General Introduction

With the creation of the Climate Action Task Force in 2019, the American Association of Geographers (AAG) joined a heterogeneous and loose-knit community of scholars and individuals concerned with placing the climate crisis at the center of discussions surrounding academic practice (see, e.g., Kalmus [2021]; Wilde and Nevins [2021]). This involves examining how the institutions and individuals that make up academia can abandon high carbon-emitting practices. Although this is a multifaceted task, moving away from a reliance on air travel is central to such an agenda. Academic conferences, venues that showcase and frame general professional practice, are a central site of such necessary transformation. Accordingly, the main goal of the Climate Action Task Force is to transform the AAG annual conference into a low-carbon event. Through its work, the Task Force seeks to address the professional interests of association members, while foregrounding the broad goals of social and environmental justice (Martin and Nevins 2019).

As part of this initiative, the Task Force members organized a series of panel and paper sessions for the 2020 AAG Annual Meeting. Collectively, these sessions embodied critical praxis: Not only did they introduce research that demonstrates the necessity for concrete change in academia but they also incorporated novel practices into the AAG meeting to test new modes of dialogue and exchange. Growing out of these 2020 sessions, this special focus section of The Professional Geographer presents a series of articles and debates that we hope will broaden and deepen the discussion about how to transform the AAG Annual Meeting, and academic practice more generally, to respond adequately to the depth of the contemporary climate crisis. The focus section is divided into two parts. The first part centers on Kevin Anderson’s plenary address, in which he articulated the urgency of climate action while addressing the role that universities and academics should play as a catalyst of change; it includes commentaries on the lecture from a broad range of geographers. Building out of three panel sessions sponsored by the Task Force, the second part addresses debates and dilemmas that confront the AAG and the discipline of geography as the Association engages with a transformation to a low-carbon culture. These range from the social and environmental complexities of reimagining the AAG annual conference to the possible risks and benefits of carbon offsetting, to the ethical dilemmas that underpin (international) fieldwork.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patricia M. Martin

PATRICIA M. MARTIN is a Professor in the Département de géographie at the Université de Montreal, Montréal, QC H3C 3J7, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include feminist geography, political geography, and the geographies of Latin America.

Joseph Nevins

JOSEPH NEVINS is a Professor in the Department of Earth Science and Geography at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include socioterritorial boundaries and mobility, violence and inequality, and political ecology.