The Geography Education Networking Initiative for Underrepresented Scholars (GENIUS) is a three-day workshop for rising third- and fourth-year students who identify as part of a racially underrepresented group to receive support and mentoring in preparing to apply to graduate programs in geography. During the workshop, participants will be mentored in preparing application materials that they can use to apply to graduate programs. In addition, attendees will have the opportunity to network with peers and scholars from across the United States and Canada. The workshop will help students begin to form networks that they can use to navigate their professional careers. At the end of the workshop, participants will have created an email introduction to send to potential advisers, a curriculum vitae that documents their achievements, and a personal statement for graduate school applications. Students also will have identified up to five programs that they are interested in applying to. Finally, a portion of the workshop will focus on identifying funding to help defray the costs of graduate applications.
GENIUS
GENIUS is a three-day workshop for undergraduate students that will take place May 9-12, 2023, in State College, Pennsylvania. Students will receive travel support, hotel rooms in State College, and some meals while attending. Students will work closely with mentors, Penn State Geography faculty, and current graduate students to understand how to apply to graduate school and what grad school is all about. The workshop will include opportunities for both group and individual mentoring as well as the option for students to work together on graduate application materials.
Qualifications
Successful applicants to GENIUS will demonstrate that they:
- Identify as a member of a traditionally underrepresented racial group (including but not limited to African American, Chicano/a and Latino/a, Native American, and Asian American)
- Are U.S. citizens
- Intend to apply to graduate school in geography
- Are available to come to State College, Pennsylvania, on May 9-12, 2023
Co-organizers
Emily Rosenman
Emily Rosenman is an urban and economic geographer who researches the connections between finance, urbanization, and inequality. Her work is motivated by the aim of understanding relationships that produce both wealth and impoverishment, with particular attention to the uneven geographies of financialization and racialization that characterize contemporary urban life.
Joshua Inwood
Joshua Inwood is a professor of geography and holds a joint appointment with the Rock Ethics Institute. His work is focused on race, processes of racialization, racial capital, and the Civil Rights Movement and the U.S. South.
Faculty Mentors
Katherine McKittrick
Katherine McKittrick is professor of gender studies and Canada Research Chair in Black studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. She authored Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle and edited and contributed to Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Her most recent monograph, Dear Science and Other Stories, is an exploration of black methodologies.
Laura Pulido
Laura Pulido is the Collins Chair and professor of indigenous, race, & ethnic studies and geography at the University of Oregon, where she studies race, environmental justice, and cultural memory. She has written numerous books, including Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest; Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles; and A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (with Laura Barraclough and Wendy Cheng). She has received numerous honors from the Association of American Geographers, including the Distinguished Scholarship Honors, the Presidential Achievement Award, Globe Book Award for Public Understanding of Geography, and the Harold Rose Anti-Racism Award. She is also the recipient of the Cullum Geographical Medal from the American Geographical Society and Ford and Guggenheim fellowships.
Beverley Mullings
Beverley Mullings’s research focus is located within the field of feminist political economy and engages questions of labor, social transformation, neoliberalism, and the politics of gender, race, and class in the Caribbean and its diaspora. She is interested in the ways that evolving neoliberal regimes are recasting and transforming work, divisions of labor, patterns of urban governance and, ultimately, responses to social and economic injustice. More specifically, she studies the long-term effects of neo-liberalization in the Caribbean on the ways that citizenship and belonging are imagined, and on the ways that social justice is articulated, particularly within work regimes. She is committed to understanding how people located at the intersections of overlapping systems of oppression are affected by and respond to the exclusions produced by these transformations.
Applications
Undergraduate scholars interested in attending GENIUS May 9-12, 2023, should use the form below to submit the following application materials. Applications are due by the end of the day on Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2022.
- Name
- Institution email (abc123@psu.edu)
- A statement of 500 or fewer words explaining why they would like to pursue graduate studies in geography
Workshop Contacts
If you have questions about the workshop or applying, please contact Josh Inwood (jfi6@psu.edu) or Emily Rosenman (ekr5260@psu.edu).