Practicing Growth
I started running in my 40s because I was professionally and personally sad, stuck, and a little angry. I started running because I wanted to teach myself that I could change. I had never run a single mile—but I wanted to exercise that muscle of change and discipline. I’m a terrible runner and I’ll never be fast, but nowadays, running on a little uneven trail through the trees feels like an integral part of who I am. When a recent injury kept me out of the woods, I craved it. In every graduate seminar, I have a similar conversation with students about writing. I tell them: the most important thing to remember is that your relationship to writing can change. When I was a student, handing in late and sloppy seminar papers, I thought that was just me. But writing my dissertation, and then writing books, I had to make writing feel like part of who I am: if I write every day, I’m a writer. If I practice at not writing—that becomes who I am too.
At our AAG Council meeting in DC in September, I was thinking about running, I was thinking about writing, I was thinking about how we build habits and strengths and how we lose them. As Council, we are faced with an array of challenges—both the pressures and tensions we experience at our own institutions, and internal calls for changing our organization in a precarious moment. As Council faces these challenges we are also growing and strengthening our capacity to meet our current moment (as prior Councils met challenges such as Covid). We are exercising that muscle of growth. We might feel this is especially difficult in this political moment—but we need to keep practicing, keep rehearsing for growth, or we will lose that strength.
In DC, we collaborated and strategized on wide-ranging issues. How can we make the conference less expensive, while also keeping our commitments and services? How can we bring more folks to our conferences—particularly during a moment of constrained financial support for science? Many of our physical geographers can now only attend one conference (or less) per year. How can we make AAG a can’t-miss event? (Please tell me). We have pledged to site our conference in union hotels, to have a resource person on call for cases of harassment, to provide subsidized childcare, and to have an open convention (meaning, everyone can participate—we do not reject submissions). We have been trying to balance these commitments and investments with what might make our conference more financially accessible—e.g., holding it in smaller and less-expensive cities, while also trying to choose cities that members will be excited to visit and where our diverse members will feel safe and welcome.
I was grateful and impressed at how Council takes up these thoughtful issues. I think we have grown as an institution—in part because of recent difficult conversations.
At the Detroit AAG meeting (one of our most popular and definitely my favorite recent conference)—you might have seen many of our members in keffiyeh, wearing red Geographers for Justice in Palestine pins on their AAG name badges. You might have signed the GJP petition; or conversely, you might have felt frustrated by this approach to the Palestine question. In fact, you might have met me in this context, before I joined Council after my election. Building on momentum from university-based activism, in a raw response to the unbearable violence in Gaza, and often grounded in decades of work on this issue, our members were working to ask AAG as an organization to respond to the moment.
Over the last year, you witnessed us working to respond to this petition. Last year AAG released four responses: a statement, a change in our investment practices, an ethical partnerships policy, and a Displaced Scholars Program. Out of these responses, I have been particularly energized by our work with displaced scholars and by our investment changes. In addition to an ethical investment strategy that avoids fossil fuels, we now also added screens that filter out investment in military and weapons technology. This made our organization a leader in the movement to disinvest from war and from the occupation. We recognize that our choices on these issues are making the future, and we want to make the most ethical decisions that we can as a large organization. I have also been moved by the generosity of our members supporting the AAG Displaced Scholars Program—something I will write more about in a future column.
A Practice for Change and Community
Just before the Council meeting, and then right after, Council received two requests. First, before the meeting, Geographers for Justice in Palestine reached out, asking us to consider calling a membership vote on boycotting Israeli institutions. Just after our meeting, we received a request from the Climate Action Committee to develop an AAG policy on generative artificial intelligence.
GJP’s request came with over 300 signatures from geographers: senior professors whose work I have cited for over a decade, junior faculty trying to get tenure, graduate students taking time away from their dissertations to work on this issue. As President, I understand that my role is to work hard to serve all our members and to work for the future of AAG. I understand my charge to be to learn as much as possible about our members’ hopes and aspirations for our organization, and to reflect the will of the member-elected AAG Council. In my informal response to GJP, I wrote that I understand their work to be labor toward justice and their appeal to us to reflect their trust in us as an organization to get these issues right.
As faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I have watched generations of students pour their love and trust into the institution—in the form of protests and demands that the university do better. I have always seen this as unpaid labor—often they are doing the research and work that the university has neglected—and often the university slowly improves by compromising with their demands. This work has taught me to listen, even when it’s uncomfortable.
When my daughter and I slept out under the stars at our university’s short-lived Gaza solidarity encampment, we knew that our little camp would get dismantled. We knew it was only a question of when the police would be knocking over tents and arresting students. But this didn’t make that effort less valuable: it was a practice in developing new skills, new community, and building an infrastructure for a different kind of future. Like my clumsy running, it was proof that we can change, that we can develop new skills and capacities that will help us live together differently.
As always, in my role as President, I am eager to learn from you how we can build new and more expansive forms of community together.
Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email AAG President Sara Smith directly to enable a constructive discussion.
