of the journals or submitting to the journals? Contact the AAG Publications Director, Jennifer Cassidento at jcassidento [at] aag [dot] org.
The AAG Snapshots series, first launched at the 2017 Annual Meeting, provides insight on and information about different aspects of the projects, programs, and resources of the association. Do you have suggestions for future Snapshots content from AAG staff? Email cluebbering [at] aag [dot] org.
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Awardees
2018 AAG Award Recipients Announced
The American Association of Geographers congratulates the individuals named to receive an AAG Award. The awardees represent outstanding contributions to and accomplishments in the geographic field. Formal recognition of the awardees will occur at the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting in New Orleans during the AAG Awards Luncheon on Saturday, April 14, 2018.
2018 The AAG Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography
The AAG Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography is given annually to an individual geographer or team of geographers that has demonstrated originality, creativity and significant intellectual breakthroughs in geography. The award includes a prize of $1,000.
Mei-Po Kwan, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Mei-Po Kwan, Professor of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is one of the most creative and transformative geographers of our time. Her research has made groundbreaking theoretical contributions to health, mobility, urban, and transportation geographies as well as broadly to geographic information science (GIScience). Kwan’s articulation of the uncertain geographic context problem highlights a fundamental methodological problem in all studies that examine the effects of area-based environmental variables on individual behaviors or outcomes. The problem is now widely recognized as a significant issue in social science, health, and environmental science, in addition to geographic and GIScience research.
Combining empirical research with original theory, Kwan has continuously developed and advanced paradigm-shifting ideas (e.g., feminist visualization, hybrid geographies, affective GIS, and algorithmic geographies) that profoundly challenge how geographers think about disciplinary dynamics, geographic method, and core tendentious binaries in the discipline (e.g., quantitative vs qualitative geography; GIScience vs social theory). Kwan’s work on space-time accessibility fundamentally altered our understanding of the methods used to study access by underprivileged populations to urban facilities and opportunities. She also played a key role in the integration of GIS with qualitative methods, and pioneered the development of a GIS-based approach to narrative analysis (i.e., geo-narrative) that has advanced qualitative methodologies in significant ways.
The AAG Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography is bestowed annually on an individual geographer or team that has demonstrated originality, creativity, and significant intellectual breakthroughs in geography. The award honors those who have a sustained, impressive and recognized record of creative and cutting-edge work, who have made significant contributions to new geographic methods or ways of thinking, or who have introduced new and meaningful ways of thinking about human/environment relations at local or global scales. Mei-Po Kwan is the sixth recipient of the award. Previous recipients of the Stanley Brunn Award are David Harvey (2017), Michael Goodchild (2016), Susan Hanson (2015), Robert B. Kates (2014), and Yi-Fu Tuan (2013).
The 2018 Marble-Boyle Undergraduate Achievement Award in Geographic Science
The Marble-Boyle Undergraduate Achievement Award recognizes excellence in academic performance by undergraduate students from the U.S. and Canada who are putting forth a strong effort to bridge geographic science and computer science as well as to encourage other students to embark upon similar programs. The award is an activity of the Marble Fund for Geographic Science of the AAG.
Noah Irby, University of North Dakota
2018 Susan Hardwick Excellence in Mentoring Award
The AAG bestows an annual award recognizing an individual geographer, group, or department, who demonstrates extraordinary leadership in building supportive academic and professional environments and in guiding the academic or professional growth of their students and junior colleagues.The late Susan Hardwick was the inaugural Excellence in Mentoring awardee. The Award was renamed in her honor and memory, soon after her passing.
David Kaplan, Kent State University
The Committee on the Status of Women in Geography and the Enhancing Diversity Committee unanimously elected to award David Kaplan the 2018 AAG Susan Hardwick Excellence in Mentoring Award. David Kaplan is an exceptional mentor, serving as principal advisor to at least 26 master’s thesis student committees and 11 PhD student committees, along with serving on the committees of dozens of other student projects. He has a proven track record of successfully graduating students and setting them off into academic or other positions. One of his more recently graduated PhD advisees calls him a “lifelong advisor” who has “enduring and genuine concern” for his students. In addition, his support of junior peers both at his institution and elsewhere, speaks to his commitment to offer sound counsel and valuable information to others in order to advance and develop their own paths to academic and professional success. A colleague of Kaplan’s writes, “His insightful comments have been very beneficial for my research and later career….His continuous support has been critical for my professional development”.
