Undergraduate Student Affinity Group Elects Inaugural Board
The AAG’s new Undergraduate Student Affinity Group has elected their first board. Congratulations to the following:
USAG Chair: Michelle Church; Michigan State University USAG Secretary-Treasurer: Lauren Gerlowski; Point Park University USAG General Board Member: Siobhan Flynn; Rutgers University USAG General Board Member: Erika Ornouski; California State University, Sacramento USAG General Board Member: Noah Irby; University of North Dakota
The AAG is very excited for these student leaders to guide this group to serve our growing community of undergraduate student members.
NCRGE Welcomes Abstracts for a Special Track During AAG 2018 New Orleans
Transformative Research in Geography Education
For the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting in New Orleans, the National Center for Research in Geography Education (NCRGE) is welcoming abstracts and organized session proposals for a special track of sessions on Transformative Research in Geography Education during the AAG Annual Meeting on April 10-14, 2018, in New Orleans. This track aims to raise the visibility of research in geography education, grow the NCRGE research coordination network, and provide productive spaces for discussion about geography education research and the notion of what makes research in the field potentially transformative.
CONTEXT: In 2007, NSF adopted the following working definition of “transformative research”:
Transformative research involves ideas, discoveries, or tools that radically change our understanding of an important existing scientific or engineering concept or educational practice or leads to the creation of a new paradigm or field of science, engineering, or education. Such research challenges current understanding or provides pathways to new frontiers.
The concept of transformative research pervades the Road Map for 21st Century Geography Education project’s landmark report on geography education. By organizing new networks of geographers, educational researchers, and practitioners, the NCRGE research coordination network aims to build capacity for research in areas of geography education that were deemed by the Road Map Project to be highly significant for achieving broad-scale improvement in educational practices.
SESSIONS: Abstracts and sessions on any geography education research topic are welcome. Examples of topics include:
Integration of Geography and STEM Learning
Project-based learning
Learning progressions
Assessment
Capabilities and powerful knowledge
International comparative research
Professional development (Online & Face-to-Face)
Teaching Strategies (All levels)
For each of the activities below, we seek a diverse group of individuals representing a range of experiences with these and other topics. If interested, please follow the specified procedures.
During abstract submission select “paper” as the abstract type
When you receive confirmation of a successful abstract submission, please then forward this confirmation to ncrge [at] aag [dot] org with “Transformative Research paper abstract” in the subject line.
The abstract deadline is October 25, 2017.
ORGANIZED SESSIONS
To submit an organized session to this theme please forward your session confirmation email to ncrge [at] aag [dot] org by November 8, 2017.
If ever you find yourself at a loss for conversation among a group of geographers, simply ask this one question: Where do you think the AAG should hold its next Annual Meeting? Everyone has an opinion on this question, and embellished memories of past meetings to recount; the only risk of raising this question is that the conversation may well go long into the night.
How the AAG Selects Annual Meeting Sites
Selecting AAG Annual Meeting sites is a lengthy and complex process. I would like to share with you the many steps and considerations that go into Annual Meeting site selection that have been in place for many years. As with most major academic associations, we contract for meeting sites about five to eight years into the future, and in blocks of three or four meetings at a time. This gives us negotiating leverage, minimizes costs, and reduces staff time by consolidating what is a very lengthy and complicated due diligence and negotiation process.
At the outset, the process involves a great deal of AAG member and Council discussion and input, as well as extensive data gathering, past history analysis, cost comparison, staff experience, research, and consultation with our professional conference managers firm, as well as geographical balancing of our meeting sites. We then develop and issue a detailed Request for Proposals (RFP) to several prospective cities, liaison with the bidders, conduct comparative analyses of all proposals, perform physical site inspections, weigh union hotel preferences, and enforce the inclusion of numerous specific contract stipulations that I have developed over the years to protect the AAG. All of these considerations go into the process of narrowing down feasible locations for our AAG Annual Meetings for each calendar year. With a shortlist of promising bids in hand, we then enter into detailed and careful negotiations of myriad contract provisions before signing an agreement with major convention centers and/or large hotels at a proposed site. If we cannot negotiate the costs and legal terms we require and which are favorable to the AAG at an initially preferred site, we are willing to cancel negotiations and start the above process all over again with an alternate potential city.
