Awardees

AAG Announces 2020 AAG Award Recipients

The American Association of Geographers congratulates the individuals and entities named to receive an AAG Award. The awardees represent outstanding contributions to and accomplishments in the geographic field. Formal recognition of the awardees will occur at the 2020 AAG Annual Meeting in Denver, CO during the AAG Awards Luncheon on Friday, April 10, 2020.

2020 AAG Harm de Blij Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

This annual award recognizes outstanding achievement in teaching undergraduate Geography including the use of innovative teaching methods. The recipients are instructors for whom undergraduate teaching is a primary responsibility.  The award consists of $2,500 in prize money and an additional $500 in travel expenses to attend the AAG Annual Meeting, where the award will be conveyed. This award is generously funded by John Wiley & Sons in memory of their long-standing collaboration with the late Harm de Blij on his seminal Geography textbooks.

Dr. Jennifer Collins, University of South Florida

Dr. Jennifer Collins, a Professor of Geosciences at the University of South Florida, is described by her colleagues as a highly respected role model (especially for female students in STEM) and passionate about undergraduate education. Dr. Collins designs her courses to offer high impact learning experiences to her students. She has co-published with numerous undergraduate students, and routinely includes undergraduate mentoring and collaboration in her research grants. However, her impact goes far beyond her own students.  Dr. Collins engages in numerous well-recognized community outreach projects herself, such as providing workshops for K-12 teachers and promoting geography in the media. One colleague described her as “… not only [having] impacted the field, students, and the community at large, but [she] is also a good steward of the environment, imparting those values onto others.” Similarly, another colleague describes her as a “true collaborator” with a strong “devotion to the university, our students, and her profession at large”. For all these reasons, we are pleased to recognize Dr. Jennifer Collins with the 2020 AAG Harm de Blij Award.

2020 AAG Presidential Achievement Award

The AAG Presidential Award is given with the purpose of recognizing individuals for their long-term, major contributions to geography. The Past President has the honor of bestowing this distinction on behalf of the discipline and the association.

Nicholas Dunning, University of Cincinnati

Nicholas Dunning, University of Cincinnati, for his significant contributions in the areas of environmental archaeology, soils, physical geography, cultural ecology, and Latin America. Dr. Dunning’s contributions include keen insights into human ecology and the environment, especially as applied to the Ancient Maya. Dunning has three degrees in geography, yet the broader impacts of his work range far beyond geography into anthropology and archaeology, to epigraphy, soil chemistry, pre-Columbian Studies, and Latin American Studies.

He published his dissertation as the book Lords of the Hills: Ancient Maya Settlement in the Puuc Region, Mexico (Prehistory Press, 1992) and this volume remains one of the most influential and best cited works in our field. Dunning has since published more than 125 peer-reviewed papers and chapters and a dozen books, monographs, and special issues of journals, across different fields, from Culture and Agriculture in 1998 and the AAG Annals in 2002, to two articles in a special issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, to a paper applying LiDAR in Maya Geoarchaeology in a special issue of the journal Geomorphology.

Dr. Dunning has led his research teams and generations of students on an amazing journey, without ever thinking of rewards for himself. It is Dunning’s time to be celebrated as the most influential scholar in geoarchaeology, cultural ecology, and environmental and physical geography in our generation and many to come.

Sally Horn, University of Tennessee

Sally Horn, University of Tennessee, for her significant contributions in the area of paleoenvironmental change research in underexplored neotropical regions. Dr. Horn’s research contributes new knowledge in tropical environmental change, and in methodological advances for detecting and measuring change.

Her scholarship has been honored at university, national and international levels, including the Carl O. Sauer Award (Conference of Latin American Geographers, 2002) the AAG’s Barry Bishop Mountain Geography Award (2010), AAG’s James J. Parsons Biogeography Specialty Group Award (2014), the SEDAAG Lifetime Achievement Award (2014), and election as a AAAS Fellow in 2003.

Dr. Horn is also recognized for her enthusiastic devotion to educating the next generation of scientists, as evidenced by her many teaching and advising awards, and by her extraordinary productivity of graduate students. Dr. Horn has advised 34 Masters and 14 PhDs (including 6 in progress), and also served on the committees of 99 MA and PhD Students, in programs ranging from Geography to Anthropology to Ecology. The lasting impact of her scholarship is evidenced by her more than 150 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and edited volumes, and by her multiple grants from such sources as NSF, the Mellon Foundation, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

The 2020 AAG-Kauffman Awards for Best Paper and Best Student Paper in Geography & Entrepreneurship

This award identifies innovative research in business, applied or community geography that is relevant to questions related to entrepreneurs and their firms as well as to practitioners and policymakers. Award winners and runners up will be invited to present their research in a session highlighting geography and entrepreneurship at the AAG Annual Meeting on Thursday, April 9, 2020.

2020 Best Paper Award

Keith Debbage, University of North Carolina – Greensboro, Non-Farm Proprietorship Employment by US Metropolitan Area

2020 Best Paper Award Runner-Up

Joseph Scarpaci, Center for the Study of Cuban Culture + Economy, Scarpaci, J.L., Coupey, E. and Reed, S. 2018; Artists as Cultural Icons: The Icon Myth Transfer Effect as a Heuristic for Cultural Branding. (Journal of Product & Brand Management. 27(3): 320-333) 

2020 Best Student Paper Award

Andreas Kuebart, Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Open creative labs as providers of core functions within entrepreneurial ecosystems: Using sequence analysis to explore new infrastructures for startup processes in Berlin

2020 Best Student Paper Award Runner-Up

Yue Lin, The Ohio State University, A deep learning architecture for semantic address matching

The 2020 AAG Marcus Fund for Physical Geography Award

The objective of The Mel Marcus Fund for Physical Geography is to carry on the tradition of excellence and humanity in field work espoused by Dr. Melvin G. Marcus. Grants from the Mel Marcus Fund for Physical Geography will foster personally formative participation by students collaborating with faculty in field-based physical geography research in challenging outdoor environments.

Frederick (Fritz) Nelson, Michigan State University

Project: Baseline Data for a Field-Based Critical Geomorphic Experiment in the Juneau Icefield Research Program’s Camp 29 facility on the Cathedral Massif near Atlin, British Columbia, Canada

The 2020 William L. Garrison Award for Best Dissertation in Computational Geography

This biennial award supports innovative research into the computational aspects of geographic science. The award is intended to arose a deeper general understanding of the important role that advanced computation can play in the complex problems of space-time analysis, that lie at the core of geographic science.

