AAG 2025: It’s About Care

I have just returned from my first American Association of Geographers conference, and I felt the need to write about my experience now rather than delay until I forget the details. So, here’s my recap of two days at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting held in Detroit, Michigan.

To be at a conference as large as the AAG Annual Meeting is certainly intimidating. Geography is perhaps one of the most broad disciplines within academia, encapsulating physical and social sciences, quantitative and qualitative methods, and a range of theoretical frameworks that give context to the challenge one has when discovering what geography is and isn’t. The breadth of this discipline is on full display at AAG, where I estimate roughly 5,000 students, professors, industry representatives, and hobbyists gathered in Detroit for five days of panels, poster sessions, plenaries, and parties (I don’t know if there actually were parties, but I thought the alliteration sounded nice. Plus, there were probably parties). Even though I was only able to stay for the first two days of the conference, by the time I boarded my flight home I was well and truly intellectually stuffed.

For those who haven’t attended AAG before, the conference is a five day marathon of academic presentations, discussions, Q&A’s and exhibits starting at 8:00 A.M. and going well into the evening. What I appreciate most about this event is that there is truly something for everyone whether your interest be the natural or the social, the rural or the urban, interviews or GIS. However, given my limited time and my desire to make new connections, I stayed within my focus area of energy geography (unfortunately many of the rural geography sessions are scheduled for after I had to leave). Nevertheless, I certainly made the most of my brief introduction to the geographical mosaic that is the AAG Annual Meeting.

Monday Morning: Electric Utilities And The Energy Transition

Monday was all about the energy transition, specifically from our current fossil-fueled economy to one based in renewables. In the morning, the sessions I attended focused specifically on the role of energy utilities within the transition process.  The first session took a historical perspective, examining the role of energy utilities in shaping our modern energy system, and we might learn from these previous events. I would like to particularly note Dr. Amy Janzwood of McGill University and her ongoing work studying the public’s involvement in British Columbia Hydro’s efforts to decarbonize, Recent University of Arizona Graduate Dr. Elena Louder and her work studying the history of electric utility ownership in Chile, and University of Toronto PhD Candidate Hongyun Lyu’s exploration of the rural-urban divide in the history of China’s electric utilities. I will not go into further detail about their work here, as I would surely not be able to do it justice; however, I recommend that you look into their work for yourself!

Switching from history, the following section looked at the interaction between electric utilities and consumers in the present day. Once again, the session was full of impactful research with important insights on consumers both affect and are affected by the energy transition. I must extend a sincere congratulations and thank you to the organizers of the session: Session Chair Dr. Salma Elmallah and Organizers Dr. Veronica Jacome, Isaac Sevier, and Dr. Laura Tozer. Each of these fantastic people are also doing work that I recommend you to read. Particularly notable information from this second session was Dr. Yutong Si’s presentation which found that many states across the U.S. have regressive electricity rates in disadvantaged communities, meaning that those communities are likely to pay comparatively higher electricity rates than communities with higher incomes, education levels, and white populations. Only in Washington were electricity rates found to be higher in areas with higher incomes, levels of education, and whiter populations. This will be important work to follow over the coming years, as I wonder whether current efforts to limit energy justice may impact this further. I was also fascinated by the work of University of Utah PhD candidate Marissa Greer, who showed how different states and utilities across the Western United States are implementing demand-side energy management projects. I’m a huge policy wonk, so I was really interested to see what strategies these different entities are using to get consumers to reduce their energy consumption. Finally, I want to note the work of University of Michigan PhD Candidate Pamela Wildstein, who introduced the term “Gridmaking” to describe how communities work to create distributed energy grids that suit their needs and align with their values. As someone who studies the role of place in the energy transition, I am excited to see how I can bring a “Gridmaking” lens to my future work!

Monday Afternoon: Landscapes And The Energy Transition

While the electric utilities sessions did continue through the day, I switched over to another very exciting session in the afternoon organized by some truly fantastic scholars looking at the energy transition in rural communities: Dr. Kaitlyn Spangler of Penn State, Dr. James McCarthy of Clark University, PhD Candidate Zachary Goldberg of Penn State, Dr. Steven Wolf of Cornell, and Dr. Francisco Calafate-Faria of London South Bank University. There were several reasons why I looked forward to this track of three sessions in particular. First, I had cited Dr. Spangler’s work in both my thesis and recent publication in the Journal of Rural Studies and wanted to formally introduce myself after lots of email back-and-forth over the previous several months. Second, Zach’s work on solar development on Pennsylvania farmland is pretty similar to my work on solar and agrivoltaics in Arizona, and I always enjoy seeing the progress he is making toward earning his PhD. Third, and perhaps selfishly, I was scheduled to present an abridged version of my thesis (the length of each presentation was only 12 minutes, so I had to condense enough that I think it warrants a hefty ‘abridged’ disclaimer).

