A Good Day for Geography, Every Day
The late Will Graf would end his AAG President's columns with this optimistic affirmation: It's a good day for Geography. Given the last year, you might be surprised to hear that it is just as true today as it was during his tenure in 1998-99. Let me explain. As I write this, it is the…
Ethical Research in the Age of COVID-19: A Participatory Forum
Introduction AAG assembled the following perspectives from the discussions during the AAG Participatory Forum on New Requirements for Ethical Geographic Science in Rapid Research held October 1st, 2020. We worked with AAAS’s Science and Human Rights Coalition to experiment with a format that could help us overcome the lack of face-to-face exchanges and networking. We…
Resilience in GIS Education
COVID-19 Cases across the United States. Bang. The spring semester was cut short, everyone was sent home, and the fall semester is still morphing. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a reset in the way we think about teaching and learning. Distance learning is not new, of course, but forced distance learning on a global scale—that's…
Geographers Recognized for National Research on COVID-19
Projects address mobility patterns, access to health care and food systems, racial and disability disparities during the pandemic WASHINGTON, DC…Geographers have been recognized in 16 research and educational fellowships from The Geospatial Software Institute (GSI) Conceptualization Project. The fellowships support 14 projects that tackle COVID-19’s challenges for public health, social networks and contact tracing, housing…
Participate in AAG’s New Career and Research Mentors Program
Within AAG’s COVID-19 Rapid Response Task Force, members proposed the creation of a mentoring program in a time when students and colleagues may have limited access to previous peer and professional contacts and mentors, while also facing new challenges. In response, the AAG has created a new program with the goal of facilitating more connections…
Participatory Forum on New Requirements for Ethical Geographic Science in Rapid Research
COVID-19 calls upon researchers to navigate a fast-paced scientific inquiry process under enormous public scrutiny. The rapid funding mechanisms, abundance of geographic data from emerging technologies, and the “real-time” expectations and needs of governments have posed new challenges to traditionally accepted research methods and timelines, collaborative relationships, parameters for data sharing, and public expectations of…
The Spatial Scale of ‘We’
Every day around my town, I see signs of encouragement, most frequently — “We’re All In This Together.” That statement refers to the coronavirus pandemic, suggesting and assuming that we are all equally engaged in and affected by the pandemic. Similar messaging is delivered via emails, websites, and store speakers. Oregon’s public campaign takes the…
Summer Series on questions of Geoethics and Human Rights highlighted by COVID-19 Conditions
Introduction By Coline Dony and Emily Fekete This series developed from discussions that took place at the AAG’s Virtual Annual Meeting, April 6-10, 2020, during publicly available panels of the breaking theme “Geographers Respond to COVID-19”. The panels were set up by AAG specialty groups and their chairs who wanted to initiate discussions about the…
Facing an Existential Crisis or COVID-19 and the Long Term Future of Geography
It does not seem so long ago that people were talking about the compression of space and time, about the “ends of history and geography.” How recent events have obliterated this! The pandemic of COVID-19—with its echoes of the 1918 Spanish Flu and the great contagious scourges of the past—demonstrates again that “history doesn't repeat…
Geographers Act on COVID19
GeoDS Lab at University of Wisconsin, Madison. County-level Spring 2020 travel data from March shows thousands of trips generated in the , which may help explain the rapid growth of infection cases across the country. On March 23, AAG asked how our members and followers are responding to the COVID19 pandemic. We got an extraordinary…