2027 AAG Annual Meeting

Participants-including geographers, GIS specialists, environmental scientists, and other knowledge leaders-will share and discuss the latest in research and applications in geography, sustainability, and GIScience. With thousands of different papers and presentations scheduled throughout the conference, you’ll find no shortage of activities that reflect your specific interests within the field of geography. It is a hybrid conference, denoting on-line and face to face events.

For more details, visit: aag.org

Black Geographies Specialty Group Pre-Conference to the 2027 AAG Annual Meeting

New York City, NY | February 7, 2027

The Black Geographies Specialty Group (BGSG) of the American Association of Geographers invites proposals for its Pre-Conference of the 2027 AAG Annual Meeting in New York City. This year’s pre-conference will be hosted at CUNY in collaboration with Rutgers Black Ecologies Lab, and will focus on themes of Black Geographies in the wake of U.S. 250. As we celebrate the 10th annual meeting of the BGSG and the 20th anniversary of Katherine McKittrick & Clyde Woods’ foundational text, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, we must also reckon with the consequences of 250 years of U.S. nationhood and its contingent definitions of freedom for Man, several hundred years of settler colonial empire in Turtle Island, and the cataclysmic era of global ecocide, genocide, and fascism that we find ourselves in today. As Frederick Douglass asked 174 years ago, “What to the slave is the 4th of July?” we take as a starting question of this pre-conference: What to Black Geographies is U.S. 250? What do the themes of transnational Black Geographic scholarship teach us about fugitivity, solidarity, resistance, world making, and desirable futures within and against the heart of empire? And what do Black ecological lifeways teach us about what might emerge from the ashes of its ultimate demise? 

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Following the precedent of our inaugural pre-conference in 2026 in San Francisco, and in the spirit of Black geographic practices of abolitionist placemaking, trans-national solidarity, and radical anti-racist pedagogy, we invite proposals for workshops, roundtables, field trips, and discussions between scholars, artists, and activists that facilitate dialogue, teaching and research skills-building, creative methodologies, political engagement, and community-based collaboration and organizing. We encourage proposals that address institutional and state memory, the challenges scholars of transnational Blackness, Indigeneity and migration face today, the liberatory possibility for Black futures, and the Black Geographies of U.S. empire as situated from and/or within New York City.

Panels and Workshops

Proposals for panels and workshops should include, in no more than 500 words, a description outlining learning objectives; theoretical and or empirical aims; as well as the practical or interactive activities that are planned. Proposals for panels that include a prospectus of confirmed panelists or potential panelists with confirmed interests will be given priority consideration.

Field Trips

Proposals for field trips should outline in no more than 500 words, who will facilitate the field trip; the rationale, learning objectives, or salience of the trip to Black geographies/ Black studies/Africana studies; proposed site(s) and itinerary; estimated duration of the trip; and estimated cost for attendees. Proposed field trips that entail collaborations with local Black cultural institutions, activists, and practitioners (eg. public historians, heritage tour guides, etc.) will be given priority consideration.

Submit Proposals Here by October 20; please send any questions you may have to blackgeog@gmail.com & BGSG Co-Chairs Kaily Heitz (kheitz@g.ucla.edu) and Jane Henderson (jane.henderson@dartmouth.edu)

Homecoming: Black Geographies at 10

An AAG Black Geographies Specialty Group Initiative

Black Geographies Specialty Group Sponsorship