As expected, the sessions throughout the afternoon were fantastic. Dr. Spangler has gathered such a rich dataset of interviews and surveys of solar and agricultural stakeholders in Pennsylvania, and I believe she has new work coming out very soon with this data. Zach is close to finishing his PhD, and I believe his dissertation will contain some truly valuable insight on solar energy and agrivoltaics in Pennsylvania once it is published, and though my efforts to shorten my thesis presentation into this smaller timeframe were ambitious, the work was still well received by the roughly two dozen attendees who viewed it.

What I was perhaps most surprised by was how exhausted one can feel after engaging with these presenters and their work for so long. By the time the sessions ended at 5:30, I was completely drained, and intended to go back to my hotel and rest; however, by a stroke of sheer luck, or an example of how small the world is, I stumbled into several of my colleagues from the University of Arizona in the middle of the crowd, and enjoyed a walk and drink with them before eventually retiring to my hotel for the evening.

Tuesday Morning: Connections

There is a sense of relief that came with delivering my presentation on Monday. By Tuesday morning, after a fantastic nights sleep that cured me of the extensive three-hour jet lag resulting from my flight from Tucson, I was simply excited to meet as many people as I could.

Before I go any further, I should note that Downtown Detroit is absolutely beautiful. I stayed at the Hollywood Casino – Greektown in, you guessed it, the Greektown Neighborhood, but I walked through the heart of Downtown Detroit several times on my way to and from the Huntington Place Convention Center right on the Detroit River overlooking the U.S.-Canada border. The architecture of every building is ornate and decadent and gives you a sense of awe as you walk through the streets. I appreciate that the city is not fully dominated by the steel and glass structures common of many major U.S. cities and gives a sense of the history of the place. I can’t speak for the rest of Detroit, as I didn’t have time to venture out of Downtown and Greektown, but I was quite impressed by what I saw.

Anyway, the morning at the convention center was full of networking. I was honored to meet Dr. Mike Pasqualetti of Arizona State University, a founding member of the Energy Geography Specialty Group of the AAG who actually reached out to me asking to learn more about my work. I’ve read several of Dr. Pasqualetti’s articles throughout my master’s studies, and being able to meet anyone you read during your student years and talk to them as a peer is both exciting and validating. I also met Dr. Adam Gallaher, current Cornell PostDoc and soon to be  professor at Central Michigan University. Dr. Gallaher delivered an excellent presentation in the afternoon examining the use of agricultural land to produce energy in the forms of both ethanol and solar energy, and positing how we can use the land we currently use to grow corn for ethanol to develop Ecovoltaic (solar energy plus pollinator-friendly plantings) projects and thus generate energy while improving ecosystem services. I think the work is important for us to consider, though I am curious to examine it through a place attachment perspective.

Tuesday Afternoon: Stacked Energyscapes

This brings me to the final session track I attended on stacked energyscapes, a new term advocated by Dr. Jennifer Baka at Penn State and Dr. Tyler Harlan at Loyola Marymount University that examines how the fossil fuel energy landscapes of the past interact with new renewable energy landscapes. Oftentimes, these landscapes “stack” with each other rather than replace one another, such as oil workers taking renewable energy jobs or renewable energy infrastructure being used to power fossil fuel energy infrastructure. I didn’t take notes on these sessions due to dead phone and computer batteries caused by me forgetting to charge my devices the previous night; however, Dr. Baka delivered an insightful and critical presentation on the development of a hydrogen energy system, and many other excellent scholars explored stacked energyscapes in communities ranging from Montana to West Virginia to Puerto Rico. This is literature I look forward to engaging with in the future,

Final Reflections

If I could boil down everything I took away from the AAG 2025 annual meeting into one thing, it would be the importance and value of care. It is evident walking through the convention center halls and food court listening to conversations, or sitting in meeting rooms listening to presentations, that everyone cares deeply about what they do. In my case, I spent two days surrounded by people who are studying the social aspects of the energy transition because they care about how people will be affected when we let electric utilities be privatized and the market reign, they care about what will happen to people’s communities when solar developers bring a 100 MW project to town, and they care about whether someone will be able to pay their electric bill. It’s incredibly heartening to see that this work is taking place at a time when research on topics like this is threatened with cancellations and clawbacks. That’s what made this event so special to me, it was a re-centering of sorts. As I take the next step in my academic journey, I’m reminded why I do this:

Because I care.