David Kaplan’s direct efforts both through publications and external funding, as well as his extraordinary dedication and service to his department, institution, and the AAG, exemplify the many ways that he is committed to enhancing diversity and inclusion in the discipline of geography. For these reasons, we are pleased to present the 2018 Susan Hardwick Excellence in Mentoring Award to David Kaplan.
2018 Enhancing Diversity Award
The AAG Enhancing Diversity Award honors those geographers who have pioneered efforts toward, or activelyparticipate in efforts towards encouraging a more diverse discipline.
Banu Gökarıksel, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Dr. Banu Gökarıksel of the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill has earned the gratitude and respect of students and colleagues alike for her unwavering commitment to mentoring, her dedication to encouraging young scholars to enter the field of geography, and the lasting impact from her leadership role as Director of Graduate Students (DGS). Despite her own recent immigrant status, her position as one of the first women to get tenure in her department, and her prominent role as DGS, she has never hesitated to stand up for students and scholars who she felt were being marginalized. As DGS she has answered the call for Geography departments and faculty to recognize diversity not just through their recruitment policies, but also through supportive practices designed for a diverse graduate student population. Dr. Gökarıksel is able to translate feedback from her colleagues and students into impactful action. For example, after hearing graduate student concerns about cost of living, she facilitated conversations on summer funding. Within a few weeks, these conversations resulted in summer grants for several graduate students. Dr. Gökarıksel received her university’s most prestigious teaching award, the Chapman Award. This is partly due to her careful and thoughtful engagement with issues such as Islamophobia, xenophobia, and the associated forms of gender-based discrimination. Banu is a stellar example of someone who works both behind the scenes and in a leadership role, doing work that is often unrewarded and invisible. She has created lasting institutional change in her department through her work to retain and recruit women and scholars of color through mentoring and through her improvement of the graduate program. As co-editor of the Journal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies she has created a venue that has diversified rigorous peer reviewed scholarship. Her commitments to enhancing diversity became even more apparent in her administrative efforts as a faculty member at UNC, where she works tirelessly to enhance the diversity of her department and the discipline. Dr. Gökarıksel was co-organizer for the 2017 Feminist Geography Conference, and clearly demonstrated her commitment to including diverse and marginalized voices. In the midst of the conference, the new US administration’s rules regarding entry to the United States from several Muslim majority countries were announced. Dr. Gökarıksel immediately mobilized efforts to remotely connect those newly banned participants. She also coordinated an effort among the feminist geographers present to support their colleagues’ scholarship, if they were unable to come to the United States. Dr. Gökarıksel has been selected to receive the AAG Enhancing Diversity Award not only because of these accomplishments, but because her actions provide a model for other AAG members invested in enhancing the diversity of our discipline.
2018 AAG Honorary Geographer
The AAG annually selects an individual as the year’s Honorary Geographer. The award recognizes excellence in research, teaching, or writing on geographic topics by non-geographers. Past recipients include Stephen Jay Gould, Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Krugman, Barry Lopez, Saskia Sassen and Maya Lin.
Robert Bullard, Texas Southern University
In making its selection, the Executive Committee of the AAG recognized the important foundational role that Dr. Bullard has played in the study of environmental and transportation justice and the skills he has shown in translating those ideas to policy makers and wider public groups. This work has been invaluable to scholars in geography, who increasingly address issues of inequality, spatial justice, and environmental racism. Bullard’s ability to mix advocacy with strong basic research is a model for many of us in geography.
2018 AAG Presidential Achievement Award
The AAG Presidential Award is given with the purpose of recognizing individuals for their long-term, major contributions to geography. The Past President has the honor of bestowing this distinction on behalf of the discipline and the association.