Finally, once we have completed lengthy negotiations and entered into major contracts for convention centers and/or large hotels at a particular year’s site, we then also must develop specifications and competitively bid out dozens of ancillary contracts for meeting services such as audio-visual services; internet availability; food and beverage obligations; overflow hotels; exhibitor booth agreements and exhibit setup services; special events needs related to workshops, field trips, and supplemental meeting room space; design, construction and setup of meeting registration structures and signage; mobile app and the printed program book; and many other agreements.
Why not small cities?
I frequently am asked why the AAG doesn’t meet in smaller cities such as Ann Arbor or Portland. The fact is that most cities are far too small to host our Annual Meetings. They lack the required number or concentration of hotel rooms and meeting rooms or sufficient airline flights to accommodate our 9,000 attendees. We do have a suite of mid-sized and lower-cost cities that we have used from time to time (most recently Tampa), but ironically these smaller city meetings are among our very lowest-attended meetings despite being our lowest cost venues. So it is not clear that lower venue costs correlate with greater access or attendance (or desirability). Costs of transportation are of course primarily a function of where one lives in relation to the meeting site, rather than the meeting site itself. This is why we try to rotate our meetings among different regions the country, so that each region is involved, and also of course so that geographers can experience many different places.
What about international AAG Meetings?
The AAG has on a few occasions held an Annual Meeting in Canada (Toronto and Montreal). I would love to hold additional AAG meetings in other international locations, from Mexico City to Vancouver to elsewhere. So why not?
One obstacle is that since 9/11, the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico have become more difficult and uncertain to cross. At the same time, growing numbers of AAG members from other countries now teach or study on visas in the U.S. Many members have expressed concern that if they were to leave the U.S. to attend an Annual Meeting, they may not be able to return easily (or in some cases at all) to the United States. The AAG Council has considered the issue of international Annual Meetings on several occasions during the past decade, and each time the consensus has been it would not be fair to hold the AAG Annual Meeting in a location where a substantial number of our faculty and graduate student members would be unable to attend. It is of course always possible that domestic and international circumstances may change, or that the AAG Council’s position on this issue could change, but for now the consideration of fairness to these many members residing in the U.S. on visas remains the policy.
Controlling Costs at our Annual Meetings
Our conference manager consultants tell us every year that the AAG meetings are the best bargain of any of the dozens of meetings they help organize. We hold a full five day meeting, with elaborate and expensive A/V requirements for 80+ concurrent and fully equipped session rooms, as well A/V systems for large plenary and reception rooms, etc. Our meeting fees are very low and are well below those of nearly all other comparable geography meetings. In addition, our meeting fees have not been increased in many years, despite rising costs in almost every category of expense. The AAG also sponsors many programs which subsidize the costs of attending, including a very progressive registration fee structure for students, un- and underemployed members, and retired geographers, as well as mechanisms to subsidize travel and offset costs for students attending the meeting. Learn more about AAG Annual Meeting cost comparisons at our report, AAG Annual Meeting Fees: An Analysis.
Summary
We can always do more, but by all comparative measures, we are doing a very good job of keeping our meeting reasonably priced while providing an incomparable experience. This was illustrated by the responses to the recent McKinley Membership Survey, and also by the remarkable growth in the number of geographers and attendees from other disciplines deciding to attend our Annual Meeting every year. The reality is that thousands of geographers from around the world now choose to attend our meetings, despite the fact that they have dozens of other meeting options to choose from. So, we must be doing something right.
