Sentinels of geography: legacy,public policy and contemporary relevance

Many geographers, past and present, have addressed public policy issues facing nations and peoples and in the process offered solutions to highly complex problems. Three ‘sentinels’ of the discipline, Halford Mackinder, Carl Sauer and Thomas Griffith Taylor, served as protectors of geography speaking up for the science in a way often confronting public officials, politicians and others. They contributed significantly to the development of geography in Britain, the USA, Australia and Canada, while engaging in public policy debates on topics such as geopolitics, geographical constraints on land use and natural resource management. All three were advocates for the unity of geography, stressing how an understanding of the interconnectedness of natural and human phenomena can assist in decision making. They were often frustrated by what they saw as ill-informed policies which did not respect geographic realities. Given their varied contributions, it is difficult to fully assess their impact both during their long and productive lifetimes, and subsequently, especially given the interdisciplinary and contested nature of their research. Today, academic geographers are faced with having to increasingly ‘prove the impact’ of their research, something beyond the comprehension of previous generations. Lessons from an analysis of the work of these ‘sentinels’, as well as my own experience, show how difficult a task this will be.     

A Review of “The Future of Intermodal Freight Transport: Operations,Design, and Policy”

This article analyzes the interrelationship among resource consumption, sociospatial justice, and what is popularly known as global warming by interrogating the ecological footprint of professional geographers, especially in terms of their conference-going involving air travel. In this spirit, the article introduces and employs the concepts of ecological privilege (as well as its inextricably related antithesis, ecological disadvantage) and dys-ecologism as a way to understand the roots and implications of professional geographers’ fossil fuel use and those of globally advantaged classes more broadly. To illustrate this, the article measures the flight-related ecological footprint of the 2011 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in Seattle, Washington. In doing so, the article examines how professional geographers, in the form of the AAG, have responded to their travel-related ecological footprint. It thus highlights the importance of scrutinizing the complex and dynamic interrelationships among consumption; associated socioecological benefits and detriments and their systemic manifestations; and hierarchy-related and power-infused categories of race, class, and nation—and their spatialities.     

Climate change and national security: an agenda for geography

On 4 December 2017 the Australian Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee is due to report on its inquiry into the implications of climate change for Australia's national security. Public submissions to the inquiry closed on 4 August 2017 and, at the time of writing, some 59 submissions had been made by researchers, public-interest organisations and members of the public, including a number of geographers. A topic of profound significance, climate change and national security warrants deep and sustained public engagement such as that offered by the Senate Inquiry submission process. In this Thinking Space essay, I urge geographers, working in Australia and internationally, to make ongoing contributions to such engagements. The emerging debate about climate change and national security will likely amplify following the release of the Committee's report. Geographic data and analysis pertaining to various aspects of climate change and security are needed in order to shape policy directions and support evidence-based policy making. My contention here is that contributions ought to extend not just from those working at the coalface of climate change risk, for example in political geography, but from all quarters of the discipline.     

Geography's Human Resources over the Past Half‐Century*

This article examines trends over the past five decades in three human resource issues in geography: the production of new geographers; the size and diversity of the membership of the Association of American Geographers (AAG); and the topical specializations of geographers. The number of geography degrees awarded increased rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by a modest decline as baby boomers exited their college years. The number surged again in the 1990s, however, and it seems to have stabilized in recent years. AAG membership trends followed a similar trajectory and membership is currently poised to set a new record. The participation of women in the discipline has increased steadily over the past half‐century, but geography still lags the social and physical sciences in the share of women receiving bachelor's degrees. The participation of geographers from ethnic minority groups continues to be very low. The number of AAG specialty groups has doubled since their inception in 1978, and geographic information science (GIS) now occupies a prominent position within the discipline. Challenges in the coming years include increasing the diversity in geography, reducing the turnover in AAG membership, preparing for the imminent retirement of a large cohort of baby‐boom geographers, and reconnecting with nonacademic geographers.     

Intellectuals in the Public: Uniting a Divided Baltimore

The University of Baltimore offered a community-based course following the Baltimore unrest in 2015. The course, which we called Divided Baltimore, engaged scores of students and community members together in a weekly forum of presentations and hard discussion. It focused on how Baltimore became segregated, how segregation affects all Baltimoreans, and what we could do about it. I discuss how the course worked, what we learned, and how we were able to pull off the course in short order. The key to what we accomplished was having built community partnerships around structural racism and racial equity in Baltimore over a period of several years before 2015. The lesson is that we can all do this—all be intellectuals in the public—if first we invest the time, our talents, and our intellectual energy in community engagement.     

Distance Decay Values And Shopping Center Size

The question of what lies ahead is of particular concern for Latin Americanists. The last decade has witnessed a serious erosion of both the popularity of their specialty, and an equally troublesome reduction in employment opportunities. This paper uses Association of American Geographers (AAG) data bases to document the age-gender structure of contemporary Latin Americanist geographers, and projects likely compositional changes through the end of the century.     

