Annual Meeting

2024 Annual Meeting

AAG 2024 is remote and in-person in Honolulu, Hawai'i and is scheduled for April 16-20. For general information about the Annual Meeting, see the AAG website.

The landscape on which the 2024 Annual Meeting takes place is the Hawai'ian Kingdom and the landscape of the Kānaka Maoli. We encourage all settlers and visitors to reflect on the history of this landscape and the past and continued impacts of colonialism. A potential starting place for learning more is Native Land. Kānaka Maoli and other Pacific Basin Indigenous groups can attend the meeting free of charge, as noted by AAG President Rebecca Lave in her President's column.

AAG is aware of the controversial nature of hosting the annual meeting in Honolulu, please see Rebecca Lave's President's column post for more information. AAG is hosting a virtual learning series featuring Hawai'ian speakers and perspectives on a broad range of environmental, political, and historical topics including Indigenous ecological knowledge and sovereignty from July until March. The recordings and upcoming topics are available online.

LSG Keynote Speaker

The Landscape Specialty Group is delighted to announce our Keynote Speaker for the Annual Meeting 2025 is

Juliana Fulton

Deputy Chief Parks Planner with the City of Detroit

Brief Biography

Juliana Fulton is the Deputy Chief Parks Planner with the City of Detroit. In her decade tenure with the City, Juliana has led two city-wide park and recreation strategic plans, including developing an equity metric to ensure resources go to those with greatest need across Detroit’s parks system. Juliana also manages the annual capital budget, fundraising, planning and community engagement for park improvements in Detroit. Previously she was a Conservation Legacy Fellow with the National Park Service, based in Detroit. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the University of Michigan and a Master’s degree in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University, as well as LEED AP accreditation. Juliana also served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho in southern Africa.

LSG Keynote Speaker

The Landscape Specialty Group is delighted to announce our Keynote Speaker for the Annual Meeting is

Dr. Desirée Valadares

Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia

2024 ANNUAL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF GEOGRAPHERS. Unlike Antiquities: U.S. National Monuments, Public Land, and the Fictions of a Shared National Heritage. ABSTRACT: Anticipating the 75th anniversary of martial law in Hawai‘i in 2015, president Barrack Obama designated the Honouliuli Gulch, a drainage ditch, in his home state. Overnight, a seemingly ordinary irrigation channel, nestled in the central plans of O‘ahu in Kunia, was transformed into an “antiquity. ”[i] Obama’s invocation of the Antiquities Act of 1906 to designate Honouliuli on February 24, 2015, is noteworthy. As a hallmark of federal U.S. preservation law, this act allows an American president to unilaterally declare sites of natural or cultural significance as national monuments.[ii] At a public ceremony, Obama read aloud Presidential Proclamation 9234, a declaration that placed Honouliuli under auspices of the National Park Service (NPS) for “proper care and management. ”[iii] By order of the president, Honouliuli was positioned as a landscape “for the enjoyment for future generations” and declared part of “our shared national heritage and national consciousness. ”[iv] In the lead up to Honouliuli’s designation, the Obama administration was confounded with a managerial puzzle. The 122.5-acre parcel of interest was the property of Monsanto Company - an American agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation and a serial violator of federal environmental laws. Declaring Honouliuli as public land required that this site and its right-of-entry be situated on lands that are “owned or controlled” or “may be relinquished to the federal government’ - as stipulated in the Act.[v] A “gift” of land through a benevolent land donation from Monsanto to the federal government ultimately qualified Honouliuli’s inclusion in the corpus of US national heritage.[vi] Why this fanfare over a gulch - a vestige of sugar plantation infrastructure and a ubiquitous part of the Hawaiian landscape? The gulch is a central starting point for this inquiry. More broadly, I seek to understand processes of national heritage-making through the category of “antiquities” in Hawai‘i. Tracking the use of the Antiquities Act of 1906, I chart a history of federal property transfers and acquisitions that convert public lands and waters as “shared national heritage. ” I ask: What exactly is shared? By whom, and under what circumstances?[vii] LSG 2024 KEYNOTE SPEAKER. Dr. DESIRÉE VALADARES. University of British Columbia. VIRTUAL. April 16th at 3:00 PM HST. Open to all conference attendees! See LSG website for more details. [i] See Proclamation No. 9234 (February 25 2015), https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/02/24/presidential-proclamation-establishment-honouliuli-national-monument. [ii] On June 8, 1906, Congress authorized the U.S. president to protect “objects of historic or scientific interest” on public lands without congressional approval. [iii] The Act, in its earliest years, codified established government practice by centralizing power in a tripartite inter-agency cooperation. Today, various state, local, tribal, and private sector policies broaden the scope of legislation on managing cultural resources and historic properties. [iv] See Proclamation No. 9234 (February 25 2015), https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/02/24/presidential-proclamation-establishment-honouliuli-national-monument. [v] See: Jerry L. Rogers, “The Antiquities Act and Historic Preservation,” in Dwight Harmon, Francis McManamon, and Dwight Pitcaithley, The Antiquities Act: A Century of American Archaeology, Historic Preservation, and Nature Conservation, (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press 2006), 176-177 and Linda Rosenblum, Katherine Orr, and Nicholas Murray., “To Provide for the Enjoyment for Future Generations: The First 100 Years of the National Park Service,” in National History Day 2016: Exploration, Encounter and Exchange in History, ed. Lynne O’Hara (Washington, DC: National Park Service, 2016), 31–35. [vi] This gesture in 2015 was overshadowed by a spate of 2021 lawsuits against Monsanto (then, acquired by Bayer) for thirty misdemeanor crimes related to the use and storage of a glufosinate ammonium-based pesticide on the islands of O‘ahu, Maui, and Molokai See: U.S. Attorney’s Office. Central District of California. Press Release: Monsanto Agrees to Plead Guilty to Illegally Using Pesticide at Corn Growing Fields in Hawaii and to Pay Additional $12 Million. [Available] https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/monsanto-agrees-plead-guilty-illegally-using-pesticide-corn-growing-fields-hawaii-and [vii] Amy H. Blackwell & Christopher W. Blackwell, Hijacking Shared Heritage: Cultural Artifacts and Intellectual Property Rights, 13 Chi.-Kent J. Intell. Prop. 137 (2013).