Taylor Anderson, Simon Fraser University, Towards the Integration of Complex Systems Theory: Geographic Information Science, and Network Science for Modelling Geospatial Phenomena

The 2020 Anne U. White Grant

This grant enables people, regardless of any formal training in geography, to engage in useful field studies and to have the joy of working alongside their partners.

Joshua Steckley, University of Toronto, will conduct community based research in Thailand with his partner, Marylynn Steckley, for their project titled: The Political Ecology of Coconut Water: how Thailand exports health, and imports obesity

2020 Dissertation Research Grant recipients ($1,000/each)

The AAG provides support for doctoral Dissertation Research in the form of grants up to $1,000 to PhD candidates of any geographic specialty.

Madeleine Hamlin, Syracuse University

Shannon Jones, University of Denver

Veronica Limeberry, American University

Maegan Miller, CUNY – Graduate Center

Audrey Smith, University of Florida

Yining Tan, Arizona State University

Greta Wells, University of Texas at Austin

2020 Research Grant recipients ($500/each):

The AAG provides small Research Grants of $500 to support direct costs for fieldwork and research.

Perry Carter, Texas Tech University

Sean Kennedy, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Aaron Malone, Colorado School of Mines

Emily Mitchell-Eaton, Bennington  College

Jennifer Rice, University of Georgia

David Trimbach, Oregon State University

2020 AAG Darrel Hess Community College Geography Scholarships

Outstanding students from community colleges, junior colleges, city colleges, or two-year educational institutions who will be transferring as geography majors to four-year universities receive support and recognition from this scholarship program, including $1,000 for educational expenses. The scholarship has been generously provided by Darrel Hess of the City College of San Francisco to 29 students since 2006.

Cassia Barnard-Royer, transferring from Santa Fe College to the University of Florida

Laurel Durbin, transferring from Shasta College to CSU Chico

Valeria Ferrufino, Irvine Valley College (awaiting responses from UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, and CSUs)

Mary Anne Flier, transferring from Grand Rapids Community College to Aquinas College

Andrew Mendez, transferring from East Los Angeles College to CSU Northridge

AAG Awards, AAG Dissertation Research Grant, AAG Grants & Awards Program, AAG Presidential Achievement Award, AAG Research Grants, Anne U. White Fund, Darrel Hess Community College Geography Scholarship, Harm J. de Blij Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Geography Teaching, Mel Marcus Fund, William L. Garrison Award
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Awardees

AAG Announces 2019 Book Awards

The AAG is pleased to announce the recipients of the three 2019 AAG Book Awards: the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize, the AAG Globe Book Award for Public Understanding of Geography, and the AAG Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography. The AAG Book Awards mark distinguished and outstanding works published by geography authors during the previous year, 2019. The awardees will be formally recognized at the Awards Luncheon during the 2020 AAG Annual Meeting in Denver, CO.

The John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize

This award encourages and rewards American geographers who write books about the United States which convey the insights of professional geography in language that is both interesting and attractive to lay readers.

Robert Lemon, The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food Is Transforming the American City, (University of Illinois Press, 2019)

Robert Lemon’s The Taco Truck is an evocative and penetrating look at a fascinating, often underappreciated part of urban America. The book is based on extensive field work, participant observation, and in-depth interviews in Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Columbus, Ohio. The immigrant Mexican origins of the taco truck are described and the author demonstrates how these moveable features on the urban scene have become important parts of Latino identity.

In this engaging, clearly written, and well-illustrated book, Lemon also explores some of the controversial urban politics that have surrounded, shaped, and sometimes limited the taco truck’s access to parts of the city. Lemon’s book marks a creative intersection of food geography, ethnic studies, and urban political geography and the result is a readily digestible, yet meaty appreciation for how taco trucks and their informal cuisine have created new, fluid, and mobile places in the cities we live in.

Simply put, Lemon’s appealing exploration of the taco truck—crafted in a wonderfully Jacksonian narrative—demonstrates the author’s success in making these street-side eateries a more legible part of the vernacular urban landscape and in highlighting where millions of Americans meet for lunch.

The AAG Globe Book Award for Public Understanding of Geography

This award is given for a book written or co-authored by a geographer that conveys most powerfully the nature and importance of geography to the non-academic world.

Adam Moore, for his book, Empire’s Labor: The Global Army that Supports U.S. Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).

Empire’s Labor conveys powerfully the nature and importance of geography to audiences beyond  academic geography. Clearly written and accessible to readers without training in specialist theory and vocabulary, the book nevertheless shows how extensive fieldwork and a critical geographical imagination can re-map the abstract and violently inhuman logistics of war-fighting in a profoundly humanizing way. As former AAG President John Agnew noted: “[Moore’s book]… displays the very best qualities of contemporary geographical scholarship in its synthesis of first-person experiences, wide reading of specialized literature across a range of fields, and a sophisticated but clearly expressed theoretical framing, particularly with its emphasis on the transfer of risk onto the shoulders of foreigners even as the objectives pursued are defined in Washington DC.”

Further, the prominent use of maps in the book helps to document a global geography of military infrastructure that is commonly ignored or obscured. What is especially impressive is the way in which Empire’s Labor conveys the human geographies and voices of the workers who toil in ‘someone else’s war’. This is a book that geographers will be able to recommend to non-geographers with pride.

 The AAG Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography

This award is given for a book written by a geographer that makes an unusually important contribution to advancing the science and art of geography.

Julie Guthman, Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry  Industry (University of California Press, 2019)

Julie Guthman has earned the 2019 AAG Meridian Book Award for her innovative, timely and terrific tome, Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry.  This in-depth analysis of the California strawberry assemblage is about so much more than strawberries; it is about the socioecological consequences of corporate domination of scientific practice and the limits of chemical plantation agriculture. Based on extensive research that represents the best of the art and science of geography, Guthman’s masterful examination of the co-evolution of strawberry monocultures, soils, chemicals, climate, and labor, reveals that decades of narrowly-focused one-off solutions to pathogens and pests has had the effect of breeding ever more hostile growing conditions and requiring ever more extreme measures to perpetuate a deeply destructive agricultural practice on which ever more extensive food markets depend. Thus, the work exposes the limitations privatized science.  Moreover, the book not only documents the strawberry assemblage in exquisite detail, but also proposes solutions to “repair the repair”.

With lessons that resonate far beyond strawberries to the complex of industries and institutions involved in global chemically-intensive commercial food production, this book constitutes an unusually important contribution to geography as well as an empirically-grounded clarion call to fundamentally reorganize how we produce food, conduct research, and organize land and labor markets.  Wilted, then, will seem a “Silent Spring for our present moment” to many readers.