Susan Cutter, University of South Carolina
The Presidential Achievement Award recognizes Dr. Cutter’s transformative research on disaster vulnerability/resilience science which has served as an important bridge between physical and human geography. Her leadership in disaster vulnerability/resilience research has both extended the reach of the discipline to other academic disciplines and to policy communities, and also brought new insights and approaches to geography. The award also recognizes Dr. Cutter’s early attention to issues of race, class and environmental justice and her role in bringing these important concerns to the discipline of geography. In addition, the award recognizes her many service contributions to the discipline and beyond, including her leadership as President of the Association of American Geographers and President of the Consortium of Social Science Associations.
Billie L. Turner, II, Arizona State University
The Presidential Achievement Award recognizes Dr. Turner’s transformative research on development of land use/cover change science which has served as an important bridge between physical and human geography, and between historic/prehistoric analysis and contemporary issues. His leadership in integrating geographical sciences with wider academic and policy concerns in the areas of global change, earth systems and sustainability science, and his early recognition of the importance of these issues to geography, is also recognized by this award. The award also recognizes Dr. Turner’s extensive contributions representing geography on important national and international bodies and initiatives including the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, the International Human Dimensions Programme, and the U.S. National Climate Assessment and Associate Editorship of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
2018 The AAG Harold M. Rose Award for Anti-Racism Research and Practice
The Rose Award was created to honor Harold M. Rose, who was a pioneer in conducting research on the condition faced by African Americans. The award honors geographers who have a demonstrated record of this type of research and active contributions to society, and is awarded to individuals who have served to advance the discipline through their research, and who have also had an impact on anti-racist practice.
Laura Pulido, University of Oregon
Over her two and half decade career as a professional geographer, few scholars have impacted the study of race and the environment as much as Professor Laura Pulido. Her work is foundational to a whole generation of race scholars in geography and beyond, and her commitment to anti-racist practice is central to her work in the discipline. She has mentored countless students, junior faculty, and colleagues throughout her career, focusing on supporting scholars of color and scholars engaged in anti-racist research.
Professor Pulido’s work on environmental racism is path-breaking and documents the central role of geography in the continuing exposure of environmental hazards and the pivotal role of white privilege and white supremacy in the uneven geography of environmental hazard exposure. Also, her work on anti-racist activism in Southern California and her book Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left is a seminal piece of scholarship that has driven conversations in Geography and Ethnic and Racial Studies about race, politics and anti-racist activism. Through this work, she introduces the concept of “differential racialization” and opened space for a range of academic disciplines to think geographically about racial identity formation and the way racialization processes are impacted by and through geography.
In addition to these scholarly contributions, Dr. Pulido is tireless in her dedication to helping new generations of scholars enter into the field. Like Harold Rose himself, who mentored generations of students at UW-Milwaukee, Professor Pulido’s generous support of students and colleagues in geography is a vital part of her anti-racist praxis.
A massive tax reform package signed into law by President Trump shortly before the holidays drew attention primarily for slashing corporate rates and amending individual filing rules. The legislation, however, was also of significance for the higher education community.
The original bill that passed the House of Representatives included language that would have counted graduate student tuition waivers as taxable income. This proposal drew significant protests and press criticism and was ultimately removed by House and Senate negotiators. The AAG was actively involved in opposing the provision and keeping our student members and departmental leaders informed, and we are pleased with the outcome.
Separately, the new law will apply a new excise tax of 1.4 percent on investment income for certain private colleges. Institutions with over 500 students and holding assets of $500,000+ per student will be affected. It is estimated that this new tax will affect approximately 35 institutions including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford and will generate close to $2 billion in revenue over ten years. The House had proposed taxing additional colleges and universities, but Senate negotiators argued for the more narrow language.
Finally, it will bear watching how much of an impact the new law has on financial support for public institutions in high-tax states. The legislation caps personal deductions of state and local taxes at $10,000, which could apply pressure on certain states to lower taxes. This, in turn, could force these states to cut budgets, including for public higher-ed institutions.
Over the past decade, most universities and some secondary schools across Africa have been exposed to geographic information system (GIS) technology. Teaching about and with GIS on that continent has been both challenging and rewarding.