I hope this quick overview is helpful; we welcome questions and your input and would be happy to discuss any aspects of the AAG Annual Meetings in more detail with you. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me (drichardson [at] aag [dot] org), Oscar Larson (olarson [at] aag [dot] org), or Kelsey Taylor (ktaylor [at] aag [dot] org). As always we welcome your insight and ideas for improving our annual meetings, and we look forward to seeing you in New Orleans in April of 2018!
The title of my column comes from a recent NPR story on the NAACP. The storied civil rights organization is undergoing a wholesale “retooling” of its structures and tactics in an effort to regain relevance among younger generations of activists and to enhance its efficacy in anti-racism advocacy and education. In adapting to a dramatically changing political and media environment, former NAACP president and CEO Cornell Brooks said: “All of us have to be prepared to respond, not with telegraph speed but with Twitter speed.”
Moving at “Twitter speed” has special meaning to the NAACP, criticized recently by social media-deploying Black Lives Matter movements. Yet, this emphasis on readiness, speed, and communication has applicability to any organization seeking to affect how public groups think about and debate today’s issues. Moving quickly is not about rushing in unprepared, but laying back too much misses important opportunities for civic engagement and public education.
The AAG as of late has been especially mindful of staying current with and taking advantage of a wide array of communication and social media platforms as it promotes the work and interests of geographers and provides virtual places for community interaction and awareness. The purpose of this column is to discuss a few of those exciting ongoing developments at Meridian Place and elsewhere.
My intent in this column is also to encourage geographers to consider the potential benefits of using social media, which includes but is not limited to Twitter. More broadly, moving at Twitter speed is my call for geographers to be nimble, responsive, and strategic public intellectuals not confined to the traditional reach and pace of academic discourse and dissemination. Effective media engagement requires, however, a sober consideration of opportunities, challenges, and strategies. This column ends by conveying the sage advice that a group of AAG members provided me on this issue.
AAG’s Expanding Social Media and Public Outreach Agenda
Many organizations are developing or expanding their social media presence. It is increasingly common to see academic journals appointing social media editors to their ranks, for promotional purposes and in recognition that social media is a fertile area of research in its own right. Academic geography departments have established active profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other platforms to assist with student recruitment, program marketing, and maintaining a sense of community among alumni, faculty, students, and staff.
The AAG is no different and over the past few years has enhanced its social media profile and larger public outreach efforts. It has a substantial communication plan for reaching multiple audiences. The Association tailors the scale, frequency, and tone of communications relative to the intended audiences and the media platforms used. Executive Director Doug Richardson continues to make important communication staff hires, including in social media, while also developing a number of new communication channels.
The AAG joined Twitter in 2009, establishing an account (@theAAG) that serves primarily as a news and informational feed for its almost 10,000 followers. Over the past year, Meridian Place staff have hosted Twitter Chat sessions (#AAGChat) on topics such as Careers in Geography, Geography and the New Presidential Administration, the AAG Awards Program, and Geography Awareness Week. These chats, which will continue this year, are valuable opportunities to have a dialogue with the AAG and learn from each other’s questions and comments. If you have not yet participated in one of these Twitter Chats, I encourage you to do so.
The Association has recently added an Instagram account. Instagram is a photo and video sharing service, and its visual nature is a good fit for many geographers who create and analyze maps, images, and other representations. The AAG is currently using Instagram to connect with and feature the work of undergraduate and graduate students. Some of you may have noticed the Instagram call for students to share pictures and videos related to their summer research. The AAG anticipates that the new Instagram channel will engage and capture new generations of geographers, highlight the importance of mentorship and faculty-student collaboration in the discipline, and inspire students to present their research at annual meetings. Students represent 40 percent of our members, and it is important to help them make the most of their AAG membership and wider experience as geographers. In this respect, social media is critical to sustaining the discipline.