AAG Book Awards, AAG Globe Book Award for Public Understanding of Geography, AAG Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography, Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize, Globe Book Award, JB Jackson Prize, John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize, Meridian Book Award
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New Books for Geographers

New Books: February 2020

Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related areas. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books.

Publishers are welcome to send new volumes to the Editor-in-Chief (Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803).

Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should also contact the Editor-in-Chief.

PLEASE NOTE: Due to current public health policies which have prompted the closing of most offices, we are unable to access incoming books at this time. We are working on a solution during this transition and will continue our new books processing as soon as we can. In the meantime, please feel free to peruse previous books from our archived lists.

February 2020

The Saguaro Cactus : A Natural History by David Yetman, Alberto Burquez, Kevin Hultine, and Michael Sanderson (University of Arizona Press 2020)

Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater by Melody Jue (Duke University Press 2020)

Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory, and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold by Sara Smith (Rutgers University Press 2020)

Panic City: Crime and the Fear Industries in Johannesburg by Martin J. Murray (Stanford University Press 2020)

Assembling Moral Mobilities : Cycling, Cities and the Common Good by Nicholas A Scott (University of Nebraska Press 2020)

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Newsletters

Newsletter – February 2020

PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

Beyond the Academic 1 Percent Or How to Create a More Inclusive and Equitable Academic Culture

By David Kaplan

“Social media can be dangerous. I recently read a post on Twitter, sent by a non-geographer, which seemed to lament geography’s absence from the Ivy League and similarly selective private institutions.

If I could share an unpopular opinion, I’m glad that geography does not have a large representation in the Ivy League. Not because I do not consider geography worthy of Harvard, Yale or Princeton. Nor because I don’t think geography should be available to every college student. Rather I dislike how Ivy League institutions foster elitism in American higher education, in a manner that could distort our discipline.”

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ANNUAL MEETING

2020 AAG Annual Meeting Presidential Plenary Announced

2020-Presidential-Plenary

This year’s Presidential Plenary features a panel on “Resurgent Ethnonationalism: The Politics of Purity in a World of Difference,” describing and analyzing new political movements based around more exclusive forms of national identity. The panel will be introduced and moderated by AAG President David Kaplan and feature Liah Greenfeld, Kenan Malik, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Andreas Wimmer, and Caroline Nagel. The discussion will focus on how ethnonationalism manifests itself in different societies, whether it can coexist with civil society and cultural diversity, points of comparison and contrast among ethnonationalist movements, how ethnonationalism is expressed in attitudes and policies, and the future of this trend. The plenary takes place on Monday, April 6th from 6:20 to 7:00 p.m. in the Sheraton, Concourse Level, Plaza Ballroom A.

Learn more.

Family Activities at #aagDENVER

Focus-on-Denver-graphic

Bringing the whole family to Denver for the 2020 AAG Annual Meeting? The Mile High City has a wide variety of kid friendly activities such as the Children’s Museum of Denver, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Firefighter’s Museum, and Dinosaur Ridge. The AAG will also continue to offer onsite, professionally managed child care at a subsidized rate. CAMP AAG will offer age-appropriate activities for children ranging from 6 months to 17 years of age, including children with disabilities. Registration for childcare is now open.

Plan your family trip.

Don’t delay – book your room for #aagDENVER today!

AAG has negotiated a discounted block of hotel rooms at the 2020 AAG Annual Meeting headquarters hotels, the Sheraton Denver Downtown and the Hyatt Regency – Denver. This rate is available on a first come, first served basis until March 13. Now that the preliminary program has been released, rooms will start going fast.

PUBLICATIONS

NEW The Professional Geographer Issue Alert:
Articles with topics ranging from vaccine exemptions to Manuel Castells

The-PG-2017-generic-213x300-1The most recent issue of The Professional Geographer has been published online (Volume 72, Issue 1, February 2020) with 15 new articles on current geographic research. Topics in this issue include solar desalination, mental health policy, intergenerational political behavior, viral maps, postqualitative analysis, microtoponyms, legal geography, and US shrinking cities. Locational areas of interest include the US Great Plains, the Small Island Developing States, and Sri Lanka. Authors are from a variety of institutions including United States Military Academy, University of Georgia, Nanjing University, and Universidade Estadual de Campinas.

All AAG members have full online access to all issues of The Professional Geographer through the Members Only page. Each issue, the Editors choose one article to make freely available. In this issue you can read Making the Case for Critical Q Methodology by Gretchen Sneegas for free for the next 3 months.

Questions about The PG? Contact PG [at] aag [dot] org.

NEW Winter Issue of the AAG Review of Books Published

The latest issue of the AAG Review of Books is now available (Volume 8, Issue 1, Winter 2020) with 10 book reviews on recent books related to geography, public policy, and international affairs. The Winter 2020 issue also holds four book review essays including a discussion of AAG Past President Alec Murphy’s latest work Geography: Why It Matters? led by Johnson et al.

Questions about the AAG Review of Books? Contact aagreview [at] aag [dot] org.

Journals-newsletter-100-2In addition to the most recently published journal, read the latest issue of the other AAG journals online:

• Annals of the American Association of Geographers
• The Professional Geographer
• GeoHumanities
• The AAG Review of Books

New Books in Geography — December Available

New-books1-1-3From geoengineering to industrial landscapes of Pittsburgh, there are always new titles in geography and related disciplines to be found on the New Books in Geography list. Some of these books will be reviewed in the AAG Review of Books. Persons wishing to volunteer their reviewing services for new books should have the requisite qualifications and demonstrable prior knowledge and engagement with the subject area, preferably through publications. Please contact the editors at aagrb [at] lsu [dot] edu if interested in being a reviewer.

Browse the full list of new books.

ASSOCIATION NEWS

AAG Announces Additional 2020 AAG Award Recipients

awards_hi-res-300x160-1Congratulations to the recipients of 2020 AAG Awards including the E. Willard and Ruby S. Miller Award, the Glenda Laws Award, the Wilbanks Award for Transformational Research in Geography, and the new AAG Award for Associates Program Excellence! Formal recognition of the awardees will occur during the AAG Awards Luncheon at the Annual Meeting on Friday, April 10, 2020.

Learn more about the awardees.

