Elevating the Discipline: Creating Pathways for Geographers as Public Scholars

Geographers are well suited to be public scholars, due to their specialized training and interdisciplinary perspectives, which equip them to “ground-truth” and convey knowledge on a wide variety of trends and issues to the public and policymakers. Although institutional recognition of public scholarship has increased over the past twenty years, it remains an underdeveloped area of practice for geographers, often fraught with professional and personal pitfalls. The gap in public relevance for geographers, relative to other disciplinarians, has been documented for decades. Current trends of greater public engagement indicate cause for cautious optimism, albeit plagued by risks to individual geographers, particularly those who might be marginalized in public discourse due to their identities, their stances, or both. Drawing on the lessons learned from the first-ever media and advocacy training cohort at the American Association of Geographers (AAG), entitled Elevate the Discipline, this article examines the skills and attributes geographers bring to the public arena, as well as the obstacles to such work. Although some universities address the need for public scholarship development through training and support, geographers might need very specific components around elements of their practice such as mapping and visualization tools, or bringing multifaceted messages into focus. The experience with AAG’s yearlong Elevate the Discipline, which culminated in a week of in-person training, demonstrates that a relatively modest training can instill confidence and skills in geographers to weigh in on ever-more crucial science communication and engagement with the public.