Confessions of a Conference Thief
The views and opinions expressed in op-eds published in the AAG Newsletter are those of the author(s) and do not imply endorsement by the American Association of Geographers. The AAG accepts submissions of op-eds for AAG news content consideration. Authors must be current AAG members. The decision to publish op-eds is at the discretion of…
Civil Rights Featured Theme of 2017 Geography Awareness Week: A Call for Participation
Established by a joint resolution of the Congress in 1987, Geography Awareness Week (GAW) is observed the third week in November every year. GAW promotes what geography is, why it is important, and the relevance of a geographic education in preparing citizens to understand and debate pressing social and environmental issues and problems. This year's…
A Museum of Geography, What?
Los Angeles's Hollywood Bowl Overlook (Beau Rogers via Compfight) On October 21, 2016, the Los Angeles Museum of Geography opened its first exhibition, “The Homeless Amongst Us,” in its temporary home at 2426 SET in the West Adams district of The exhibit, designed by John May and Zeina Koreitem of Millions Architecture, consists of three…
Wither “Traditional” Geography?
Everyone who has taken a basic geography course know its Greek etymology as coined by Eratosthenes: geo, meaning “earth” and graphe, meaning to “describe.” For many centuries after, geography was synonymous with exploration and discovery, both of the physical/natural and cultural/human/social landscapes. While geographers past may have noted differences between the landscape dichotomy they practiced…
Op-Ed: Make Civil Rights a Geography Awareness Week Theme
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial By Night - Washington DC (Glyn Lowe via Compfight) We have thought for some time now that it would be educationally productive to have a Geography Awareness Week theme devoted to civil rights. Tragically, events over the summer—especially the massacre at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South…
Op-Ed: #KickOutTheKKK: Challenging White Supremacy at UNC
Figure 1. UNC students protesting for the renaming of Saunders Hall as Hurston Hall (courtesy of The Daily Tar Heel/Claire Collins) On May 28, 2015, the Board of Trustees at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill voted to rename Saunders Hall—the building in which the Geography Department is located—following months of student…
Op-Ed: A Graduate Student Perspective on Geography
Editor’s Note: This essay was written for a graduate course on “Contemporary Geographic Thought,” which is co-taught by Professors Bruce Rhoads and David Wilson at the University of Illinois. Students were asked to respond to four open-ended questions: 1) How has the course shaped your perception and understanding of geography, 2) Do you see geography…
Op-Ed: Preemption and Scalar Politics, from Living Wages to Hydraulic Fracturing
If municipal political geographies seem boring, think again. In Texas, where we study municipal oil and gas drilling ordinances with support from the National Science Foundation (and live in cities with active drilling), fundamental questions are being raised: What are state governments for? What are municipalities for? How do opposing sides frame their struggles to…
Justice and Place
In this forum and with this audience I doubt that it will be at all controversial to state that justice and place are intimately connected. After all, geographers are typically quite aware of such relationships. Or at least one hopes that they are typically quite aware of this. The dynamics between geography and justice is…
Can China’s Urbanization Save the World?
For the first time in Chinese history more people now live in cities and towns than in the countryside. Some 700 million urban dwellers now account for more than half of China’s total population. Many pundits, such as Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, have said this urban transition will be one of the two main forces…