Introduction to Debate One: Academic Knowledge Production in Age of Climate Disruption: Relevance, Inclusion, Connection

In the spring of 2019, the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Council created a task force charged with transforming the organization’s Annual Meeting to achieve reductions in CO₂ emissions at a level commensurate with that indicated by climate science. Taken to its logical conclusion, this initiative invites a radical openness in reimagining the dominant modes of academic dialogue and exchange in a way that fully acknowledges the severity of contemporary climate disruption but that also engages with other long-existing social, political, and economic challenges manifest in contemporary academia. The collection of articles in this special section results from a panel session in which we asked participants to think about the relation between the climate crisis and the AAG meeting to critically reflect on what a low-emissions, ecologically and socially just, and politically and intellectually relevant AAG conference might look like. Here we present four contributions from the panel session.

The first contribution, written by Jayme Walenta and Aylin Castro, demonstrates the way in which distinct geographical configurations of the annual conference affect the event’s carbon footprint, thereby prying open the conference to a critical geographical analysis. The article demonstrates that international travel to the AAG is a major source of carbon emissions, highlighting the significant reduction that is possible with a multiple hub configuration. Indeed, after seeing the numbers, and the ecological transformation that a multiple hub model would permit, it becomes very difficult to articulate a justification for not pursuing such a path. Drawing on and extending Pulido’s (2002) essay, “Reflections on a White Discipline,” Tianna Bruno and Cristina Faiver-Serna argue, in turn, that racial justice must accompany ecological justice in reimagining the AAG Annual Meeting. Accordingly, the broader (white) institution and discipline should work on nurturing, engaging with, and expanding the nascent sacred spaces created by Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) scholars. As Bruno and Faiver-Serna argue, such an imperative would work to confront historical and contemporary racism within geography while also transforming our collective understandings of the causes and consequences of the climate crisis, rooted as it is in structures of “white supremacy, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism.”

Hannah Knox’s contribution brings a different angle to the idea of knowledge production. Her research on climate change governance led her to see the tensions and contradictions in maintaining a strong division between object (climate change) and researcher, leading her to the decision to stop flying. Developing the idea of “material reflexivity,” she argues that the process of “knowing” is inherently, always material. Integrating a consideration for the material basis of how we do research and generate ideas and, by extension, organize conferences, serves as a “mode of analysis” making different worlds visible and possible. Finally, Patricia Martin argues that the current “high-emissions culture” of the AAG Annual Meeting is linked to a process of knowledge enclosure that is structured by both neoliberal and nationalist logics. Accordingly, the reaffirmation of geography as a transnational “public good” should accompany any transformation in the conference model.

Taken together, these articles mark out an ambitious agenda for change, inviting geographers, our home institutions, and the AAG to engage in critical praxis regarding the material, discursive, and social conditions that underpin contemporary knowledge production on and in the climate crisis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tianna Bruno

TIANNA BRUNO is a Doctoral Candidate in the Geography Department at the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include Black geographies, critical environmental justice, political ecology, and critical physical geography.

Patricia M. Martin

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