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.
About GENIUS
The workshop will help students begin to form networks that they can use to navigate their professional careers. Attendees will have the opportunity to network with peers and scholars from across the United States and Canada. 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.
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.
Funding
Students will receive travel support, hotel rooms in State College, and some meals while attending.
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 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 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
Akira Drake Rodriguez
Akira Drake Rodriguez is an assistant professor of design at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines the politics of urban planning, or the ways that disenfranchised groups re-appropriate their marginalized spaces in the city to gain access to and sustain urban political power. Using an interdisciplinary and multiple method approach, her research engages scholarship in urban studies, political science, urban history, black feminist studies, community development, urban policy, and critical geography using both qualitative and quantitative data and methods.
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, should use the form below to submit the following application materials.
NOTE: Application information for the 2024 workshop will be announced in September 2023.
- 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).