Chair's Blog

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Could I have picked a more polarizing subject? Absolutely. But this one is good enough. I don’t know how you feel about AI, but I’m pretty sure your feelings are strong. I’d guess that the reason for this is that AI is an immensely powerful tool — for good and for evil. Never have we come this close to Orwellian 1984-type capabilities on the one hand, and to “boldly go[ing] where no man [or anyone else] has gone before” on the other. Which direction will it go? Most likely, both.

It’s up to us — people — to decide what we use this power for.

I remember the early 2000s, when GPS tracking technology emerged and started taking over the world. We, geographers, raised concerns about what we called geo-slavery. The idea was simple: once the technology became widely available, it would be used to track and control people. Did that happen? Unquestionably. GPS is still used to stalk and control people. And yet, it’s also hard to imagine life without GPS now.

AI is more powerful, and the potential for both good and bad is much larger. That’s why I’m glad to see so many people engaged in the broader conversation. I don’t think AI is going away. And I, for one, am happy about it (yes — once the computers take over the world, you can tell me “told you so”).

In the meantime, I’m looking for ways to get AI to help me make my workday more productive and a bit more interesting. I collaborate with several AI agents, and I find them extremely helpful. Do I think my collaborators are always right? Nope. Do I take everything they say for granted? Definitely not. Do they provide useful insights and helpful arguments? They do — especially when I ask them to play devil’s advocate.

But that’s on me. I need to ask for sanity checks. I need to decide whether the arguments they present actually withstand scrutiny. I need to check whether they interpreted the information they pulled from web sources correctly. I need to provide proper guidance to get a good result. Don’t be mad at AI when you get a garbage response. Keep in mind that it was we, people, who put the initial garbage into the information pool.  

AI, at least for now, is a very bright early-career collaborator who is genuinely trying to help. Instead of fighting against AI, I strongly advocate engaging it — as much as possible — in our teaching, research, and yes, even service.

I would much rather see students using AI to build something interesting in an introductory programming course than proudly printing “HelLo world./” I would rather researchers run manuscripts through AI before submission to look for weak spots in their arguments. And I would much rather read an AI-edited paper than struggle through awkward grammatical structures from authors whose first language is not English (I am one — I would know). I would also much rather let AI draft policies for me — especially if I can ask it to make them consistent with a hundred-page university policy document. AI can and will do this gladly.

But when I put my name on the final version, it’s still my job to make sure it says what I mean. So I’m learning how to collaborate with AI, and I’m genuinely enjoying the process. I push it to its limits (it’s funny how close those limits sometimes are). And because of that collaboration, I can accomplish more and feel happy with the quality of the outcome.

AI will keep getting better. Human intelligence needs a little more training.

Published by Tatiana Loboda on Fri, 01/30/2026 - 16:05

On the way to tundra fieldwork, Tatiana Loboda takes a break to pose by the Arctic Circle sign on Alaska’s Dalton Highway in 2018.

What happened to geography? When did “discovering the world” get boring and unappealing? Where did wanderlust go? Why is introducing oneself as a geographer so intensely uncomfortable that one immediately feels the urge to explain?

We could all come up with a long list of reasons. But I really think it boils down to two big ones.

First: information overload. We are so very fortunate to live in a world where you can visit—at least virtually—any country on Earth, day or night, with just a few clicks on your keyboard. We can.

But we rarely do.

With so many apps competing for our eyeballs, and with attention spans getting shorter by the day, natural and cultural wonders don’t stand much of a chance. This isn’t exactly a shocking realization. I’m not going to pretend I’m saying something new here.

But information overload isn’t the whole story.

The second reason is harder to talk about. It’s the gradual, and very intentional, removal of geographical knowledge—and even awareness of geography as a discipline—from American society. Chester Finn, a senior fellow at the Fordham Institute, once referred to geography as “the unloved stepchild of American education.” I’d actually take it a step further.

Geography isn’t Cinderella. Geography is Rapunzel—locked far away in an academic tower, surrounded by thick, nearly impassable brambles of ignorance.

Geography gets discovered by people who are bored with the available options, or by those who are genuinely, hopelessly lost. And then, of course, there are the knights (of all genders) who arrive from faraway lands to join Rapunzel’s round table.

I’m getting carried away with mythology, but you get the point. American geography relies heavily on foreign talent. We are fortunate because of it. But it’s still worth asking: why does that matter?

Because once you actually stop and think about it, it becomes surprisingly hard to name an economic or societal endeavor that doesn’t require a solid understanding of spatial linkages. Supply chains? Workforce availability? Exposure to harmful—or beneficial—conditions? School redistricting?

Try it yourself. It’s harder than it sounds.

I’m sure that two or three hours later I might come up with an exception. Until then, nearly everything depends on geographic knowledge overlapping with other kinds of expertise.

Geography—the study of spatial linkages in natural and societal settings—is central to how the world works. What happens where. Why it happens there. And why that matters elsewhere.

In many ways, we still do what the intrepid explorers of the past did. We describe what Earth looks like, where it is changing the fastest, and why things are the way they are in different places.

We just use cooler tools. Satellite data. Digital platforms. Increasingly, artificial intelligence. But we still go to faraway, remote, and sometimes uninhabited places.
Geography is still about seeing the world—how it works, how it’s changing, and how our lives are entangled with those changes.

So yes—join geography. See the world.

And yes, in a good way.

Published by Tatiana Loboda on Wed, 01/14/2026 - 9:35