The 2022 summer series will be the first of its kind for AAG. It is an expansion of the 2020-2021 Learning Series. Our program committees have selected and identified 45 offerings, including workshops, seminars, working groups, and forums. They will be offered between May and August and registrations will open in April.  Subscribe to our mailing list and get firsthand notifications to apply once registration opens. Seats will be limited in workshops and working groups, so join the list today! 

In response to COVID-19, the AAG called upon geography teachers, instructors, and faculty to help us offer a series of virtual workshops for AAG graduate student members, to support them to adapt in their research or learn a new “pandemic-proof” method. We received 28 proposal ideas and selected 14 workshops, helping students across the geography spectrum with methods and tools such as Jupyter Notebooks, Google Colab, GeoPandas, SaTScan, ATLAS.ti, Miro, Google Maps, or ArcGIS StoryMaps. About 10% of AAG’s graduate student members (256 graduate students) participated in at least one workshop in the series. Each workshop took place over the course of one week, with a few synchronous sessions and a few asynchronous resources (pre-recorded videos, reading materials, exercises, etc.). During that week, participants were also able to connect with geographers around the world, hear each other’s projects, and each other’s challenges. 

The need for such a program beyond the pandemic became clear based on testimonies from the Learning Series (see written testimonies and video testimonies), which is why the AAG Council re-committed support for another year and increased its budget. Based on community input during the Learning Series and from an all-day event on September 10, we changed the format of this program in 4 major ways. First, the main audience for the series remains graduate students, but we are also developing a few offerings that will target recently graduated geographers in- or outside of academia, and a few undergraduate students. Second, we will continue having graduate-level advanced workshops, but we are also developing other offering types such as graduate-led working groups, a post-graduation essentials series and a seminar series. Third, we are collaborating with the AAG Affinity Groups for Graduate Students (GSAG) to offer informal graduate forums. Fourth, the series will happen throughout the summer months (May through August), rather than all year long. 

The original proposal for the 2020-2021 workshop series was written in May 2020 as part of AAG’s COVID-19 Task Force by Brittany Lauren Wheeler (Clark University, Mount Holyoke College) and Dydia DeLyser (California State University, Fullerton) as members of the “Student” subcommittee chaired by Lindsay Naylor (University of Delaware). Their proposal was selected for funding by AAG Council in July 2020. 

The program implementation was supported by a Selection Committee composed of faculty at all levels and a graduate student: Lindsay Naylor (Committee Chair, University of Delaware), Dydia DeLyser (California State University, Fullerton), Adriana E. Martinez (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Skye Naslund (University of Washington), and Yuqin Jiang (University of South Carolina). Guidelines for the workshops were further refined based on 2 pilot workshops instructed in September 2020 by Joslyn Zale (University of Southern Mississippi) and Iain Hay (Flinders University of South Australia). 

The 2022 summer series builds on this initial workshop series and has been further developed with the input and ideas from our community. AAG Staff and AAG Program Chair gathered input during a day-long event on September 10, 2021, which gathered 30 participants including graduate students, recent graduates, professionals, instructors, academic scholars, as well as AAG specialty and affinity group leaders: Alisa Yang (University of Kansas), Nita Shashidharan (Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, India), Terra McKee (North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University), Shrobona Karkun Sen (Temple University), Chantal Rietdijk (National Taiwan Normal University), Kimberly Fernandes (University of Pennsylvania), Pallavi Gupta (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Nomcebo Dlamini (University of the Free State ), Sahar Zavareh (University of Munich ), Sara Tornabene (University of North Carolina Charlotte), Brittany Lauren Wheeler (Clark University, Mount Holyoke College), Peter DeBartolo (University of Oxford), Joan Ogongo (Egerton University), Holly Moulton (University of Oregon), Jonayed Rousan Mandal, Vidya Pancholi, Mackenzie Fox (Johns Hopkins University), Brittany Jones (University of Toledo), Timileyin Odunayo (Urban Planning Smart Solutions ltd), Karen Paiva Henrique (University of Western Australia), Aparna Parikh (Pennsylvania State University), Dydia DeLyser (California State University, Fullerton), Peter Kedron (Arizona State University), Joseph Holler (Middlebury College), Douglas Munski (University of North Dakota), Joshua Merced (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Michael Desjardins (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health), Linda Peake (The City Institute at York University), Bandana Kar (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), and Brian Chaffin (University of Montana). 

This program is supported by AAG program staff, Julaiti Nilupaer and Coline Dony, and overseen by the program chair, Lindsay Naylor (University of Delaware). You can reach them with any questions at research-during-covid@aag.org.