Innovations in social media development are also evident in a number of specialty and affinity groups and among some of our AAG regional divisions. In SEDAAG, the editors of Southeastern Geographer, Hilda Kurtz and Deepak Mishra of the University of Georgia, use Twitter (@SEGeographer) to publicize papers as each issue of the journal is published. Hilda and Deepak tweet announcements of articles, tagging the author’s home institution as well as public broadcasting outlets in the author’s home media market and the site of the paper’s case study or empirical focus. It is my hope that our flagship journals, Annals of the AAG and Professional Geographer, can soon participate in a similarly targeted and aggressive use of social media promotion.
Opportunities, Challenges, and Strategies on Twitter
To move quickly and effectively in the area of public outreach is not simply the job of AAG, but an important responsibility for all of us individually and collectively. Engaging social media requires a thoughtfulness that we often do not see among our politicians and celebrities. Some of you might be reluctant, and rightly so, to venture out beyond traditional academic communication without an understanding of what social media may offer, its possible pitfalls, and how best to navigate the new(ish) medium. I asked several Twitter-active AAG members to share their impressions with me. Below is a summary of those impressions, which I have limited to their professional use of social media.
When asked about the benefits of participating in Twitter, our colleagues consistently emphasize how social media allows them to expand their scholarly networks and thus facilitate research and teaching. One can follow and engage established and emerging major thinkers in the field, although not all are social media active. Some of my respondents note that contacts made in the Twittersphere have led to “real world” introductions at conferences and later even collaborations. Social media allows many geographers to hear about new publications, ongoing projects, forthcoming meetings, fluid national and international political crises, and natural disasters (e.g. recent flooding from Hurricane Harvey).
In addition to what Twitter can provide in information and networking, it has proven especially powerful in spurring discussion and debate and gaining access to a wide range of perspectives on issues important to one’s work. The capacity of Twitter to assist people to view a situation or issue from an alternate perspective depends upon the diversity of people and organizations one follows. As one colleague points out, a “confirmation bias” is prevalent among users, meaning that we tend to follow Twitter accounts that conform with our interests and point of view. To assist in understanding an array of perspectives, another colleague suggests that we follow a variety of people and organizations on Twitter, including those with whom we disagree.
There is an important subjectivity at work in Twitter as users fashion and project a public identity as well as critical voice. Advocacy work is increasingly important to geographers from many sub-fields, especially in these disruptive times. Social media is also an important vehicle for greater visibility and recognition of one’s work, leading to inquiries from journalists or catching the attention of non-geographers who we hope will cite and build upon our ideas and research findings. Self-promotion, although open to narcissistic abuse, is not negative if deployed for advancing larger academic and public conversations and ensuring that geography is included rather than excluded from those debates. Some geographers use Twitter to promote the achievements of their colleagues, students, and programs—a nice counterpoint to the zero sum politics found in many universities.
Twitter certainly brings certain professional opportunities, but a strategic approach is required to manage the platform’s challenges. One is limited in how much one can say in a tweet (140 characters), although links to longer comments can be included. The brevity of communication can make it difficult to get the intonation of posted comments right and tweets are open to misinterpretation as with any form of communication. Some of this is unavoidable, such as when another user appropriates or “re-tweets” your comment out of context, but constantly being reflexive and reflective of what one says online should take precedence over knee jerk reactions.
The openness of social media facilitates a culture of outrage and academicians are easy targets for people and organizations not only interested in disagreeing with us but also seeking to damage our reputations. Some employers can be quite sensitive to social media posts. One of my colleagues suggests a “10 minute rule” when one sees something that is disagreeable. If you have to react, then draft an angry tweet, save it, and then come back in 10 minutes. The issue of time is also salient in that Twitter is just one of many of our other duties. Some of the more successful users limit time on Twitter to certain times of the day or only so many minutes a day.
