Reflections from the 2024 AAG Conference
By Jo Gillespie, Associate Professor, School of Geosciences
In April 2024, the annual AAG (American Association of Geographers) Conference took place in Hawai’i stimulating academic engagement and collaboration with geographers and cognate colleagues around the world.
The conference coalesced around three key themes which also clearly resonate with SEI priorities:
- Reciprocal scholarship
- Colonialism and resources
- Recovery and restoration
The themes provided inspiration and food-for-thought for the sessions and conversations throughout the week-long conference. It was clear that these themes mirror so much of the work being done under the various auspices of the SEI.
The conference afforded me an opportunity to present my SEI-funded work. The project, which is a collaboration between myself, Dr Rebecca Hamilton and Professor Dan Penny, is about “Nature-based solutions for re-building resilience in the Botany Wetlands” and aligns with the Biodiversity, conservation, and culture research theme.
On behalf of the team, I presented part of our research in a session about “Vegetal Geographies”, in a paper which talked of the importance of giving plant communities a ‘voice’ in ecological restoration efforts through the combined research efforts of environmental reconstructions, archival research and the documentation of biodiversity conservation laws.
Regarding the very many stimulating events, I will mention just a couple here to provide some insights into this popular conference.
An inspiring Presidential Plenary address led by Professor Rebecca Lave shone a light on the ‘reciprocal scholarship’ theme.
The AAG set out Reciprocal Scholarship as taken to mean “ʻAʻohe pau ka ‘ike i ka hālau hoʻokahi”, literally “All knowledge is not taught in the same school” and figuratively, ‘One can learn from many sources.’ Reciprocal scholarship was described as a method of inquiry that prioritizes non-extractive research and community-building engagement.
This Plenary session showcased the research of Aurora Kagawa-Viviani, an early career ‘physical’ geography scholar.
Aurora who is an Assistant Professor at the Water Resources Research Centre and Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, spoke about her less-than-linear career trajectory that brought her to geography via environmental engineering and hydrology.
Aurora’s insights into Hawai’i water, plant and people connections were powerful. Her use of language underscored how important place understandings are to research and, more notably, how important, we, as researchers, are to enabling progressive research to happen when we work with community.
As Aurora said: we all have a responsibility to do reciprocal scholarship as researchers. You can watch the session here.
Other highlights included watching and listening to University of Sydney and School of Geosciences alumni, Dr Ming Li Yong, talking about her work in a session entitled “Political ecologies of sustainability, water governance, and digital environmentalism: Critical scholarship inspired by Karen Baker”.
Ming Li’s paper, “Water security and vulnerability in the Mekong Delta: a hydrosocial approach”, spoke of her field-based work in the Mekong region, and highlighted how lowland farming communities cope both with and without inundation – particularly salient issues considering hydropower damming of the Mekong River together with potential climate change impacts on low-lying communities.
I found this conference so valuable, as together with scholars from the US and Europe, we contributed to the generation of some thought-provoking ideas challenging the dominant anthropocentric framing of plant/human/place entanglements.
Header image by Mitch Meyers on Unsplash.