PhD student Rachel Lamb Reflects on her Time at AAG
From April 9-13, I attended my first annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in New Orleans. I was amazed by the breadth of session topics, and the efforts of conference organizers to sponsor themes salient to our conference location. For example, two of the primary conference themes, Black Geographies and Natural Hazards, tried to help contextualize the intersection of race and vulnerability in New Orleans, a city with a heightened risk of hurricanes. One of the keynote speakers, Dr. Robert D. Bullard, the “father of environmental justice,” told stories from his 40-year career fighting for human rights and dignity in the south. Through his work as a sociologist, he helped showcase the environmental discrimination that communities of color were experiencing and the uphill battle to collect data, map spatial connections, and advocate for better decision-making.
Although officially named an “honorary geographer” at the conference, Dr. Bullard gave voice to the unique and spatially-explicit inequities that Black Americans are facing in the southern United States.
In addition to my role as an attendee, I also gave two research presentations. On Wednesday, I presented the first phase of my SESYNC Graduate Pursuit Research regarding social-ecological networks in Lake Erie, delivered alongside my co-PI from the University of California, Davis. Joining a special session on Network Perspectives on Adaptation and Resilience in Social-ecological Systems, we were able to share our work with senior scientists and gain valuable feedback on our work. It was particularly encouraging to hear that the scope of our work, specifically our efforts to incorporate ecological data more explicitly into social network analysis, was in-line with cutting-edge research in the field. Given that social networks are not my primary area of expertise, I enjoyed the deep-dive into the subject and also learned about work Dr. Christina Prell is doing right here in our own Department.
My second presentation on Friday centered on my preliminary work to advance the socio-economic applications of our carbon monitoring products for the State of Maryland. Joining the Landscape Specialty Group’s Student Presentation Competition, I was able to present my research take on “landscape,” an inclusive concept for investigating the human and non-human objects, patterns and processes across scales from the local to the global. The session provided a great opportunity to exchange research applications and ideas among human and physical geography, and I was awarded first place in the student presentation competition.
Overall, I appreciated the opportunity to hear fellow UMD students present their work, showcase our Department’s diverse research expertise, and better understand the interdisciplinary work of geographers. I look forward to attending future meetings of the AAG and sharing future iterations of my dissertation research.
