UC Berkeley Geography students, faculty and alumni were recognized for their groundbreaking work in the field of geography at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG).
The AAG is a nonprofit educational society aimed at providing “students, educators, practitioners, and partners with the resources they need to enter the field, develop their careers, and form professional friendships that can last a lifetime.” Its annual meeting gathers geographers from around the nation for “high-profile sessions, as well as many opportunities for networking and learning.”
The UC Berkeley Geography students, faculty and alumni who received honors include:
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Clara Perez, Ph.D. candidate, who won the AAG Black Geographies Specialty Group's 2025 Clyde Woods Graduate Student Paper Award for their paper “Framing Displacement: Visual Geographies, Black Geographies, and the Crisis of Homelessness in Oakland.”
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Jimena Perez, Ph.D. student, who won the AAG Latinx Geographies Specialty Group's 2025 LxG Graduate Student Paper Award for her paper “Restorying the L.A. River.”
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Lee Crandall, Ph.D. student, who won the Digital Geographies Specialty Group’s Best Graduate Student Paper Award for their paper “Plotting cryptoeconomic imaginaries and counterplotting the network state.”
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Andrea Lara-Garcia, Ph.D. student, who won the Legal Geographies Specialty Group’s Best Graduate Student Presentation Award for “Who Owns the Border?: Contested Territorialities in the Arizona and Texas Borderlands.”
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Tianna Bruno, assistant professor, who was awarded the 2025 Margaret FitzSimmons Early Career Award by the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group. The award recognizes the innovative work of an early-career scholar in the area of human-environment relations, nature and society, or political ecology, including research, teaching and outreach.
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Sharad Chari, associate professor, who received an honorable mention for the Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography for his book “Apartheid Remains” (Duke University Press), which explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the Indian Ocean city of Durban.
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Shaina Potts, UC Berkeley geography alumna and UCLA associate geography professor, who was awarded the AAG Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography and the Political Geography Specialty Group’s Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award for “Judicial Territory: Law, Capital, and the American Empire” (Duke University Press).
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Andrea Marston, UC Berkeley geography alumna and Rutgers University assistant geography professor, who received an honorable mention for the Outstanding Book award by the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group for “Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia” (Duke University Press).