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This semester, the CU Geography department welcomed new faculty members, Ellen Considine and Federico Andrade-Rivas, who are both featured in this newsletter. We welcomed alumni and donors to a dinner at Chautauqua in October. The evening was filled with memories and wonderful conversation about CU Geography’s past, present, and future.

CU Geography has also reestablished the Colorado Geographic Alliance (COGA) with assistance from our amazing graduate students Naomi Hazarika, Neda Shaban, Hayes Hart-Thompson, and Alaric Kothapally, and teaching faculty member Gretchen Lang. Graduate Student, Millie Spencer, designed the new logo for COGA, which can be viewed at the COGA website along with more information (/geography/co-geographic-alliance). As part of the relaunch, we hosted an event on November 17th to celebrate this relaunch and gather information from teachers and professors across the state. Many thanks to our graduate student volunteers:��Saad Hakim, Lauren Palermo, Zhe Lin, Mallory Sagehorn, Laine Sullivan, Anshul Sharma, Anthony Pirolli, Matt Miller, Emily Nagamoto, and Maren Roeske; and��undergraduate student ambassadors:��Autumn Quinonez, Katie��Baptiste, John Strathmann, Marley Jones, and Samuel Fitterman for helping to make this a successful event.

We dedicate this relaunch to the founder of COGA,��A. David Hill. Emeritus Professor Hill received a B.A. and M.A. from CU Boulder and graduated with a PhD in Geography from the University of Chicago in 1964. He joined the Department of Geography at CU Boulder as a faculty member in 1968 until his retirement in 1999. In 1986, Professor Hill founded the Colorado Geographic Alliance (COGA) with the help of the National Geographic Society and several Colorado Foundations. He received the George J. Miller Award for distinguished service from the National Council for Geographic Education in 1990. David Hill’s memory lives on at CU Geography through the David Hill Scholarship, and through the amazing support and continued relationship to our department of Professor Hill’s family, his son Graham Hill, and daughter-in-law Cathy Hill, and his daughter Tiffany Boyd, who is supporting COGA, through her nonprofit, Classrooms for Climate Action.

We also recognize and thank past leaders of COGA, from the University of Northern Colorado, Dr. Phil Kelin, and the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Rebecca Theobald. Rebecca received her PhD from CU Boulder Geography, and her absolutely fantastic colloquium presentation in our department inspired this relaunch of COGA. She has been actively and continuously providing assistance, suggestions, and information for this next iteration of the Colorado Geographic Alliance.

Despite the challenges facing higher education and research funding, CU Geography continues to remain strong. We are facing a time that has called into question the value of science as a public good and the public’s belief in science. It is important to remember that science is not a belief system, and attempting to stop the study of Climate Change, Environmental Science, Environmental Justice, Social Justice, Public Health, and Critical Scholarship on race, gender, sex, and class inequalities will not end existential threats to humanity and the continued fear and aversion to human differences that continuing to divide us. We must therefore meet this moment with bravery and the audacity of our convictions to work collectively, creatively, carefully, and caringly toward a future yet imagined that seeks to ensure and celebrate the tenets of inclusivity, diversity, and equity.

While these words cause many cause some people in power to react with fear, ignorance, and intolerance.�� As Geographers, we seek out spaces, teams, and work environments that value the principles of inclusivity, diversity, and equity as foundational to human progress. Inclusivity simply means the quality or state of being inclusive. Developing an environment of inclusion is, by its very act, a method of learning from others. This is how we build a community of knowledge and progress, which, rather than merely tolerating differences, connects with and celebrates diversity by ensuring we hold onto the democratic principles of community that encourage and embrace the choices we make about our bodies and how we choose to look, live, and love.

Quality research engages with multiple methods of learning from others. Thus, if we limit our learning by seeking knowledge from those who are the same as us, we miss the opportunities afforded by diversity. People from diverse backgrounds, experiences, geographies, and educations are essential for our critical thinking and foundational to the production of Geographic knowledge. As an interdisciplinary and diverse science, Geography incorporates natural, physical, social, data, and spatial sciences and systems to provide us with the tools necessary to chart new pathways of understanding toward insightful, innovative, imaginative, and inspired solutions for the trials and troubles we face now and in the future.

To truly dismantle the systematic and systemic barriers that keep us divided, we must create the conditions of inclusion and diversity that ensure and embrace equity as a common good. Equity means fairness or justice in the way people are treated, along with freedom from disparities. Geographic research and teaching locate and critically examine past and current inequities through a diversity of approaches, methodologies, and critical thinking tools.

Many of us, as students and professors, came to Geography because of its interdisciplinarity and the ability to study multiple problems from various interrelated perspectives, scales, spaces, and places. We hope you will join us in celebrating all that Geography and Geographers have to offer our community, campus, state, nation, and globe.