Community Geography
Chip Peterson, a geographer in the University of Minnesota's Learning Abroad Center and a member of our Council on Public Engagement, sent me an interesting Op-Ed piece entitled “Community Geography� from the March 2007 issue of the AAG (Association of American Geographers) Newsletter. The article was authored by Don Mitchell from Syracuse University.
The article describes how the Executive Director of a hot food program in downtown Syracuse contacted the Geography Department to ask whether the department could help to create a “Syracuse Hunger Project� (SHP) to “map the face of hunger in the city�. He suspected that the locus of hunger in the city had shifted over time, but that the social services needed to respond had not followed that shift. The piece goes on to describe how a GIS course was reoriented to make the issue a class project, and how, when
… the students’ maps were presented to SHP meetings, the whole tenor of the conversation changed. Those who had been working on hunger forever began to look at the problem in a new way. They saw that indeed thee were large-scale shifts in the geography of poverty … without a similar shift in service provisions. But even more importantly, they began to apprehend the importance of finer-scale geographies… This resulted in … a raising of critical questions about how entitlement programs like food stamps intersect with the social geographies of the city. … In instance after instance, the maps grounded what had heretofore been quite abstract discussions, providing a specific focus for discussion and debate.
The article goes on to describe how this project led to broader initiatives, including the establishment of a “Community Geographer� , “someone with both social-geographic and GIS/spatial analysis skills, who would have full access to departmental and university facilities, students and courses, and the support of the university’s Center for Community and Public Service, but who would be paid by the community. But then, alas, adequate continuing funding could not be found, unless for narrow purposes, because foundations were unwilling to fund something that is open-ended rather than project-based, and town-gown issues made full university funding impractical. Mitchell writes
This conundrum is doubly frustrating because both the Syracuse Hunger Project and the Community Geographer have significantly transformed our department: how we approach our work, how we interact with students, and what our position is in the city and university. Faculty in other departments urge their students to take our classes and to consider geography as a dual major, students report that they have sought out our classes after hearing about SHP and CG work, student evaluations in classes linked to, or that draw from, the work of the SHP and CG indicate a genuine excitement about geographical learning and thinking that is strikingly different from a half dozen years ago. One of the things students report is that geography is becoming known as a place where “real work� gets done …
One can hardly imagine more eloquent or persuasive testimony that public engagement is not only valuable for its own sake, but that it enriches teaching and scholarship.