On April 9, 2017, the panel session “Teaching GIS in Africa” was held at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual meeting in Boston. Esri organized this session, and speakers came from several nations and spoke of their diverse experiences as teachers and, in one case, as a student in Eastern Africa.
Although every African university and nation has its own unique characteristics, the speakers and audience members coincided on several issues. GIS education across Africa—with exceptions especially in South Africa—has been slow to evolve beyond the teaching of basic GIS theory, in large part due to a lack of sustained resources such as computer labs, Internet connections, and updated local datasets. Often these resources are donated but not maintained in the medium or long term. Software is generally available either as open source or via discounts and donations by Esri and other commercial providers.
The main limiting factor identified was the lack of instructors educated on the latest technologies and methodologies such as mobile data collection, data publishing and sharing, and advanced spatial analysis. Far too many students are still learning GIS from textbooks instead of via hands-on use. Much of the applied GIS being taught is natural resources (and satellite imagery) oriented, with less attention being paid to human geography, urban issues, and cartography. This, again, is due to the limited availability of specialists in these areas and of spatial data such as street networks and geodemographics. Many steps have been taken in the form of short-term, donor-funded projects, but often momentum is lost after project completion.
The University of North Alabama’s Jonathan Fleming, an Esri education ambassador, teaches in the geography department at the University of Dar es Salaam.
Esri is committed to making a long-term difference in GIS education in Africa and, over the past five years, has ramped up its involvement in this endeavor. Esri has sponsored a series of education user conferences (in Eastern Africa), training sessions, and other activities organized by local Esri offices. Additionally, special assistance has come from Esri’s offices in France, Portugal, and Switzerland to support universities in francophone nations, lusophone nations, and Rwanda, respectively. Esri has sponsored a growing group of education ambassadors to travel and conduct teaching and geomentoring missions across the globe. Among them are Jonathan Fleming of the University of North Alabama, who taught in Dar es Salaam in 2013, and Stace Maples from Stanford University, who visited Kenyatta University (KU) in Nairobi in spring 2017. Maples taught several classes and also mentored faculty and the university administration about how to apply and sustain GIS across the entire campus. Feedback from the universities and ambassadors was extremely positive, and so Esri will continue to support these missions in the future.
Among African universities, Kenyatta University has emerged as a star—a lighthouse exemplar—in adopting and promoting GIS. As in many GIS success stories in any field, a GIS champion was involved: Professor Simon Onywere. Onywere had been a GIS and remote-sensing expert for many years, but in 2013 he decided to take his university to the next level. He worked with Esri’s home office and Esri Eastern Africa Limited (in Nairobi) to craft a memorandum of understanding (MOU) whereby both parties would contribute to the success of GIS across the entire KU campus. Under Esri’s 100 Africa Universities program, the MOU included a donation of ArcGIS software to the university. Esri has worked with approximately 70 universities under this program thus far. With software installed in the laboratories, Onywere and Esri personnel trained instructors, students, and administrators on the power of GIS for solving spatial problems in any field of study. Enterprise GIS, including attention to servers and client apps, became available to anyone showing interest in learning on the same platform used by industrial, commercial, and government entities around the world. GIS Day and similar events were run; a GIS club was formed; and, soon, a small army of GIS users and promoters was created.
The first Esri Eastern Africa Education GIS Conference was held in Nairobi in 2013.
KU recently hosted the 2017 Esri Eastern Africa Education GIS Conference. GIS is being taught and used for research by Onywere’s environment science faculty and several others including staff of the recently added tourism and hospitality department and the newly built library. The KU story is a story of hope for GIS at African universities, demonstrating that with personal and collective initiative, anything is possible.
Working with instructors, students, and university/school administrators in Africa has been extremely rewarding and gratifying. We encourage all AAG members to consider lending a helping hand to slowly but surely raising the level of GIS education across the continent. If you’d like to apply to become an Esri Education Ambassador, send a brief CV with teaching experience and a statement of interest to edambassadors [at] esri [dot] com.
