This is a column I wrote for the AAG Biogeography Specialty Group newsletter while serving as chair 2017-2019.
Tales from the Underside
I want to talk about some of the forces that shape us as a scholarly community internally, and within Geography. Although such introspection can be taken to a paralyzing extreme, I’ll argue that periodic formalization and discussion of these kinds of issues is not entirely useless. Some recent events, and no doubt my own personal experiences along these lines, have prompted me to propose a few tentative questions.
Are research funding opportunities equitably distributed across geography and among physical geographers? Calls have been made for federal funding agencies like the NSF and NIH to fund a proportion of research proposals based on random selection, a lottery, once they surpass a given level of fundability. This allows more varied kinds of research to be funded and circumvents the problem of prestige. Criticisms have been leveled that success and the prestige that comes with it makes the strike zone for future success a little larger, even though the relationships among funding levels, novelty of research, and publication record are not necessarily as strong as we assume.
Must all physical geography research be critical and relevant to policy? Many of us have become aware of critical physical geography. It emphasizes how the production of knowledge relates to issues of power and justice. Should this version of being critical take prioritization over others in physical geography and biogeography? How does critical physical geography’s implied urgency impact the standing of biogeographers and physical geographers at large within the NSF and within the AAG? Open-ended research without overt relevance to policy and critical theory seems to be a hard sell today. But is that what a more pragmatic process of scientific inquiry requires?
To what extent should publishing (and broadly, academics) become a zero-sum game, in which if you don't win, you lose? I’d like to think that every bit of my research had clearly defined goals from the outset and career-forwarding outcomes. Hardly. My first, and unschooled attempt at dendrochronology was a disaster. My tinkering with kite photos and structure-from-motion photography had a large effort to return ratio. Yet they were successful, just not in the manner that we are increasingly conditioned to think of success: as winning, as publishing, as fame and fortune. Has practice in biogeography become too wedded to outcomes? How do we value our work more broadly? With the small acts of learning and service, the moments that are not quantifiable in Web of Science or in the kudos that go out on the faculty listserv? Where would we be without more stumbles, false starts, and plain old being wrong? How has the emphasis on visibility and quantifying our productivity, often through increasing specialization, impacted physical geography?
