Department News
2021-2026 Geography Strategic Plan
During the 2020-2021 academic year, the Department of Geography took on the daunting and massive task of creating a five-year strategic plan. The purpose of this exercise was to guide the department’s efforts to raise our profile in research and graduate recruitment, to engage individuals from different perspectives and from across diverse constituencies, and to develop curricula and programs that students demand in the 21st century.
The department identified two strategic initiatives that were crucial to the continued success of geography as a department and as a discipline. The first initiative was climate change. Climate change has an increasingly broad scope, touching on disciplines outside Atmospheric Sciences and Physical Geography. We, as a department, wanted to delve deeper into the impacts of climate change on political structures, cultures, public health, land use, business logistics, and others.
You can read more about this initiative, the goals associated with Climate Change for the department, and our strategies to achieve these goals, here.
The second initiative identified was Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI). Tying succinctly with climate change, justice was another issue that unifies the diverse subfields within our department. Beyond our academic subject matter, the department felt it was necessary to look at the make-up of our faculty, students, courses and content, and our programming to identify ways in which we have perpetuated biases on the basis of race, gender, religion or citizenship. We aim to expand our work on justice in our research and teaching, and in our departmental culture.
You can read more about this initiative, the goals associate with Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, our strategies, and our expected outcomes, here. You can read the full 2021-2026 Geography Strategic Plan, here.
2020-2021 Blog Series
The Department of Geography continued the Blog Series throughout the year with engaging posts from faculty, staff, graduate students, and visitors.
Our series during summer semester of 2020 discussed experiences of students and faculty as they participated in field research. These posts discussed the best practices, their experiences in an ever-changing environment, and how those experiences changed not only their perspectives, but how they conducted research moving forward.
Autumn semester saw the investigation of the 2020 Census. The department heard from individuals that study the census, use census data, and those that work in the Census office. Topics during this blog series included The 2020 U.S. Census and Indigenous Peoples, Locating the Rural Forested Community: Aka When Bugs Bunny Saved the Day, Why We Count: Geographers and the US Decennial Census, and Making Sense of Census Data Resources. Autumn semester’s blog series examined the decennial census from multiple angles and its impacts.
Spring Semester’s topic was Food Systems and the Food-Water-Energy Nexus where the department evaluated the importance of how food security is impacted across space, across places, and across people. These blog posts discussed the sustainability of the current system and food sources. Each blogger also addressed the future outlook for agriculture in our communities, the marketability and
economic changes that would need to occur, as well as the logistical hurdles to provide for a growing population to ensure food security for all.
During the 2021-2022 academic year, The Department of Geography blog is celebrating a century of geography here on the OSU campus. The department will have former colleagues, former students, and experts in the field discuss their memories of Geography at OSU and the impacts to both themselves personally and globally that geography has made. Join us to take a walk down memory lane as we celebrate 100 years of Geography at The Ohio State University!
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