Professor Reg Golledge has been selected to receive the Enhancing Diversity Award of the Association of American Geographers for 2008. The honor is bestowed “in recognition of your long-standing efforts to support and mentor underrepresented students in higher education, and particularly for your attention to those with disabilities. Your cutting-edge research on geography and disability has not only achieved the highest levels of excellence in scholarship, but has also helped to find ways to allow disabled people to become fully integrated into their communities around the world” (Douglas Richardson, Executive Director of the AAG).
The AAG Enhancing Diversity Award “honors geographers who have pioneered efforts toward or actively participated in efforts toward encouraging a more diverse discipline over the course of multiple years.” Previous recipients include geographers Joe Darden (Michigan State University), Don Deskins (University of Michigan), Saul Cohen (Boston University), Janice Monk (University of Arizona), and Jacquelyn Beyer (University of Colorado, Colorado Springs).
To quote from Reg’s Enhancing Diversity Award Citation: “Throughout his career as an academic, Dr. Golledge has consistently sponsored and mentored a variety of undergraduate and graduate students from diverse minority and underrepresented groups. Many of his MA and PhD students during the 60s and early 70s (and even more so today) were women. In the early 1980s, he analyzed a very large AAG study called “Women in Geography” and published a summary paper in The Professional Geographer which dispelled a number of myths about problems that female geographers were supposed to face in graduate programs…During his period as Chair (1980-1984), he was able to appoint four women to UCSB academic positions. Three of them have distinguished themselves in the discipline…Since losing his sight in 1984, Golledge has been active in helping people with disabilities worldwide and has held private and public meetings with disabled people in many countries…His research has been heavily concentrated on finding ways to allow disabled people to become fully integrated into their communities, to participate in undergraduate and gradate education, and to pursue a higher quality of life than they might previously have anticipated achieving…Golledge’s efforts to promote diversity in the discipline of Geography by recruiting, sponsoring, and advising female and minority group members has had an impact at his department level, and this generation’s impact can also be felt today on the discipline as a whole. With respect to disability, he has extended these activities to a world-wide scale and continues to do so today.”
Reg will accept this honor at the AAG Annual Meeting Awards Luncheon on March 27, 2009 at the AAG Annual Conference in Las Vegas. For more about Professor Golledge’s distinguished career, see .