AAG Welcomes Spring 2020 Interns

The AAG is excited to welcome two new interns coming aboard our staff for the Spring 2020 semester! Joining us this semester are Ariel Golightly, a senior at the University of Maryland, College Park, pursuing a B.S. in Geographical Sciences with minors in Geographic Information Systems and Sustainability Studies, and Hannah Brenner, a senior at George Washington University pursuing a bachelor’s degree in geography with minors in sustainability and GIS.

Interested in interning with the AAG for Summer 2020? The AAG is accepting intern applications until March 1, 2020. Interns at the AAG are provided a weekly stipend and participate in most AAG programs and projects such as education, outreach, research, website, publications, or the Annual Meeting.

Meet the interns.

POLICY CORNER

The Census is Underway!

US_Capitol

Counting for the 2020 Census has officially started in Alaska. The first data collection began in the town of Toksook Bay. Since Alaska became a state it has always been counted first by Census workers because January offers the most favorable conditions for getting between remote villages. For the rest of the United States, April 1st is “Census Day” and serves as the kickoff for the big population count.

It is well understood that counting the population is an important undertaking, but the biggest impacts of the Census Bureau’s work are recognized once everyone has been counted and the data is put into action. The first and foremost task of the data, as charged by the Constitution, is to determine Congressional redistricting in order to keep representation in the House of Representatives as equal as possible. The manner in which new districts are drawn plays a key role in determining access to resources and apportionment of federal funds to communities in need. Furthermore, census data lives on in the work of geographers and the broader academic community as they rely on the results to inform their research. With the power of this information comes the responsibility to map Congressional districts in an equitable way that avoids advantageous population groupings and politically non competitive districts. The AAG continues to engage with thought-leaders on issues of redistricting, gerrymandering, and the fundamentally important work of the U.S. Census Bureau in empowering accurate and fair representation.

 

In the News:

  • The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) recently issued a Request for Public Comment entitled “Draft Desirable Characteristics of Repositories for Managing and Sharing Data Resulting from Federally Funded Research.” OSTP is collecting this feedback in order to develop common characteristics that agencies can use to improve the management and sharing of data from federally funded research. You can go through the Federal Register to submit comments as an individual or institution. The comment period closes March 6th, 2020.
  • Dr. Sethuraman Panchanathan has been nominated to serve as the next director of the National Science Foundation following the retirement of current director, Dr. France Córdova, in March. After going through the Senate confirmation process, Dr. Panchanathan will serve for a typical six-year term.
MEMBER NEWS

Profiles of Professional Geographers

“Understanding geography is a critical foundation to a GIS career path,” says Sean O’Brien who works as a GIS Analyst for U.S. Bank. In his work, O’Brien tackles massive databases to analyze the activity of bank customers and branches as well as advise and assist other bank departments with their geographic needs. As GIS becomes a growing necessity for business, O’Brien stresses that geographic knowledge, the ability to use Python, and networking skills are all essential pieces of a successful career.

Learn more about Geography Careers.

 

RESOURCES AND OPPORTUNITIES

AAG Seeks New Editor for the ‘AAG Review of Books’ Journal

Please consider submitting an application for the position of Editor of the AAG Review of Books. The new editor, whose responsibilities include overseeing the solicitation, review, and publication of book reviews for the journal, will be appointed for a four and a half year editorial term to start on July 1, 2020. The AAG Review of Books is published online only on a quarterly basis. Applications will be accepted until February 20, 2020.

More information on the position.

AAG Calls for Nominations for Standing and Awards Committees

The AAG Council will make appointments to several of the AAG Standing Committees at its spring 2020 meeting. These appointments will replace members whose terms will expire on June 30, 2020. If you wish to nominate yourself or other qualified individuals for one or more of these vacancies, please notify AAG Director of Operations Candida Mannozzi on or before March 1, 2020. Please make sure that your nominee is willing to serve if appointed. Include contact information for your nominee as well as a brief paragraph indicating his/her suitability for the position. Open committees include: Archives and Association History;  Committee on the Status of Women in Geography; Diversity and Inclusion Committee; Finance Committee; Membership Committee; Publications Committee; AAG Awards Committee; Fellows Selection Committee; BA/MA Program Excellence Award Committee; AAG Globe Book Award Committee; Harm de Blij Award Committee; Harold M. Rose Award Committee; Mel Marcus Fund for Physical Geography Committee; AAG Meridian Book Award Committee; AAG Research Grants Committee; and AAG Student Award and Scholarship Committee.

Click here for a description of committees.

IN MEMORIAM

William L. Graf

Past AAG President and one of the nation’s leading geomorphologists, William L. Graf, passed away on December 27, 2019 at the age of 72. With research focusing on rivers and water preservation, William Graf strongly identified as a geographer throughout his work in academia and in the US Air Force. Appointed by President Clinton to the Presidential Commission on American Heritage Rivers, Graf advocated for geographers’ roles in public policy decision making on rivers and land use.

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GEOGRAPHERS IN THE NEWS
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President's Column

Beyond the Academic 1 Percent Or How to Create a More Inclusive and Equitable Academic Culture

Social media can be dangerous. I recently read a post on Twitter, sent by a non-geographer, which seemed to lament geography’s absence from the Ivy League and similarly selective private institutions.

If I could share an unpopular opinion, I’m glad that geography does not have a large representation in the Ivy League. Not because I do not consider geography worthy of Harvard, Yale or Princeton. Nor because I don’t think geography should be available to every college student. Rather I dislike how Ivy League institutions foster elitism in American higher education, in a manner that could distort our discipline. One recent essay argued that “Ivy League mania” warps students. And articles have shown how a small group of exclusive universities produce the lion’s share of professors.

It is an academic 1% who gain influence, prestige, and resources far out of balance with the rest of the higher education workforce. Expanded beyond this super elite class, we also have a group—call them the 10%—of professors who are either tenured or tenure track at Research 1 institutions.1 This is followed by another 6% of tenured/tenure-track faculty at other research universities, 10% at bachelors/masters institutions, 5% at community colleges, and 23% of faculty listed as non–tenure track. The rest—almost half— are relegated to part-time status and may have little control over their professional lives and oftentimes suffer living standards close to poverty levels.

Well, geography does not have places like Stanford or Duke calling most of the shots. Rather we are focused at a number of large state universities, some notable private universities, and a host of smaller public institutions and community colleges. And relative to other disciplines, our balance is good. Yet we still suffer issues of inequality. Just as wealth inequality can build upon itself, providing the lion’s share of benefits to those at the top, so can academic inequality engender a privileged class of the professoriate; folks who reap disproportionate benefits of connection, abundant resources, miniscule teaching loads, and who also enjoy the benefit of the doubt because of where they are located. And so much of it depends on luck! I remember a couple of graduate school friends, both with strong and basically identical CVs. One landed a tenure-track appointment at a prestigious flagship university, while the other has been scraping by in adjunct positions. These random outcomes proliferated, affecting each of their professional lives.