By Michael Gould, Global Education Manager, Esri
Featured Articles is a special section of the AAG Newsletter where AAG sponsors highlight recent programs and activities of significance to geographers and members of the AAG. To sponsor the AAG and submit an article, please contact Oscar Larson olarson [at] aag [dot] org.
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President's Column
Creating Safe Spaces at AAG Meetings for All
Hollywood, The Hill, and the nation’s newsrooms have been exposed as spaces of sexual harassment, misconduct, and even assault. Yet, sexual harassment and discrimination are neither unique nor new to these highly public industries and this misconduct is unfortunately common to most workplaces. Indeed, conservative estimates suggest that 60% of all women have been victims of sexual harassment while a Harvard study found that number to be almost 90 percent for women ages 18 to 25.
The academy can and should be an important tool in studying this issue, collecting the stories of victims, and analyzing the frequency, scale, and impacts of sexual harassment. At the same time, however, higher education is also part of the problem. In a 2014 survey of field scientists, a staggering two-thirds of respondents indicated experiencing sexual harassment at a field site, and one-fifth were victims of sexual assault. Female trainees were much more likely to be targets of harassment and assault than males and “their perpetrators were predominantly senior to them professionally within the research team.” This study also found few respondents aware of mechanisms to report incidents and those who did report indicated being unsatisfied with the result. Reacting to universities’ historically poor record of dealing with sexual- and gender-based harassment and discrimination, “women in academia are beginning to join in the #MeToo campaign, naming predators and speaking out.”
While not discounting advocacy among female scholars, it is not the responsibility of women alone to challenge and transform cultures of inequality and abuse. It requires all members of the academy to adopt diverse and just approaches that are inclusive of gender, race, social class and sexuality. These approaches are critical to the sustained health of the AAG and, importantly, the well-being of our colleagues; they allow us, in the words of past AAG President Victoria Lawson, to develop an ethics of care and responsibility in geography that can enhance relationships, institutions, and professional practices. Now is not the time to be passive or merely reactive about developing and adopting this care ethics. Responsive and proactive institutional and individual interventions are necessary to address this important national moment.
Over the past several months, AAG members have approached both of us to share stories of sexual discrimination and to ask that the Association take a lead against sexual harassment in the academy. In a spirit of joint responsibility and collaboration, this co-authored column seeks to begin what should be a long and committed series of conversations and brainstorming that will allow the AAG, and the larger discipline of geography, to engage with this issue in meaningful and impactful ways.
The purpose of our comments is to highlight the specific importance of ensuring that our annual meetings are “safe spaces” that are free of sexual harassment but also places for raising a larger awareness of discrimination and developing creative advocacy and mentorship initiatives. We encourage members to view the AAG meeting as a place of power-laden social encounters that are consequential to people’s professional and personal development and sense of belonging, safety and security of attendees. The Association has clear expectations about ethical professional conduct at annual meetings, but there is certainly room for further policy and program development.
In an effort to generate discussion about how to bring greater attendee safety and disciplinary understanding of sexual harassment, we review strategies pursued by other professional societies at their meetings while also providing some of our own ideas and suggestions. These suggestions, while requiring action on the part of AAG leadership, rely upon the participation of geographers in regional divisions and individual departments as well as within the national association.
Academic Conferences as Consequential Social Encounters
On the surface, academic conferences appear simply to be about the presentation and discussion of the latest research, teaching innovations, or professional practices. In reality, they are complex social encounters characterized by interpersonal and group exchanges that take place within session meeting rooms and beyond. Indeed, it is this larger cultural milieu of consulting and collaborating with others, participating in fieldtrips and workshops, attending socials and receptions that makes attending a conference enjoyable. However, these encounters—while worthwhile—also carry a vulnerability as junior scholars are put in close contact with senior and powerful scholars while blurring the lines between work and play.
The intellectual, professional, and recreational interactions at academic conferences are part of rather than apart from the inequalities and injustices of daily social life. An online survey of scientific conference attendees reports that sexual and gender-based harassment at meetings includes “catcalling, sexual comments, and other forms of verbal harassment to stalking, groping, and physical assault.” Respondents stated they did not report these incidents for two reasons: they were concerned about the impact to their careers, but secondly, there were no obvious reporting mechanisms at national meetings. Importantly most of this harassment happens in the social spaces of the meeting.
