Strategic Planning Initiatives: Overall Foundations and Rationale
A preliminary survey of the faculty was conducted in November 2019, “Geography Department Priorities and Mission.” There were 15 responses. In surveying which priorities we had for building an excellent department, the priorities receiving the most responses as “extremely important” were in order as follows (See Appendix for full list of departmental priorities and mean scores):
Excellence in research
Collegiality and mutual support
Ethical behavior in teaching and research
Excellence in graduate student mentoring
Public-facing research and outreach
During Spring semester of 2020, a representative group of department citizens including faculty, staff, lecturers, and students identified large overall themes that the department of geography needed to address that touched all aspects of our community.
In the following 2020-2021 Academic Year, the whole faculty and graduate student body were surveyed several times to populate those themes with concrete action items that will catalyze latent, cross-disciplinary potential in our interactions with each other, allied departments and researchers across campus, and our own research agendas. To slowly integrate these initiatives and build capacity, we have identified a tiered approach that will space out the initiation of each tier and the responsibilities of the department citizens working on individual initiatives. This strategy will allow committees to learn as they go and follow new avenues of inspiration as each group progresses.
An additional departmental initiative identified through our surveys was Transportation and Mobility. We as a department have decided to table this initiative for now but will revisit in the future.
Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
Establish an overarching plan to identify areas within the department requiring deliberate anti-racist efforts: in hiring, annual reviews, promotion and tenure, teaching and mentoring, and in research and curriculum. This initiative represents a dual-pronged approach for us to respond to recent calls for justice in the discipline, decolonize our curriculum and research, and also internally to acknowledge where we have fallen short of our justice principles and take corrective action to make our department a more inclusive and welcoming community.
These topics are timely, and we are receiving signals from the highest levels of the university; most notably, President Kristina Johnson announced a hiring initiative, RAISE: race, inclusion and social equity. Likewise, the College of Arts and Sciences formed working groups of chairs and directors in AY 2021-2022 to address racial justice within our own units. The events surrounding the death of George Floyd in summer 2020 and the months of protests that followed galvanized our department and spurred faculty and graduate students to think and act more systematically in the name of justice. Finally, topics such as inequality and unevenness are central geography foci: we have a particular intellectual stake, even as the whole university is taking up this issue. It is time to demonstrate leadership in these areas while aligning with other university efforts at various levels.
We cannot achieve scholarly excellence without broadening our perspectives, welcoming participation from traditionally minoritized populations and constructing a community where everyone feels valued and heard.
Align and focus how we practice geography to address critical issues, build capacity and recruit faculty and graduate students who specialize in equity, justice and social difference and the associated impacts on society, environment, climate, data science, race and gender, immigration, health, policy, mobility, and diversity.
The discipline of geography historically played a role in the oppression and marginalization of the world’s peoples through colonialism and imperial conquest. Now we seek to use our 21st geographic tools towards building a more just future.
Climate Change
Focus on synthesizing and making visible our collective expertise related to all aspects of climate change, and impacts on health, food production and access, natural resources, energy, climate politics, human dimensions, transportation, and glacial retreat.
Climate change is one of humanity’s greatest challenges, with implications for where we live, what we eat, and how our societies function. Geography as a discipline and our department must provide theories, approaches, techniques, evidence, insights, options and strategies for individuals and societies to take appropriate action.