The notion of precarity, often affecting those people without stable permanent employment, is worthy of an entire column. As universities shift their hiring away from full-time tenure-track faculty, adjunct labor fills the gaps. Former President Ken Foote has outlined ways that our departments and institutions can support contingent faculty, from offering some degree of stability, to better options to collaborate and contribute to the curriculum and the departmental life. Certainly from an institutional perspective we should find better ways to reward contingent faculty commensurate with their talents.

Professors lucky enough to obtain full-time employment find themselves in a variety of job environments and at different types of institutions with varied research expectations, teaching loads, and opportunity to mentor graduate students. Some geographers stand alone in a department with other faculty; other geographers are part of a large unit with 20 or more faculty and an opportunity to specialize in their specific subfield.

This map displays the diversity of geography programs, based on our development of an extensive database that shows geography programs by highest degree offered.2

The contribution of the smaller departments should not be overlooked. As opposed to many large, research-oriented departments, where much of the focus may be on PhD students, geography at smaller state universities and at private colleges relies on providing a premium student experience with lots of undergraduate engagement, study-away experiences, and tight ties between students and faculty. When attending regional meetings, I often see faculty from these institutions bringing their students to their very first conference. At the same time, a great deal of research gets done by faculty here. They are all expected to publish, many get external grants, and as a bonus, they often share their research experience with undergraduates.

Community colleges are key aspects of our geography universe and they simply do not get the recognition they deserve. We have over 75 community colleges in the United States that offer an associate’s degree in geography (see map). Not only are a plurality of all undergraduate students enrolled in public two-year institutions, but if we are looking at true diversity within our discipline, this is where we start. Undergraduates from poorer backgrounds are much more likely to attend community colleges. African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos also show higher representation at two-year colleges. Beyond community colleges, we should be looking at Historically Black Colleges and Universities as well as Tribal Colleges. These too are intrinsic aspects of our geography universe, and we can expand our numbers by welcoming new geographers from all demographic backgrounds.

The AAG recognizes this institutional diversity in some important ways. There are affinity groups for stand-alone geographers and for community college professors. The AAG has established a Program Excellence Award (just won this year by Lakeland Community College!) and special travel grants for community college students. In addition, we have done a good job in terms of AAG governance. Participation at the Council and on AAG Committees could be a bit more representative, but shows a commitment to institutional diversity.

One example of possible improvement within the AAG lies in the composition of our journals’ editorial boards. Geographers at all types of institutions conduct research and editorial boards ought to reflect this. Yet this is not the case. The composition of the editorial boards of four major AAG journals—The Annals, the Professional Geographer, the AAG Review of Books, and GeoHumanities—shows an overwhelming preference for professors from PhD, mostly R1, institutions. Several institutions like Berkeley and Arizona State have five or more. While professors who teach at non-PhD programs make up well over half of membership, they constitute only 20 percent of all AAG editorial boards. The distribution is lopsided enough that a colleague of mine was discouraged from applying for an editorial position because their type of institution was not represented on the editorial board. This is a persistent bias and one I am guilty of myself.

Geography in the United States does not have a 1%. We have no academic over-class gazing down from the Olympian heights of the Ivies and Ivy-adjacents. But we do have a privileged 10–15% slice of tenured faculty at PhD-granting institutions and especially at Research 1 schools. It is important that we recognize the very inequalities that exist within our field. Geography, and the AAG as its premier organization, needs to improve its record on institutional diversity. It means that the field must work harder to expand the community of geography by aggressively including faculty who work at smaller institutions, often as stand-alone geographers, at HBCUs, and at community colleges. It means departments must consider hiring PhD students who come from a variety of institutions, if their CVs warrant. It means that, as with many forms of inequality, people of good will can blindly reinforce the advantages accrued to a very few members of our discipline. It is time for us to acknowledge our privilege and truly open up our field to the widest numbers of geographers.

1 This data is derived from National Center for Education Statistics. The breakdowns by faculty workforce were provided to me by the American Association of University Professors.

2 Map created by Jessica Reese.  This is based on a database developed by myself and Fiona Allan of all departments providing some sort of geography degree. Some departments are listed as offering a PhD even if it is in a fairly specialized area. Let me know if you see any omissions and I will add these to the database.

— Dave Kaplan
AAG President

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0067

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Member Profiles

A Day in the Life of a Geographer

 

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New Books for Geographers

New Books: January 2020

Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related areas. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books.

Publishers are welcome to send new volumes to the Editor-in-Chief (Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803).

Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should also contact the Editor-in-Chief.

PLEASE NOTE: Due to current public health policies which have prompted the closing of most offices, we are unable to access incoming books at this time. We are working on a solution during this transition and will continue our new books processing as soon as we can. In the meantime, please feel free to peruse previous books from our archived lists.

January 2020

China’s Asian Dream: Empire Building along the New Silk Road (Revised and Expanded Edition) by Tom Miller (Zed Books 2019)

Conspiracy Theories: Philosophers Connect the Dots by Richard Greene and Rachel Robinson-Greene, eds (Open Court 2020)

The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place by Germaine R. Halegoua (New York University Press 2020)

Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life by D. Asher Ghertner, Hudson McFann, Daniel M. Goldstein, eds (Duke University Press 2020)

Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty-First Century by Tim Winter (University of Chicago Press 2019)

Motorbike People: Power and Politics on Rwandan Streets by Will Rollason (Rowman and Littlefield 2019)

Multispecies Households in the Saian Mountains: Ecology at the Russia-Mongolia Border by Alex Oehler and Anna Varfolomeeva, eds (Rowman and Littlefield 2020)

The Ocean Reader: History, Culture, Politics by Eric Paul Roorda, ed (Duke University Press 2020)

Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent by Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas, eds (MIT Press 2019)

Stagnant Dreamers: How the Inner City Shapes the Integration of Second-Generation Latinos by María G. Rendón (Russel Sage Foundation 2019)

This Pilgrim Nation: The Making of the Portuguese Diaspora in Postwar North America by Gilberto Fernandes (University of Toronto Press 2020)

Traces of J. B. Jackson: The Man Who Taught Us to See Everyday America by Helen L. Horowitz (University of Virginia Press 2020)

Traveling With Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic by Amy Moran-Thomas (University of Califonia Press 2019)

Urban Mountain Beings: History, Indigeneity, and Geographies of Time in Quito, Ecuador by Kathleen S. Fine-Dare (Rowman and Littlefield 2019)

The Wari Civilization and Their Descendants: Imperial Transformation in Pre-Inca Cuzco by Mary Glowacki and Gordon F. McEwan, eds (Rowman and Littlefield 2020)

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Newsletters

Newsletter – January 2020

PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

Beyond the Academic 1 Percent Or How to Create a More Inclusive and Equitable Academic Culture

By David Kaplan

“Social media can be dangerous. I recently read a post on Twitter, sent by a non-geographer, which seemed to lament geography’s absence from the Ivy League and similarly selective private institutions.