It is important that we are mindful of the contradictory role that annual meetings can play in one’s career. For some of us, the meetings can advance and empower one’s work and self-confidence. For others who face harassment and discrimination, the meeting can be a source of marginalization and isolation, a lasting hit to self-esteem, an obstacle to the freedom to learn and share, and the stunting of career opportunity and security. Attending scholarly meetings and being seen in these social spaces is often critical to the career advancement of emerging scholars who are looking for jobs, pursuing tenure and building their network of colleagues outside of their universities.
AAG Stance on Professional Conduct
To be clear, the AAG has long realized that our annual meeting is a complex operation, socially as well as logistically, and it has been unequivocal in denouncing any form of harassment. According to its statement of Professional Ethics, the Association will not tolerate harassment of any kind, including but not limited to “unwanted sexual advances or demeaning remarks, physical assaults or intentional verbal intimidation and requests for favors (sexual or otherwise) as conditions for recruitment, employment, publication or advancement.”
The AAG also has a Professional Conduct Policy on the AAG meeting web site that briefly but quite clearly expresses the expectation that those attending the conference establish “an atmosphere free of abuse or harassment and characterized by courtesy and respect.” It might make sense to bring greater specificity to issues of sexual harassment, discrimination, and assault within existing AAG conduct policies and ethics statements; nonetheless, the AAG Council and Meridian Place staff takes these matters seriously.
We are happy to report that at the recommendation of the Executive Committee, the AAG Council recently established a Standing Committee on Annual Meeting Attendee Disciplinary Matters. The new committee is charged with investigating and making judgements on violations of the AAG’s Professional Conduct Policy committed by meeting attendees. These violations could conceivably cover a wide range of unprofessional and discriminatory conduct, but would certainly include instances of sexual harassment. Disciplinary action, as determined by the Standing Committee and oversaw by the AAG Council, may include, but need not be limited to, temporary or permanent loss of eligibility to attend future AAG Annual Meetings and/or suspension or temporary or permanent revocation of the membership and eligibility for membership in the Association.
We Need Ideas for Moving Forward
Although professional conduct expectations and mechanisms for investigating misconduct are clearly important, it seems appropriate if not critical to ask if we are doing everything possible to make the national AAG meeting a safe space for all our participants. The question is valid given the nation’s growing awareness of sexual harassment and our own discipline’s white, masculine, and Eurocentric roots and continuing struggles with diversity. Moreover, 41.7 percent of our members are students, a population historically vulnerable to being victims of sexual harassment and assault. It is worth looking to other organizations and within ourselves for ideas on how geography can actively protect colleagues from harassment and discrimination and create opportunities for analytical interventions, advocacy, and awareness building.
Other academic organizations are stepping up their efforts to address harassment at their national meetings. At the December meeting of the American Geophysical Union, two dozen staff members wore badges that said “Safe AGU.” Reinforcing this message were posters throughout the venue that read: “If it is unwanted or unwelcome it is harassment.” Staff members were available to help report an incident but critically to escort a participant through the venue if they believe they are being stalked by another attendee. The Geophysical Union is considering listing sexual harassment as a form of “scientific misconduct” and those found in violation of the Union’s harassment policies will be restricted not just from attending its conferences but also publishing in its journals.
The American Philosophical Association has gone as far as shutting down the open bar at the main reception of its annual meeting and limiting each attendee to two drinks to maintain an atmosphere of professionalism. The Association of Women in Science recommends that every professional society needs to implement anti-harassment policies that cover behavior at meetings and make confidential reporting mechanisms available to participants.