Brief Bio

Dr. Valadares scholarship focuses on the cultural memory and infrastructural imaginaries of the Second World War in western Canada and the non-contiguous US. She earned her MLA from the University of Guelph followed by her M.Arch from McGill University. In 2022, Dr. Valadares was awarded her PhD from UC Berkeley and joined the University of British Columbia as faculty, where she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and an Affiliated Faculty in Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program. Her dissertation, Transpacific Heritage Politics: Preserving Former Confinement Landscapes in Hawaiʻi, British Columbia, and Alaska, was awarded the Phyllis Lambert Prize by the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada. Dr. Valadares was recently awarded a prestigious Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant for her project, Circuits of Capital: The Visual Economy of Critical Infrastructures in Alaska and the Canadian Northwest.

Dr. Valadares is a member of LSG and was featured a few years ago for our Member Spotlight, where you can learn a bit more about her.

Location and time

The 2024 Keynote is scheduled for April 16th at 3:20 3:00 PM HST in Virtual Room 2. We encourage everyone to join us.

Geospatial Monitoring of Natural and Managed Ecosystems

Support Conference Registration Award Winner Manan Sarupria and keep this session on your radar!

In our ever-evolving world, landscapes rest at the nexus of human and environmental interactions. The way in which landscapes are managed will play a pivotal role in shaping our planet's future. As these landscapes transform at an unprecedented pace, the need for spatially accurate and frequent monitoring will become crucial for sustainable management. Technological strides in the application of artificial intelligence for geographic applications (GeoAI) have opened novel avenues for scholars to automate the monitoring of landscape dynamics and further comprehend the intricate interactions of our ecosystems.

This session is a dedicated exploration of the intersection between GeoAI and the continuously changing natural and managed landscape. It delves into machine learning applications that not only observe but also transform our understanding of these landscapes, paving the way for sustainable solutions. We offer a dynamic platform for participants from diverse backgrounds to share interdisciplinary methods that offer a deeper understanding of the current challenges posed by the evolving natural and managed ecosystems and provide potential solutions. We invite submissions that showcase innovative approaches and practical applications, integrating human-environment interactions, mapping and monitoring changing landscapes, assessing climate change impacts, and employing advanced GeoAI methods for cutting-edge research.

This hybrid session is scheduled for Tuesday, April 16th at 1:20 PM HST. If attending in-person, join us in 319B, Third Floor, Hawai'i Convention Center.

Photography Competition

We encourage all AAG 2024 attendees to join us on Wednesday, April 17th at 3:00 PM HST in Virtual 11 to hear from the photographers themselves. In this virtual session, you can learn more about the stories behind the photos. For more information on the competition, including how you can get involved, see here.

Business Meeting

The business meeting is open to everyone and we hope you'll join us to learn about what LSG has accomplished the past year and to discuss our goals moving forwards. We will also announce the winners of our Photography Competition.

The business meeting will be held in Virtual 12 and is scheduled for Thursday, April 18th at 12:10 PM HST.