{"id":398151,"date":"2021-01-19T19:59:20","date_gmt":"2021-01-20T03:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=arcnews&p=398151"},"modified":"2021-03-18T12:26:41","modified_gmt":"2021-03-18T19:26:41","slug":"pulling-together-when-a-pandemic-pulls-our-lives-apart","status":"publish","type":"arcnews","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcnews\/pulling-together-when-a-pandemic-pulls-our-lives-apart","title":{"rendered":"Pulling Together When a Pandemic Pulls Our Lives Apart"},"author":6921,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","castos_file_data":"","podmotor_file_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[25032,430081,282062],"tags":[430851,165242,288282,279282,165642],"arcnews_issues":[472041],"class_list":["post-398151","arcnews","type-arcnews","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-2","category-from-the-meridian","category-geography","tag-covid-19","tag-gis-careers","tag-teachers","tag-technology-2","tag-university","arcnews_issues-winter-2021","arcnews_sections-gis-people"],"acf":{"short_description":"As the magnitude of COVID-19 reveals itself, geographers and GIS professionals have worked tirelessly under challenging conditions.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Like many of you, I am spending a lot more time staring at video screens and multimedia messaging platforms each day. Gone is the routine of moving from office to home and traveling on behalf of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Gone are the daily rituals with coworkers. And while I am grateful that technology can connect us better than ever before, we miss something critical without face-to-face interactions. It\u2019s the small things I miss most\u2014the unscheduled chat in the hallway or in line at a local coffee shop.\r\n\r\nMeanwhile, many in our discipline are balancing the dangerous trade-offs of pursuing work in person. The plight of K\u201312 teachers and professors whose schools and campuses reopened is much in the news, while countless students stand in harm\u2019s way as they try to supplement their income by working in retail, at restaurants, and in the gig economy. All the while, teaching, graduate research, and the practice of geography are being profoundly disrupted.\r\n\r\nThe COVID-19 pandemic is the crisis of our lifetime, training a merciless lens on the social and racial fissures that already made life so difficult for so many people. As AAG president Amy Lobben wrote in her July column for the AAG Newsletter, \u201cThe UN [United Nations] predicts that the global coronavirus lockdowns will drive an additional 130 million people to the edge of starvation.\u201d\r\n\r\nCiting recent estimates from the Stop TB Partnership, she noted that as many as 1.4 million people could die from tuberculosis as a direct result of these lockdowns. Lobben continued, \u201cThe impact on other indices of health is dizzying, with surges in suicide, domestic violence, and mental health problems (the United States Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention] reported in May that one-third of Americans are experiencing Generalized Anxiety Disorder, with rates higher for women, people of color, and people with less education). Factor in unprecedented unemployment directly tied to coronavirus lockdowns that are surging across class, race, and gender lines, disproportionately affecting women, people with disabilities, and people of color.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs the magnitude of COVID-19 reveals itself, geographers and GIS professionals have worked tirelessly under challenging conditions. Teachers, students, and GIS practitioners have attended to the crisis with the full energy of their profession and passion, sometimes at significant personal risk or cost.\r\n\r\nThe world has taken notice. You can\u2019t open a newspaper or an app without seeing the vivid work of geographers and GIS specialists, rendering the pandemic in spatial and temporal terms that the broader public can grasp and upon which policy makers can act. The work of geographers is more prominent and crucial than ever.\r\n\r\nYet our field is more at risk than at any point until now because we\u2014in particular, our youngest colleagues and those most marginalized due to race, finances, or gender\u2014are engaged in our own individual battles against the public health and economic impacts of COVID-19. At the institutional scale, geography departments that were already challenged from many directions before the pandemic are now under pressure like we\u2019ve never seen. Our profession is at risk, even as we are needed to share what we know with a world at risk.\r\n\r\nPutting this awareness at the forefront, the AAG created its COVID-19 Rapid Response Task Force in mid-2020 to address the crisis\u2019s impact on the teaching and practice of geography. The task force consists of more than 60 AAG member volunteers on five subcommittees that seek to support our members\u2014students, educators, and professional geographers in government and the private sector\u2014in the distinct ways this period demands. Our goal is to address the systemic hardships facing geographers and geography. The nine projects we activated over the summer include the following:\r\n