Finally, gaining followers can be a slow and at times disheartening process that requires frequent tweeting, searching for and following others, tagging highly regarded people and organizations in tweets, using hashtags # that are trending, including Twitter handles on presentations and publications, and generating meaningful content and opinion. According to one consulting colleague, “people who share good information and provide thoughtful perspectives do tend to build a following over time.” It is also easier to create compelling content and build a following when you think strategically about what you want to accomplish through social media. Simply joining the Twitter or any social media bandwagon without a goal will probably leave you unsatisfied and the discipline poorly served. Yet, with meaningful direction and a spirit of engagement, investments of time and energy in social media can be a productive and natural extension of one’s traditional academic and professional work as a geographer rather than a distraction from it.
If you, your program, or your workplace currently “move at Twitter speed,” then let me know about your experiences, positive and negative, through email (dalderma [at] utk [dot] edu) or on Twitter using #PresidentAAG.
— Derek Alderman
Professor Geography, University of Tennessee
President, American Association of Geographers @MLKStreet
Special thanks to Sarah Bednarz, Jordan Brasher, Jason Dittmer, Latoya Eaves, Kelsey Ellis, Sara Koopman, Bill Moseley, Becky Pendergast, Kris Olds, James Tyner for contributing information and perspectives to this column.
Coline Dony Joins AAG as Senior Geography Researcher
Coline Dony, Senior Geography Researcher, for the American Association of Geographers
The AAG welcomes Coline Dony as a Senior Geography Researcher. Before joining the AAG staff in Washington, D.C., Coline served as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County where she taught undergraduate and graduate level courses in GIS, geovisualization and programming for spatial data analysis. Coline also taught an undergraduate course in medical geography, her area of expertise.
Coline holds four degrees in geography: a bachelor’s degree and a master of science degree from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, and a master of arts degree and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Coline moved from Brussels to Charlotte, N.C., in 2011 to join an interdisciplinary team doing research on spatial access to healthcare. For her dissertation research, Coline looked at ways to improve people’s health by using better urban planning instead of primarily relying on medical services through a study of access to parks in Charlotte and associated environmental injustices. Other than health geography, Coline cares about bringing programming skills to geographers, especially to female geographers and to social geography programs. In the summer of 2015 she taught for Girls Who Code, a non-profit that aims to see more women pursue their education in a STEM field.
In her role at AAG she is working on a new AAG initiative, “Coding for Girls in GIS and Geography,” helping to develop GIS coding curricular materials, such as python programming for spatio-temporal analysis and many other topics, and is helping to plan a series of workshops on coding for girls and women beginning at the AAG Annual Meeting in New Orleans in 2018. In addition, she is working with the AAG team on a series of webinars and podcasts for the Secondary Cities project.
When not working, Coline likes to watch TV, especially her favorite show: Rectify (on Sundance). Coline also likes to swim and is learning Japanese.
AAG Statement on Charlottesville Tragedy and White Supremacy
The American Association of Geographers is deeply saddened and disturbed by the recent deadly and violent events in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Rallies supported by white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members led to the killing of one counter-protester, the wounding of at least 19 other protesters, and the deaths of two law enforcement officers doing surveillance of the rallies by air. On behalf of its almost 12,000 members, the AAG expresses heartfelt sympathy to the victims of the Charlottesville tragedy and their loved ones.
The AAG also wishes to use this statement to offer the strongest possible condemnation of white supremacy and the perpetrators of this recent violence. The AAG calls upon US federal, state, and local government officials to be unequivocally anti-racist in their denouncement and investigation of white supremacy—not only in Charlottesville but also in the many US communities long harmed by racism in both highly publicized and everyday ways.
Enhancing diversity, promoting inclusion, and advocating for historically marginalized social groups are central to the AAG and its mission. Recent events in Virginia strike at the heart of these values. Moreover, geographers are making important contributions to studying the social and spatial foundations and consequences of racism, violence, and inequality. Yet more can and should be done in the discipline of geography and by academicians and professionals in other fields to address these critical issues.