If I could share an unpopular opinion, I’m glad that geography does not have a large representation in the Ivy League. Not because I do not consider geography worthy of Harvard, Yale or Princeton. Nor because I don’t think geography should be available to every college student. Rather I dislike how Ivy League institutions foster elitism in American higher education, in a manner that could distort our discipline.”

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ANNUAL MEETING

2020 AAG Annual Meeting Presidential Plenary Announced

2020-Presidential-Plenary

This year’s Presidential Plenary features a panel on “Resurgent Ethnonationalism: The Politics of Purity in a World of Difference,” describing and analyzing new political movements based around more exclusive forms of national identity. The panel will be introduced and moderated by AAG President David Kaplan and feature Liah Greenfeld, Kenan Malik, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Andreas Wimmer, and Caroline Nagel. The discussion will focus on how ethnonationalism manifests itself in different societies, whether it can coexist with civil society and cultural diversity, points of comparison and contrast among ethnonationalist movements, how ethnonationalism is expressed in attitudes and policies, and the future of this trend. The plenary takes place on Monday, April 6th from 6:20 to 7:00 p.m. in the Sheraton, Concourse Level, Plaza Ballroom A.

Learn more.

Family Activities at #aagDENVER

Focus-on-Denver-graphic

Bringing the whole family to Denver for the 2020 AAG Annual Meeting? The Mile High City has a wide variety of kid friendly activities such as the Children’s Museum of Denver, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Firefighter’s Museum, and Dinosaur Ridge. The AAG will also continue to offer onsite, professionally managed child care at a subsidized rate. CAMP AAG will offer age-appropriate activities for children ranging from 6 months to 17 years of age, including children with disabilities. Registration for childcare is now open.

Plan your family trip.

Don’t delay – book your room for #aagDENVER today!

AAG has negotiated a discounted block of hotel rooms at the 2020 AAG Annual Meeting headquarters hotels, the Sheraton Denver Downtown and the Hyatt Regency – Denver. This rate is available on a first come, first served basis until March 13. Now that the preliminary program has been released, rooms will start going fast.

PUBLICATIONS

NEW The Professional Geographer Issue Alert:
Articles with topics ranging from vaccine exemptions to Manuel Castells

The-PG-2017-generic-213x300-1The most recent issue of The Professional Geographer has been published online (Volume 72, Issue 1, February 2020) with 15 new articles on current geographic research. Topics in this issue include solar desalination, mental health policy, intergenerational political behavior, viral maps, postqualitative analysis, microtoponyms, legal geography, and US shrinking cities. Locational areas of interest include the US Great Plains, the Small Island Developing States, and Sri Lanka. Authors are from a variety of institutions including United States Military Academy, University of Georgia, Nanjing University, and Universidade Estadual de Campinas.

All AAG members have full online access to all issues of The Professional Geographer through the Members Only page. Each issue, the Editors choose one article to make freely available. In this issue you can read Making the Case for Critical Q Methodology by Gretchen Sneegas for free for the next 3 months.

Questions about The PG? Contact PG [at] aag [dot] org.

NEW Winter Issue of the AAG Review of Books Published

The latest issue of the AAG Review of Books is now available (Volume 8, Issue 1, Winter 2020) with 10 book reviews on recent books related to geography, public policy, and international affairs. The Winter 2020 issue also holds four book review essays including a discussion of AAG Past President Alec Murphy’s latest work Geography: Why It Matters? led by Johnson et al.

Questions about the AAG Review of Books? Contact aagreview [at] aag [dot] org.

Journals-newsletter-100-2In addition to the most recently published journal, read the latest issue of the other AAG journals online:

• Annals of the American Association of Geographers
• The Professional Geographer
• GeoHumanities
• The AAG Review of Books

New Books in Geography — December Available

New-books1-1-3From geoengineering to industrial landscapes of Pittsburgh, there are always new titles in geography and related disciplines to be found on the New Books in Geography list. Some of these books will be reviewed in the AAG Review of Books. Persons wishing to volunteer their reviewing services for new books should have the requisite qualifications and demonstrable prior knowledge and engagement with the subject area, preferably through publications. Please contact the editors at aagrb [at] lsu [dot] edu if interested in being a reviewer.

Browse the full list of new books.

ASSOCIATION NEWS

AAG Announces Additional 2020 AAG Award Recipients

awards_hi-res-300x160-1Congratulations to the recipients of 2020 AAG Awards including the E. Willard and Ruby S. Miller Award, the Glenda Laws Award, the Wilbanks Award for Transformational Research in Geography, and the new AAG Award for Associates Program Excellence! Formal recognition of the awardees will occur during the AAG Awards Luncheon at the Annual Meeting on Friday, April 10, 2020.

Learn more about the awardees.

AAG Welcomes Spring 2020 Interns

The AAG is excited to welcome two new interns coming aboard our staff for the Spring 2020 semester! Joining us this semester are Ariel Golightly, a senior at the University of Maryland, College Park, pursuing a B.S. in Geographical Sciences with minors in Geographic Information Systems and Sustainability Studies, and Hannah Brenner, a senior at George Washington University pursuing a bachelor’s degree in geography with minors in sustainability and GIS.

Interested in interning with the AAG for Summer 2020? The AAG is accepting intern applications until March 1, 2020. Interns at the AAG are provided a weekly stipend and participate in most AAG programs and projects such as education, outreach, research, website, publications, or the Annual Meeting.

Meet the interns.

POLICY CORNER

The Census is Underway!

US_Capitol

Counting for the 2020 Census has officially started in Alaska. The first data collection began in the town of Toksook Bay. Since Alaska became a state it has always been counted first by Census workers because January offers the most favorable conditions for getting between remote villages. For the rest of the United States, April 1st is “Census Day” and serves as the kickoff for the big population count.

