What’s Around the Corner?
Winkler Thank you for the opportunity to serve as president of the Association of American Geographers. This is an unexpected, but much appreciated, honor and responsibility, and I am excited to represent the AAG and its membership during the upcoming year. Throughout this year, please feel free to contact me with your thoughts regarding the…
Doing No Harm
There is a remarkable disconnect between the many forms of violence stalking the earth, and a lack of attention to and critical reflection on violence by geographers. Arguably, at least in the United States, violence is now so pervasive, at every scale, that we take it for granted. For humans, this ranges from domestic and…
Geography and the Neoliberalizing Academy
The role of post-secondary educational institutions in our ecology of knowledge production is shifting rapidly. Our Association must pay close attention to these shifts in its upcoming long-range planning process, given its 110 year commitment to representing the interests of academic/professional geographers. These changes, currently dominated by neoliberalization, will challenge Geography’s ability to maintain its…
An American Association of Geographers?
Naming objects is a time-honored preoccupation among geographers, whether those objects are places, concepts, or discourses. We know that names profoundly convey meaning, reflect the agendas and thinking of those who coin them, and are always contested and occasionally altered (Mumbai/Bombay, Chemnitz/Karl Marx Stadt and Myanmar/Burma come to mind). It’s high time we turned these…
Digital Earth?
As geographers, we revel in the attention our discipline garners with the explosion of geographic information technologies and georeferenced data. We cannot be complacent, however: digital earth is not simply a digital atlas, nor should we limit ourselves to visualizing its ever-more complex patterns. Digital earth is nothing less than a potential shift in how…
The Online Revolution: New Knowledge Geographies?
Last month, I advocated decentering the production of geographical knowledge. This month, I explore online revolutions in information flows, and the tensions these pose for decentering geographical knowledge. At the heart of these is a tension in the power-geometries of cyberspace itself—which is far from the flat world/global village visions of its most ardent proponents.…
Public Geographies
How should geographers engage with the world? Building on an initiative of Michael Burawoy, ex-president of the American Sociological Association, I propose that more disciplinary effort be put into public geographies. One of the great features of geography is that it is grounded—not just because we study the earth, but in the sense that geography…
Diversifying Geography
In my first Newsletter column, I wrote about how important it is for Geography to diversify the voices that constitute our scholarship. At this time, when departments with graduate programs are deciding on who to admit for 2013, I remind you of one of the main recommendations from the 2006 AAG Diversity Task Force Report:…
Geography’s Cultures of Publication
In many ways, Geography mirrors the western academy as a whole, which is why we often seem like misfits within the disciplinary boxes used to organize this academy. How we publish is one of those ways. Our cultures of scholarly publication range from multi-authored highly abbreviated articles summarizing scientific results (particularly physical geographers), to conference…
Is Los Angeles a Cash Cow?
October 24 is the (current) deadline for submitting a paper or session to the 2013 AAG national meeting in Los Angeles, for which regular members pay a registration fee of $295. Many of the AAG members I talk to find this expensive, assuming that the AAG central Office regards the annual meeting as a cash…
Beyond the U.S. Academy
Our Association has become a “center of calculation” for Geography around the world. Its annual meetings attract more geographers, presenting more research, than the quadrennial International Geographic Union meetings. geography departments, along with those in the UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand, dominate the production and dissemination of geographic research, not least through the…
Geography Outside-in
I am honored and delighted that you have given me the opportunity to act as your Association president for 2012-13. In these columns—a new experience for me—I seek to provoke us all to think critically and creatively about the relationship between Geography as a discipline and the multifaceted socionatural geographies that occupy and shape our…