Statement by AAG JEDI Committee: Recommitting to Our Core Values

Since January 20, 2025, over 100 Executive Orders have been issued together with a raft of “Dear Colleague” letters and other executive branch actions have resulted in funding freezes, audits and removal of identity and justice-related words from agencies, stop work orders, slashes to overhead rates for grant funding, and layoffs. These actions have sown chaos and distress. This shock and awe approach is awful. It has wreaked havoc on the education sector and seeks to curtail academic freedom of inquiry and teaching through funding mechanisms and ideological litmus tests. These actions take aim at issues, values, and people whom geographers hold close to our hearts and ethical commitments:

• The indivisibility of justice. Racial justice, environmental justice, climate justice, gender justice, disability justice, social justice are interdependent and uphold one another.
• Freedom of ethical inquiry and teaching: Our capacity to conduct research and teach can be eroded through austerity measures, including the shuttering of departments, indebtedness as the condition of study, and cuts to government funding of research. It can also be eroded by seeking to invalidate and legislate away entire areas of inquiry. As the association held in 2023, “Knowledge, accessible and freely offered, remains the best tool against intolerance and injustice. Whenever state-level actions are taken to suppress civil rights and academic freedom, they threaten the principles of equity, knowledge accessibility, and educational freedom that are the pillars of a healthy society. They also undermine the safety and fundamental human rights of LGBT2QIA+ people and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).”
• Transformation of our field and association: Geographers have been working to confront the field’s colonial past and histories of harmful research and exclusion. We have been actively working to transform the AAG to dismantle barriers to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

During this difficult time, we affirm the AAG member-created Statement of Professional Ethics: “Our discipline of geography is stronger when we uphold equity, human rights, and educational freedom across the breadth of geographic inquiry. We appreciate the diversity of our members’ experiences and backgrounds, as well as the broad variety of ideas and approaches to geographic knowledge production.”

This commitment is enshrined in the AAG Statement of Professional Ethics. The AAG remains true to these ethical commitments and to Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI). We reaffirm our previous statements opposing cuts to HEGS at NSF, our opposition to “state-sponsored attacks on diversity initiatives and on critical studies of racial inequity across the United States,” and our support for critical inquiry and the rights and lives of LGBT2QIA+ people and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).

We still have work to do and will continue our commitment and support for our members who have fought for human flourishing, fought for the Earth, and have fought to make this discipline responsible to and worthy of the world.

— The AAG JEDI Committee, February 2025

View JEDI Committee’s Resources for Defending Geographic Inquiry and Our Communities