Members of the AAG are encouraged to use their research, teaching, professional practice, community outreach, and channels of public communication to oppose racism and violence and advocate for a constructive national dialogue about white supremacy and race relations in general. This advocacy can come in many forms based on the abilities and sensitivities of AAG members, but it is vital that the discipline’s informed and committed voices are heard, whether that is through the media, at government and policy meetings, in classrooms, teach-ins and educational forums, or among grass roots community organizing.
Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related areas. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books.
Publishers are welcome to send new volumes to the Editor-in-Chief (Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803).
Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should also contact the Editor-in-Chief.
Emily Fekete joins AAG as Communications, Education, and Media Specialist
The AAG welcomes Emily Fekete in the new position of Communications, Education, and Media specialist. Prior to the AAG, she was employed as a clinical assistant professor and undergraduate coordinator for the geography department at Oklahoma State University. While at the university, she taught courses in cultural geography, economic geography, and geographies of new media as well as served as the undergraduate advisor and coordinator of the undergraduate geography, geospatial information science, and global studies programs.
In her new position at the AAG office in D.C. Emily will lend her expertise in communications and media geographies to the communications team through new content curation, social media and program development.
Emily holds bachelor’s degrees in history and geography as well as a minor in deaf studies from the University of New Hampshire, a Master’s degree in geography from Kent State University, and a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Kansas. Her research projects have been varied within communications geographies including a major focus on offline consumption patterns driven by social media sites as well as activism and social media, cyberwar and cyberterrorism, and deaf/American sign language geographies.
In her free time, Emily and her husband, Kevin, enjoy exploring new breweries and restaurants. She also makes time for ballet dancing, downhill skiing, and hanging out with her black cat, Mulligan.
The August Congressional recess is in full swing in the nation’s capital, and while we’re hard at work at the AAG, President Trump and lawmakers have left Washington for most of this month. Here are a few updates on key policy issues:
OSTP Appointments
As AAG members may recall, we led scientific community efforts in developing a sign-on letter to the Trump Administration urging appointment of a presidential science advisor and other top officials in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The letter was endorsed by 58 organizations and universities, including AAAS and AAU. As of this writing, the president still has not filled the top jobs in OSTP and there are no signs of pending appointments. There has been speculation in Washington that the lack of nominations to key positions across the government is part of an effort by the Administration to downsize the government.
Census Bureau Director
Meanwhile, there also continues to be a vacancy in the leadership of the U.S. Census Bureau. Former Director John Thompson left the Agency in June to take a job as Executive Director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics. Ron Jarmin, a career staffer serving as Associate Director for Economic Programs, has been appointed as the Bureau’s acting head, but the Administration has yet to nominate a permanent director as we head into the critical ramp up for the 2020 Census.
Science Agency Appropriations
The fall will be a critical time for government funding issues. Administration officials have signaled that the government is approaching the statutory debt ceiling and that an increase will be needed to prevent a catastrophic default. Congressional leaders will seek to pass a “clean bill” without any policy riders or related budget cuts, but it is likely that House and Senate conservatives will oppose these efforts. Accordingly, the final bill will probably have to be bipartisan, as happened towards the end of the Obama Administration.
Congressional appropriators have also been hard at work on the bills that will fund federal agencies for Fiscal Year 2018, which begins October 1. The House Appropriations Committee has approved legislation funding the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and both agencies fared significantly better than they did in the Trump Administration’s budget request.
The Foundation would receive $7.3 billion under the House bill, which is a decrease of 1.8 percent from last year’s enacted level, but 10.3 percent above the President’s request. Meanwhile, NIH would be funded at $35.2 billion as part of the House proposal, an increase of 3 percent over last year and a whopping 32 percent above the Administration’s budget. We will continue to keep you up to date on key developments related to federal science funding.
If you have not yet examined the AAG Long Range Plan, 2015-2025, then I encourage you to do so. It provides a useful update on the Association’s progress since its 2002 strategic plan and offers 20 specific recommendations important for the future of AAG and the discipline of geography. One of those recommendations calls on us to “promote outreach and engagement,” which includes encouraging and training AAG members to write and speak for general audiences to maximize the contributions of geography to public debates, policy initiatives, and the broader civic society.
