Toward a More Grounded Geography Community

I’m writing to you from a hot summer in Carrboro, North Carolina. My daughter has a long to-do list: make art, write, play in the woods, see family. As an assistant professor, I’ve felt guilty when I wasn’t working or being efficient. Sometimes we are teaching and cursing ourselves for not writing — then we write and get to the classroom and judge ourselves for not being better prepared. Instead, I hope you all are out in the sunshine.

I’m humbled to write to you as president of AAG, and grateful for everything I learned as vice president. I was shocked to get nominated, but am eager to serve during uncertain times. This is a good time for all of us to think about who we are to one another and how we can stay true to hardwon values of justice, freedom of speech, and equity. Let’s move with joy, be of service, and strengthen one another. I want to use this first column to introduce myself and my taskforce, speak to our current political context, and ask for your continued hard work and engagement.

Most of you are learning my name for the first time. I am an anticolonial and feminist political geographer. I started my research in Ladakh, in the Indian Himalaya, along contested borders with Pakistan and China. In my first research I developed the concept of intimate geopolitics — that who we love and how we interact with our neighbors is territorial and shaped by colonial legacies, making embodied life geopolitical. It’s a classic feminist and political question: how do our intimate lives make the world? Then, with my first student, Mabel Gergan, I worked with Himalayan college students to understand experiences of racism and personal transformation as they attended university in big Indian cities. Alongside this research, I began to work to reshape political geography and feminist geography through engagement with anticolonial, Black, and Indigenous geographies. In recent years, I have co-founded two collectives:

• The Desirable Futures Collective studies time: what kind of futures are available for whom? How is time a tool to claim territory through telling stories about past and future?
• The Landback Abolition Project, co-founded with Dr. Danielle Purifoy, works alongside community to understand what justice would look like at our university with its lasting legacy of indigenous dispossession and slavery.

These experiences have contributed to my vision for the presidency, and work with AAG beyond that. My Grounded Relations and Repair Taskforce takes up the question of our ethical relations to people and place. I want to showcase how geographers can be in good ethical relations to the history and present of their institutions. How can we be accountable to Native nations? To the enslaved labor that built many of our universities? To workers who clean and care for our institutions? I want to see a geography where every geography student learns to ask whose land they are on and consider their ethical responsibilities to the communities that sustain them.

Supporting Each Other Through Difficult Times

I’m writing during a challenging time for all of us in education. I want to call us in to support one another, and not to concede to the current political climate but rather to be in solidarity and lean into our core values. We cannot afford to give up the gains we have made. As vice president I had the pleasure of traveling to our regional conferences in Cincinnati, Lexington, and Milwaukee, and our political climate and lack of resources for scholarship were the first things that geographers talked to me about. Geographers are drawn to the discipline because they love its creativity, interdisciplinary nature and expansiveness, but most of all because they want to change the world for the better. Geographers work for justice, for healthy and beautiful and equitable urban spaces, for climate justice and environmental protection. We are an increasingly diverse and inclusive discipline.

These values that we worked so hard to cultivate and these spaces — that we worked so hard to create — are at risk.

Faculty wonder if they can teach on race and gender — the exact topics they cultivated expertise in over their careers. Environmental scientists with decades of training and NSF and NASA grants wonder how to fund their work. Graduate students ask if they need to stop studying environmental justice. International scholars can’t go home to visit their families because they worry they won’t make it back in the country. We all worry our neighbors will be picked up in ICE raids. Will our chancellors or administrators will have our backs? My chair, Conghe Song, like many department heads, never seems to leave his office: reassuring faculty their work is valued, trying to figure out scholars’ visas, seeking ways to keep us funded, and that support is such a comfort in these times. But I want you to know that AAG is here for you as well. AAG has been signing onto letters about social science and climate funding, reaching out to faculty facing institutional problems, and working to protect international scholars. I think we have more power than we think, and even more so when we stand up together.

Grounding Our Practice and Our Connections

I want to encourage us to be thinking about our ethical relations to one another and to place — and this shapes the upcoming annual meeting in New York City along with my task force. I invite us to take up these questions in New York next February, through the themes of Grounded Relations and Desirable Futures. As researchers and scientists and writers and teachers — how can we build a community grounded in our ethical relations to people and place, and intentionally create a future in which we can not only survive, but thrive?

Lastly, I want to ask us all to create collective structures to protect and affirm one another. The last year at AAG has been an inspiring one. We faced some of the most daunting challenges around federal funding and the political climate, and renewed concerns about the shuttering or merging of geography departments. But we also saw our members deeply consider our global relations — I was particularly moved by our members’ work on Palestinian liberation. I see the courage and work for this cause to be the best of our geographers’ impulses to be politically engaged, and put into practice Fannie Lou Hamer’s call that “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” One antidote to anxiety is action, and particularly action in the service of others. Can you build something with your colleagues, your students, your coworkers?

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.