TRENDS IN LATIN AMERICANIST GEOGRAPHY IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

The question of what lies ahead is of particular concern for Latin Americanists. The last decade has witnessed a serious erosion of both the popularity of their specialty, and an equally troublesome reduction in employment opportunities. This paper uses Association of American Geographers (AAG) data bases to document the age-gender structure of contemporary Latin Americanist geographers, and projects likely compositional changes through the end of the century.     

Mapping Communities: Geographic and Interdisciplinary Community-Based Learning and Research

This article discusses the ways in which the impacts of “geographic” community-based learning and research (CBLR) transcend the boundaries of the discipline of geography and also contribute to the practice and theory of civic engagement. I consider mapping and spatial thinking as a unique method for encouraging faculty, students, and community to engage in community partnerships. Drawing from several years of experience of teaching a CBLR course in an interdisciplinary setting, I highlight the role of geography in promoting community engagement. Geographic perspectives and methods can transform outreach or service models of community engagement into meaningful community partnerships that build and sustain a reciprocal relationship between university and community. I articulate three levels of geographic intervention that geographers need to attend to: theoretical, pedagogical, and institutional interventions on civic engagement.     

Engaging in the boycott,divestment, and sanctions (bds) debate

The goal of this forum is to garner attention to the issues surrounding the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, to help a broad audience better understand the complexity of BDS, and to engage geographers in the BDS debate. Including the editorial introduction, seven different experts on the issues of Palestine/ Israel have written six essays on BDS for this forum. The six essays represent a wide range of opinions while also echoing some similar themes.     

Employment Trends in Geography,Part 3: Future Demand Conditions

The third and final article in this series about employment conditions in geography addresses the issue of future demand in both academic and nonacademic settings. To gain an understanding of future demand conditions in colleges and universities, we projected the retirement of AAG members by topical specialty and then matched these retirement trends with a profile of new faculty searches as reported by geography department chairs. We assessed the likely future demand for geography teachers at the precollegiate level through a survey of Geography Alliance Coordinators about teacher certification requirements and the education environments in their respective states. We speculated on how the kinds of jobs geographers do will be affected by changes now underway in the national and global economies. And finally, we conducted a small telephone survey of AAG corporate sponsors to determine how future business trends will affect the demand for geographers.     

On Geographic and geography

New Zealand Geographic is one of a number of geographical magazines published in the English‐speaking world that make little or no reference to work by academic geographers. It recently launched a New Zealand Geographic Trust to promote research into ‘New Zealand's life, culture and sciences’ and collaborated with four other publishers of geographical magazines to raise awareness of climate change: the work of academic geographers is again ignored. This exclusion of academic and school geography from such enterprises raises important issues regarding the discipline's public profile in New Zealand and suggests the need for greater public engagement activity by the country's geographers.     

Twitter and Academic Geography through the Lens of #AAG2018

Twitter has emerged as a global social network of active users who share conversations with one another in an online setting. Academics are one community that has increasingly taken to Twitter as a means of connecting with other scholars, sharing research, and obtaining meaningful feedback. Tweeting has become especially popular during academic conferences where conference attendees use Twitter hashtags to filter conference conversations into a separate dialogue. For geographers, the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) represents one such occasion to use Twitter to discuss contemporary developments in geographic research. In this article, we provide an overview of Twitter as well as the ways in which the academic community uses the platform. Following this, we discuss the tweets sent using the hashtag for the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting, #AAG2018. To analyze these tweets, we collected all tweets with this hashtag for a period of four weeks and examined the content using word clouds and sentiment analysis to explore general feelings and trends associated with geography and the AAG Annual Meeting. We conclude with suggestions for future research avenues that could use Twitter data to gauge the pulse of the geographic discipline. Key Words: academic conferences, American Association of Geographers, geography, sentiment analysis, Twitter.     

Introduction to Focus Section: Out in the World: Geography's Complex Relationship with Civic Engagement

Geographers have long been at the forefront of participating in and exploring the intersection of geographic knowledge and community-engaged research. This Focus Section highlights key debates and challenges facing geographers who participate in community-engaged work, explorations of pedagogical and ethical practices, departmental and institutional challenges, and examples of thoughtful applications of geographic knowledge to community-based work. It also seeks to generate knowledge and discussion of how geographers can employ civic engagement to advance geographic learning and enhance the profile of the discipline within and beyond higher education institutions. By focusing on such issues, this collection of articles contributes in vital ways to meet the challenges that higher education institutions face in demonstrating the relevance of academic learning to societal issues. This introduction to the Focus Section reviews the historical context of civic engagement in geography, provides a broad-scale look at the state of civically engaged research in U.S. institutions of higher learning, and highlights the contributions of each of the individual articles included in this Focus Section.     