Many of my presidential columns over the coming year, including this one, will focus intently on offering some ideas on how geographers can further enhance their level of public engagement and outreach, communication savviness, and skills in advocacy and disciplinary promotion. Much of my time and energy will be spent developing an initiative I call “Geography is REAL” (Responsive, Engaged, Advocating, and Life-Improving). With the approval and help of the AAG Council, I hope this initiative will yield concrete programmatic results.
The purpose of REAL is to create and open spaces within our discipline to demonstrate the larger public value of a geographic perspective to a wider world. Making Geography REAL is also about supporting geographers as they move beyond simply analyzing issues and problems to making informed and ethical interventions in how public groups understand, debate, and act on those problems.
An important part of any effort to enhance the engagement and outreach focus of our discipline must address the centrality of public communication within the scientific process and its importance to the health of geography as a discipline competing for resources, practitioners, policy position, media recognition, and simply respect. The purpose of this column is to characterize public communication as “serious business,” meaning that the consequences of effective or poor communication should not be taken lightly. Moreover, writing and speaking to wider publics is indeed work and it requires strategies. The AAG can play a key role in training members in these strategies while also carrying out its own impressive communication efforts with social media, SmartBriefs, and the new Data Dashboard. I conclude this column with some specific suggestions to help start this process.
Before moving on, allow me to make an important point. I emphasize “publics” as plural, recognizing there are a vast number of community groups, governmental agencies, educational institutions, media outlets, non-profits, and private firms within which the work and perspectives of geographers can and do make a difference. The public is most assuredly our colleagues and students in the academy and our co-workers in the industry workplace, but I am especially mindful about engaging non-academic communities who are often unhelpfully lumped together as “the general public.”
While the AAG long-range plan is correct in arguing that “[g]eographic scholarship is increasingly influential beyond academia” (p. 13), there remains a great need to elevate and clarify geography’s wider public identity and to communicate more effectively and broadly the case for geography as a transformative and uniquely integrative field. At grocery store checkout lines, at my local bar, and even at family reunions, I find ordinary, everyday people blissfully unaware of what geographers do and what they bring to addressing social and environmental issues and problems. As my colleague Josh Inwood (at Pennsylvania State University) is known to say in working with public groups: “Geography is the most important thing that most people have never thought about.”
Public Communication as Matter of Science and Survival
Pubic communication is not something that comes easily or naturally to everyone, and individual scholars and academic programs have not traditionally prioritized it. Many of us have viewed efforts to engage and communicate with public groups as simply a matter of marketing or service rather than the “real” work of scientists. The process of translating and disseminating one’s scholarship to popular audiences is actually an important form of scientific work. Public communication is central to scientific process because it legitimizes the social relevance and broader implications of the science. Good science, in my view, does not stop at the publication of a journal article or book chapter, but seeks to make those findings understandable, relatable, and useful to a larger world.
Has science ever been about just the work in the laboratory, in the field, or in the archives? Very seldom do we carry out science merely for the purposes of testing hypotheses, formulating new social theory, or mapping change across the landscape. We undertake our scholarship to affect change, whether that means changing the conversation about a scientific issue, often of public importance, or going as far as resisting what we see an injustice within society. Demonstrating the broader impact of research is a now an established evaluation criteria for grant proposals submitted to funding agencies such as the NSF. Offices of research and deans at universities now employ communication staff who work with faculty and students to promote public understanding and appreciation of scholarship. Such outreach efforts are essential when we recognize that many lay communities are not reading research papers—even if they could get behind the paywall of publishers.