It is well understood that counting the population is an important undertaking, but the biggest impacts of the Census Bureau’s work are recognized once everyone has been counted and the data is put into action. The first and foremost task of the data, as charged by the Constitution, is to determine Congressional redistricting in order to keep representation in the House of Representatives as equal as possible. The manner in which new districts are drawn plays a key role in determining access to resources and apportionment of federal funds to communities in need. Furthermore, census data lives on in the work of geographers and the broader academic community as they rely on the results to inform their research. With the power of this information comes the responsibility to map Congressional districts in an equitable way that avoids advantageous population groupings and politically non competitive districts. The AAG continues to engage with thought-leaders on issues of redistricting, gerrymandering, and the fundamentally important work of the U.S. Census Bureau in empowering accurate and fair representation.

 

In the News:

  • The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) recently issued a Request for Public Comment entitled “Draft Desirable Characteristics of Repositories for Managing and Sharing Data Resulting from Federally Funded Research.” OSTP is collecting this feedback in order to develop common characteristics that agencies can use to improve the management and sharing of data from federally funded research. You can go through the Federal Register to submit comments as an individual or institution. The comment period closes March 6th, 2020.
  • Dr. Sethuraman Panchanathan has been nominated to serve as the next director of the National Science Foundation following the retirement of current director, Dr. France Córdova, in March. After going through the Senate confirmation process, Dr. Panchanathan will serve for a typical six-year term.
MEMBER NEWS

Profiles of Professional Geographers

“Understanding geography is a critical foundation to a GIS career path,” says Sean O’Brien who works as a GIS Analyst for U.S. Bank. In his work, O’Brien tackles massive databases to analyze the activity of bank customers and branches as well as advise and assist other bank departments with their geographic needs. As GIS becomes a growing necessity for business, O’Brien stresses that geographic knowledge, the ability to use Python, and networking skills are all essential pieces of a successful career.

Learn more about Geography Careers.

 

RESOURCES AND OPPORTUNITIES

AAG Seeks New Editor for the ‘AAG Review of Books’ Journal

Please consider submitting an application for the position of Editor of the AAG Review of Books. The new editor, whose responsibilities include overseeing the solicitation, review, and publication of book reviews for the journal, will be appointed for a four and a half year editorial term to start on July 1, 2020. The AAG Review of Books is published online only on a quarterly basis. Applications will be accepted until February 20, 2020.

More information on the position.

AAG Calls for Nominations for Standing and Awards Committees

The AAG Council will make appointments to several of the AAG Standing Committees at its spring 2020 meeting. These appointments will replace members whose terms will expire on June 30, 2020. If you wish to nominate yourself or other qualified individuals for one or more of these vacancies, please notify AAG Director of Operations Candida Mannozzi on or before March 1, 2020. Please make sure that your nominee is willing to serve if appointed. Include contact information for your nominee as well as a brief paragraph indicating his/her suitability for the position. Open committees include: Archives and Association History;  Committee on the Status of Women in Geography; Diversity and Inclusion Committee; Finance Committee; Membership Committee; Publications Committee; AAG Awards Committee; Fellows Selection Committee; BA/MA Program Excellence Award Committee; AAG Globe Book Award Committee; Harm de Blij Award Committee; Harold M. Rose Award Committee; Mel Marcus Fund for Physical Geography Committee; AAG Meridian Book Award Committee; AAG Research Grants Committee; and AAG Student Award and Scholarship Committee.

Click here for a description of committees.

IN MEMORIAM

William L. Graf

Past AAG President and one of the nation’s leading geomorphologists, William L. Graf, passed away on December 27, 2019 at the age of 72. With research focusing on rivers and water preservation, William Graf strongly identified as a geographer throughout his work in academia and in the US Air Force. Appointed by President Clinton to the Presidential Commission on American Heritage Rivers, Graf advocated for geographers’ roles in public policy decision making on rivers and land use.

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GEOGRAPHERS IN THE NEWS
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President's Column

The Publishing Paradox or How the Publishing Model May be Broken

Among the familiar litany of New Year’s resolutions, many of you may have promised yourselves that 2020 would be the year to finally finish that book or write that article. In other words: to PUBLISH.

Publishing is a huge part of academic life, the coin of the realm. There may have been some mythical past when graduate students could obtain their PhD and land a decent academic job without having to publish a single thing. When tenure in research universities required just a few thoughtful articles or perhaps a book. And when those in predominantly teaching institutions could get by with producing something once or twice in a career.

Fast forward to our day. Rare is the PhD who lands a job without a CV listing several publications. And institutions of all stripes demand a quiver of accepted articles from their tenure=track hopefuls. It is not unusual to see professors within research universities generating several articles every single year, racking up Google Scholar hits and the citations to go with them. Some twitter posts look like “to-do” lists of publishing projects promised and completed. Working over weekends and holidays has become the norm.

This greater frenzy of publication is borne out by the magnificent growth in journal publications each year. The most recent figure showed some 2.5 million articles published in 28,000 journals. This is driven in part by an increase in articles per capita. The chart below shows the number of scientific publications for full professors at research universities in geography and area studies between 1996 and 2014. It shows that average article generation more than doubled, and this for a group with few worries about tenure and promotion.

Average publications by geography full professors at research universities in 15 countries. Chart from Nikolioudakis et al, 2015 (https://www.int-res.com/articles/esep2015/15/e015p087.pdf).

All those would-be articles cycle through a publication system that has remained the same at its research core: authors who submit academic papers, other professors who kindly examine these submissions and provide comprehensive reviews, editors who orchestrate the whole process from beginning to end, and an audience of mostly academics ready to consume the scholarly output.

The truly dramatic changes have occurred in the larger publication universe. Two decades ago, there were many publishers such as Carfax, VH Winston, Pion, and Blackwell. In addition, there were still a number of independently published society journals. Many professors would take out personal subscriptions.

Today, most journal publishing has steadily consolidated into five or six big houses. The chart below shows the situation for all English-language journals. For just the social sciences, the top five publishers account for about 70 percent of all articles, compared to 15 percent in the early 1990s. These publishers sell journals to academic libraries as part of a package, but the costs of the packages can be stratospheric. Elsevier was recently embroiled in controversy because European libraries and the University of California felt that it charged far too much per article. Adding salt to these wounds is information that Elsevier makes about a 37 percent profit margin—selling back to academics content that these same academics have already produced. The other publishing houses employ the same basic model of selling to professors what the professors have already produced for free [full disclaimer, I am an editor for two journals published by Taylor & Francis].