Geography's Profile in Public Debate “Inside the Beltway” and the National Academies*

Geographers continue to engage in public debate “inside the Beltway” by participation within and through federal agencies and through the National Research Council. Several examples illustrate the level and kind of this engagement, which has been concentrated on environmental and spatial data and analysis themes. Most professional geographers have the opportunity to engage in this form of public debate through participation in the activities of the National Research Council. The level of this participation has been surprisingly strong, given the small size of the community of professional geographers, and has helped to shape both U.S. and international research agendas relevant to geographic research. Participation, however, is concentrated in a few programs and individuals, raising questions about the sustainability of geography's voice in this public activity.     

Narrative analysis as a strategy for understanding interview talk in geographic research

Narrative analysis produces strategies to inform the conduct, interpretation and presentation of interview talk, and encourages and enables researchers to take account of research participants' own evaluations. We suggest this to be a useful method for geographers because it focuses on how people talk about and evaluate places, experiences and situations, as well as what they say. With an example from health geography, we show how it allows for interactive texts, thus providing a tool for geographers doing qualitative research to connect intimate details of experience to broader social and spatial relations.     

Employment Trends in Geography,Part 1: Enrollment and Degree Patterns*

This paper is the first in a series of three papers dealing with the current and future labor market for geographers. It is based on a report prepared by the Association of American Geographers' (AAG) Employment Forecasting Committee to the National Research Council's (NRC) Rediscovering Geography Committee. This report provides a data-based analysis of the past and future supply of geographers, the current labor market conditions in the field, and the factors likely to influence the future demand for geographers (faculty hiring, geographic education initiatives, trends in private-sector jobs, etc.). Each year some 4,000 individuals receive degrees in geography from America's institutions of higher education. They, or some portion of them, make up the new supply of geographers entering the labor market. In the near future (up to five years), the availability of new geographers is related to the number of geography students now in the educational pipeline. Their current specialties, and the specialties of the programs from which they come, tell us about the types of skills and the kinds of interests to be held by future labor force entrants. In the longer term (five to ten years), the number of new geographers will be influenced by geographic education initiatives at the precollegiate level. More and better geographic instruction in elementary and secondary schools will expose more students to geography as a field of study and as a potential career path. The purposes of this paper are to (1) review degree and enrollment trends in geography, (2) assess the “trickle-up” effects of geographic education initiatives at the precollegiate level, and (3) investigate the characteristics of future supply as evidenced by the types of occupations for which geography departments are now preparing students.     

We Are All Makers: The Method of Keyword Selection in Teaching and Learning Human Geography

Abstract

Geographers continue to engage in public debate “inside the Beltway” by participation within and through federal agencies and through the National Research Council. Several examples illustrate the level and kind of this engagement, which has been concentrated on environmental and spatial data and analysis themes. Most professional geographers have the opportunity to engage in this form of public debate through participation in the activities of the National Research Council. The level of this participation has been surprisingly strong, given the small size of the community of professional geographers, and has helped to shape both U.S. and international research agendas relevant to geographic research. Participation, however, is concentrated in a few programs and individuals, raising questions about the sustainability of geography's voice in this public activity.

     

Geographical knowledge and policy: the positive contribution of discourse studies

The 'discursive turn' has been blamed for a lack of engagement between geographers and policymakers. This paper argues that such a view is fundamentally flawed. It ignores the positive contribution that discourse analysis has made to policy studies and the particular role that geographers have played in developing such analyses. It is based on a misconceived view of the policy process and how knowledge can contribute to policy outcomes. A closer attention to policy discourses reveals exactly how knowledge is constructed within the policy process and can help identify how policy may be improved through discursive means.     

Characterizing Non-Industrial Private Forest Landowners' Forest Management Engagement and Advice Sources

Non-industrial private forestland (NIPF) owners have options for engagement by following management strategies that reduce wildfire risk on their forestlands. Forest management engagement is a broad term with underlying categories and management implications. To better understand these categories, we examine interview data on the engagement of forest landowners from a case study of private forestland owner perspectives in northeast Oregon, USA. NIPF landowners outline two types of forest management engagement, one for property and one for community-focused forestland management. NIPF owners describe actions for engagement in public forestland management and how these actions differ from engagement in private management. Additionally, NIPF owners establish barriers to engagement in both public and private forestland management. Our findings can be used to better identify unengaged private forestland owners in the U.S. West, informing the design and implementation of extension and outreach for NIPF owners.     

NEOTRADITIONALISM IN THE SUBURBAN LANDSCAPE: CULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES OF EXCLUSION IN VANCOUVER,CANADA

During the 1990s, urban geographers have become fascinated with what are termed “neotraditional landscapes,” yet have ignored the broader cultural contexts of neotraditionalism. In this paper, I use a more encompassing and culturally based conception of neotraditionalism to demonstrate a salience of neotraditionalism in the suburban landscape beyond strict neotraditional developments. My argument is that neotraditionalist beliefs are transforming “ordinary” suburban landscapes in subtle but distinctive ways beyond the presence of neotraditional developments. This different reading of suburban neotraditionalism is filtered through qualitative material collected during in-depth interviews in two suburban neighborhoods in Vancouver, Canada. Though the research is suggestive rather than definitive, I suggest that it has important implications for rethinking geographies of suburban exclusion.