AAG members who have contacted us have suggested a number of good ideas, such as an organization-wide climate survey to see how pervasive the problem of sexual harassment and assault is in the discipline of geography, both in the context of academic conferences and wider workplaces and educational institutions. While the results of such a survey may likely mirror experiences in other associations, it is difficult to move forward and create change if there is not a clear and concrete sense of the scope of this problem and the specific issues that need to addressed. Those contacting us have also asked about the benefits of creating a specific committee or group focused on advocacy. The Geographic Perspectives on Women Specialty Group and the Mentoring Network for Women address to some degree how to navigate harassment and inappropriate behavior in academia. But, there is plenty of room for developing additional spaces at annual meetings and beyond, including at GFDA early career workshops, for sharing of survivors’ stories, creation of networks of support and solidarity, and applying pressure for institutional change. Such a committee could be a highly effective tool for reaching out to and supporting males who have been sexually harassed and assaulted.
In addition to putting safeguards and support in place at annual meetings, a “safe space” approach also emphasizes carrying out wider education and sensitivity training within the field, using not only AAG’s national organizational structure and resources but also its web of regional divisions, departments, programs, and professional workplaces. Geography departments and programs can play an influential role in educating newer scholars and reminding established ones that when they attend an annual meeting, they are operating within this larger ethical and social field of life-changing behaviors and relations. Program leaders and department chairs/heads might consider holding pre-conference orientations that directly address the social encounters that occur at meetings and to enhance community understanding of sexual harassment and discrimination, which include subtle yet harmful micro-aggressions and overt, legally actionable offenses. Offices of equity and diversity on university campuses can be helpful advisors in planning such events. Future AAG healthy department workshops, both at national AAG meetings and during summers, have long held discussions about diversity, but having entire sessions that take on sexual harassment is necessary for preparing department leaders to engage in what can be tough but essential discussions with student, faculty, and staff.
Governing boards of regional divisions of the AAG might consider following the AAG Council’s lead and establish its own committee to respond to professional conduct matters that might arise at their fall meetings. Divisions should also consider sending a strong statement about zero tolerance for harassment and discrimination by composing their own professional ethics policy for their members and regional meeting attendees as well as create formal spaces at these conferences for anti-harassment advocacy, mentoring, and program idea development that could feed and enrich the national organization. At the very least, regional divisions should prominently post the AAG’s professional ethics and conduct statements on their main and meeting-related websites and create active moments to remind attendees of their professional conduct responsibilities, perhaps at the opening session of the meeting, receptions and banquets, or the beginning of World Geography Bowl competitions.
Presidential columns customarily end with a call for readers to share their perspectives, experiences, and ideas. Because we have touched only the surface of what is deep and complex issue, it is especially imperative that members engage in conversations with us, the larger AAG Council as well as with others in their departments and workplaces about sexual harassment and how geographers can take a lead against this injustice. As always, please share your thoughts on Twitter #PresidentAAG.
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As educators, we are always faced with challenges on how we structure our curriculum activities to ensure that we are in line with modern industry practices. This is easier said than done—for one, there is likely no consensus on what a “modern geographic information system (GIS)” means; and two, it takes a tremendous amount of time to do curricula updates. As an instructor of a variety of courses on Web GIS, programming, and spatial analytics at Johns Hopkins University, I am relentlessly faced with course updates. However, my being a Solutions Engineer at Esri as well provides me with a unique perspective into the technology and helps me stay focused on what is important in the geospatial industry.
Laura Akindo recently graduated from Frostburg State University with a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Earth Science with a Concentration in Environmental Science. She also majored in Geography. Laura is in the process of applying to Graduate Programs and hopes to begin working on her Masters of Science in the Fall in GIS and Environmental Management and Policy. In her spare time, Laura likes to read, visit new exciting outdoor parks, and watch soccer.
Katelyn Suranovic is currently pursuing her master’s degree in geography at George Washington University. Her focus is climate change and weather-related phenomena in response to climatic changes. Previously, Katelyn earned her bachelor of science degree from James Madison University (JMU), where she majored in geographic science with a concentration in environmental conservation, sustainability and development.
The AAG began publishing 
Mei-Po Kwan, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
David Kaplan, Kent State University
Banu Gökarıksel, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Susan Cutter, University of South Carolina
Billie L. Turner, II, Arizona State University
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A massive tax reform package signed into law by President Trump shortly before the holidays drew attention primarily for slashing corporate rates and amending individual filing rules. The legislation, however, was also of significance for the higher education community.