 

Journal title shares by major publishers. Data from International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, 2018 (https://www.stm-assoc.org/2018_10_04_STM_Report_2018.pdf).

Very little of the publishing profits—which can be staggering—dribbles down to the people who are the beating heart of the publication process. To be sure, publishing houses offer major benefits in production, allowing articles to be copy edited, proofread, typeset and put online in a matter of days. The ability of the average scholar to access thousands of titles—crisp and in full color—without ever having to leave her office is nothing short of phenomenal. Archives can be summoned with the click of a mouse. For those who can afford it, these companies expedite the smooth transmission of information. But by acting as consolidators and distributors, journal publishers position themselves to sell scientific knowledge provided to them for free.

Of these, the only person within the research circle who gets paid—maybe a few thousand dollars a year—is the editor, mainly to cover expenses. The authors sometimes have to pay to cover page charges, especially if they want their article to be freely available to the readership. (The promotion of open access, which journals have jumped all over, can be quite costly with fees in excess of $2000 per paper.) In all but rare occasions, the reviewers review for absolutely nothing (and in some disturbing situations will get junior colleagues and students to review in their name), and merit or promotion committees seldom bestow academic credit for this consuming labor.

Added to the morass has been the proliferation of so-called predatory journals. I am sure that every one of you has received a solicitation, perhaps several times a week, asking whether you want to publish in a journal with a fishy title (International Journal of Global Technology and Science Research anyone?). These journals come with all the trappings—submission guidelines and editorial boards—and they promise a lot: super-fast review (within days!) and sometimes offers to write the paper for you. Yet the fees are onerous and the articles themselves rarely get circulated. With so many legitimate journals out there encouraging open access fees, and the pressure to publish, it is little wonder that such journals are seen as viable options.

Of course, there are a host of ethical issues that involve societies like the American Association of Geographers. We have been able to negotiate some lucrative contracts with our publisher, Taylor & Francis, which pay many of our bills. But this also perpetuates the high prices academic institutions are charged for subscriptions, and can put scientific knowledge out of reach for people without access.

So given the fact that journal publishing is not only here to stay but proliferating, how do we make the process better? Some journals have chosen to avoid the big presses: Acme, Focus, and Fennia to name three. Especially if tenure committees can come unshackled from the need for metrics, such publications provide a place for solid and alternative scholarship.

We can also devise better ways to validate the process of peer review. As an editor, I badger experts in various topics to take several hours of their time to provide a critical service to an anonymous someone. There is no monetary compensation for this, nor does it make a mark on most CVs. Yet at least half say yes, and many of the others apologize and promise to review at a different time. The entire edifice of scholarly publishing would crash without peer reviewers, yet they are often as taken-for-granted as wall studs. It would be nice if there was also a way to reward peer reviewers in some fashion and perhaps the whole process might be revamped.

The paradox of publishing is threefold. We require graduate students and professors to publish in academic journals if they hope to advance. Yet authors and peer reviewers work for free and journal editors for very little, while article fees increase and publishing houses accrue the profits. Academic societies such as the AAG rely on contracts with journal publishers to secure some of these profits, essentially benefitting from the free labor of their members.

To abandon the system would mean altering the rewards intrinsic to academia and forgoing the revenues now vital to scholarly associations. But the University of California’s termination of their contract with Elsevier earlier this year demonstrates that this system may not be sustainable in the long term. We all have a stake in the outcome. I hope that geographers will lead the way in developing a fairer and more reasonable model for journal publishing.

— Dave Kaplan
AAG President

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0066

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David Schwarz

David Schwarz (1936-2019) was a professor of geography at San Jose State University. He passed away in Gilroy, CA, aged 82, after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease.

He was born in Mattoon, Illinois, the 2nd of 7 children raised in a two-bedroom home with a coal stove for heat, and no indoor plumbing. After graduating from Mattoon H.S. he had a series of part-time jobs. The one that became the most significant was as a disk-jockey at a local radio station playing country and western music. To his friends, he seemed to know every country and western song ever recorded (both lyrics and melody). A random word or phrase in conversation would sometimes launch him into a song.
He continued with part-time jobs while attending Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, a few miles east of Mattoon. He graduated in 1963 with a double major, art and geography. One part-time job using his art skills, was to paint colorful signs in grocery store windows advertising weekly sales. It was during this era that he served six years in the National Guard.
David then attended Southern Illinois University (1963-1965), but left to pursue a Ph.D. degree at the University of Kansas under David Simonett, a world-renowned scholar in the field of remote sensing. Dr. Schwarz completed his Ph.D. in 1975, with a dissertation titled “Variability of the Accuracy of Delineating Agricultural Field Boundaries from Satellite Images of the United States.” He accepted a position in geography at San Jose State University in 1971, and rose through the ranks to become a full professor. David’s publications were in the general area of remote sensing, and he taught many courses on this subject. He spent his entire career at SJSU, and was an excellent teacher, attracting many students to his regional classes. He had small classes of dedicated students when teaching technical courses (as remote sensing, digital image processing, geographic information systems, cartography, and the like).
SJSU was in financial difficulty in the early 1980s, and social science layoffs were threatened. David helped alleviate this situation by accepting a position as a Visiting Professor at the Air Force Academy for two years (1980-82). He later taught courses on statistics in the College of Business in order to strengthen their doctoral program (in areas for which he was not trained, business or statistics, but he did an excellent job). Throughout his career David served on university committees and gained much knowledge of the university and how it operated. He was a very likeable and competent person, known for his integrity, and thoughtful and reserved demeanor. One of his colleagues called him “the Gary Cooper of the university.” Through committee work he developed many friendships with fellow professors in different disciplines. This deep background was a great help when he accepted administrative positions at SJSU.
Dave began his administrative work as Chair of Geography and Environmental Studies (1991-1995). He had the difficult and challenging task attempting to unite the two disciplines. David later began a five-year term (1996-2001) as Associate Dean in the College of Social Studies. These were the happiest years in his career, as he received wonderful support from the college staff, and from friends and staff in various departmental offices. David retired from SJSU in 2001, but continued to teach a course most semesters until the sudden departure of a dean. He once again helped SJSU, as he served as a dean for another year, and retired for the last time in 2005.
He is survived by his wife Deborah Walker Schwarz, two children, Sarah Nilsson and Noah Schwarz, and two grandchildren. He was predeceased by his parents, Raymond Noah and Gladys Elizabeth Schwarz, and two brothers James and Joseph Schwarz.
By Malcolm Comeaux and Deborah Schwarz
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