Higher education increasingly faces questions about its relevance, particularly in these disruptive times of tightening budgets, program elimination, and increased public hostility toward universities. This has further raised pressure to improve communication outside the academy. Our discipline has a vulnerable position at some of these institutions. Moreover, geography is not a major selected by students right when they enter college and geography curriculum has been weakened in many state public school systems in the US. It is imperative that geographers help direct what public groups hear and know about our discipline rather leaving it to chance or to non-geographers. Greater public communication from and about geography is critical for our discipline to thrive if not simply to sustain itself. A more communicative geography is not necessarily about political activism, although it can be. Yet, effective communication of evidence-based and theoretically informed scholarship is a key tool in challenging the current “post-truth” environment.
Public Communication Not Same as Academic Communication
A growing number of organizations recognize the great value of publicizing scientific results and perspectives, but they also realize that many scholars are poorly prepared to engage and communicate outside of their academic cultures. These organizations have established programs and resources to help train faculty, students, and other professional researchers. For example, Compass, which recently led a workshop for department heads/chairs at the 2017 AAG meeting in Boston, helps researchers refine their messages to be meaningful to non-scientists while also connecting scientists to journalists, policy-makers, and other audiences. The Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science hosts media training and improvisation workshops for scientists. It, like Compass, stresses the importance of scholars moving beyond the dry presentations of data to tell great, evocative stories about themselves and their work. Both organizations will tell you that this story-telling draws upon skills not a part of a traditional college curriculum.
Shepherd
University of Georgia’s Marshall Shepherd, former President of the American Meteorological Society and a past recipient of the AAG Media Achievement Award, has an envious career built upon not only important basic research but also the translation of his work and passion for atmospheric science to large segments of the American public. In a 2016 Forbes column, Marshall offers nine helpful tips for communicating science to non-scientists. His tips are an effective primer for geographers thinking of taking their work and perspectives more public. He emphasizes the importance of offering non-scientists a concise and jargon-free message that is not generic but tailored to one’s audience. As he writes: “Scientists need to work hard to make their message memorable, meaningful, and miniature.”
Of special note is Marshall’s point that researchers and public audiences have inherently different styles of communication. While scholars frequently present considerable amounts of background information and theory before delivering results, the public and policymaker need and expect key findings to be provided early on and in a straight-forward fashion.
Although it might seem counter-intuitive, effective engagement and communication with wider publics requires us to be good listeners as well as compelling speakers. To carry out a wider communication of science simply for the sake of self-promotion without allowing ourselves to be enriched by the experiences and knowledges of non-academics is a lost opportunity to generate the mutual benefit that is the backbone of public engagement. Finally, it is critical that these moments of public communication be made into moments of disciplinary advocacy in which we clearly identify ourselves as geographers and speak directly to why our field matters in today’s world. I would encourage you to be good stewards of not just your sub-field but the whole of geography.
I am interested in knowing how AAG members are engaging in public communication and outreach. Please share your thoughts and experiences by emailing me (dalderma [at] utk [dot] edu) or share on Twitter #PresidentAAG.
— Derek Alderman
University of Tennessee
Twitter: @MLKStreet
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To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
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The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
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For the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting in New Orleans, the National Center for Research in Geography Education (NCRGE) is welcoming abstracts and organized session proposals for a special track of sessions on Transformative Research in Geography Education during the AAG Annual Meeting on April 10-14, 2018, in New Orleans. This track aims to raise the visibility of research in geography education, grow the NCRGE research coordination network, and provide productive spaces for discussion about geography education research and the notion of what makes research in the field potentially transformative.
The American Association of Geographers is deeply saddened and disturbed by the recent deadly and violent events in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The AAG welcomes Emily Fekete in the new position of Communications, Education, and Media specialist. Prior to the AAG, she was employed as a clinical assistant professor and undergraduate coordinator for the geography department at Oklahoma State University. While at the university, she taught courses in cultural geography, economic geography, and geographies of new media as well as served as the undergraduate advisor and coordinator of the undergraduate geography, geospatial information science, and global studies programs.
