NOTE: Papers from these sessions are being proposed for publication, so please also relay interest regarding the possibility of publication within the next year. More information here. 

In urban environments, encounters between animals and humans are frequently governed by conservation policy or narratives that render the species killable in the urban context, not necessarily because of ecological necessity, but through strategic, anthropocentric classification systems that prioritize human convenience and control. Viral individual animal stories sometimes expose a broader, largely unquestioned system in which even native species-such as raccoons, opossums, foxes, and coyotes-are routinely designated as "nuisance" and subject to lethal management when they appear in urban spaces (Johnston, 2026). This disjuncture reveals a critical inconsistency: the same species valued in conservation frameworks elsewhere are, in cities, stripped of protection through overlapping and often incoherent policies that, in practice, manufacture killability despite ambiguous or contradictory classifications.

Proposals are invited that examine how multispecies negotiations contribute to broader debates on nonhuman liminality in urban spaces (Johnston, 2024). Of particular interest are analyses that consider how policy founded on ideas of conservation ecology itself produces liminality that extends across populations and species, shaping the lives of both human and nonhuman actors. Nonhuman thriving in cities is all too often reduced to "nuisance" policies, with little attention given to the extraordinary social and cultural adaptations of these urban animal communities (Barrett et al., 2019).

Of special interest is identifying researchers from different global cities working on the same species in contexts of opposing classifications in the native/nonnative binary. For example, my work this year will focus on the Green Iguana in South Florida, so I am particularly interested in finding a collaborator who can share their research and iguana stories from an urban context where the species is classified as "native." 

This session builds on our opening discussion at AAG 2026, and aims to bring together myriad examples of different types of animals thriving in contested urban spaces. For example, Egyptian geese negotiate spaces of inclusion and exclusion in Frankfurt, Germany (Kornherr, 2025), and urban pigs caught in the middle of sociocultural, religious, and nationalist debates must navigate their position within the intersection of political economy and ecology in Chennai city, India (Narayanan, 2023). Feral cats have been reclassified as community cats, but they remain suspended in a state of liminality along with their caretakers in South Florida (Johnston, 2024). An entire special issue in Political Geography explores the abjectification of species in many types of spaces commonly conceived of as made-for-humans (Fleischmann, 2023; Fleischmann & Everts, 2024). Several researchers have dedicated pages to the charismatic albeit often hated pigeon (Jerolmack, 2008; Donaldson & Kymlicka, 2011; Nagy & Johnson, 2013; Hubbard & Brooks, 2021; Shcheglovitova, & Pitas, 2022; Pitas, 2022; Palmer, 2024).

While the theory of exclusion has been explored in many works, including those mentioned above, there remains a significant need to explore the mechanics and practice of exclusion these populations of urban species face as part of urban living, even more critically, thriving (Johnston, 2021; Franks et al., 2020; Sebo et al., 2024).

This session seeks to push the boundaries of multispecies ethnography, animal geography, political ecology, wildlife welfare, conservation, and urban planning. Priority is given to interdisciplinary approaches to unpacking the practice of lethal urban policies. Proposals might address similar cases in other urban contexts, draw on cross-city comparisons, or critically assess the political, ecological, and ethical stakes of how urban biodiversity is defined and managed, or address any of the following questions: 

• What does it mean to belong in urban spaces? Who, or what infrastructural, policy, or practices shape what it means to belong as an urban nonhuman resident? 

• Explorations of how interdisciplinary backgrounds and professional orientations shape the ways this question is answered, where perspectives overlap, and where points of tension emerge.

• Opportunities for understanding and reimagining more than human life in urban contexts.

• Research that explores the way "native" species are actively excluded from urban spaces as opportunities through which to explore how the logics of conservation biology break down in urban or anthropocentric spaces.

• Research that problematizes the logics of "conservation" in built/concrete urban spaces, particularly where certain species are vilified for their impact not on an "ecosystem" but rather their impact on urban infrastructure.

• Actively engages with policy rooted in conservation ideologies, but is applied to concrete or man-made spaces

If you are interested in furthering these discussions and sharing your research, please send abstracts of up to 250 words to Jacquelyn Johnston (jajohnst@fiu.edu). Please be sure to include a possible title, author(s) name, contact information, and plans to attend the Annual Meeting either in person or virtually. The modality (in-person or hybrid) will depend on participant availability, with priority given to content over attendance type. 

Sessions will be either in-person or hybrid, depending on interest. Informal idea pitches and conversations in advance are welcome! 

Please reach out with ideas and questions! 

Deadline for this CFP:                                         October 1, 2026

Notifications sent by:                                             October 5, 2026          

References

Barrett, L. P., Stanton, L. A., & Benson-Amram, S. (2019). The cognition of 'nuisance' species. Animal Behaviour, 147, 167-177.

Donaldson, S., & Kymlicka, W. (2011). Zoopolis: A political theory of animal rights. Oxford University Press, USA.

Fleischmann, L. (2023). More-than-human political geographies: Abjection and sovereign power. Political Geography, 107, 102949.

Fleischmann, L., & Everts, J. (2024). Abject lives: An introduction. Political Geography, 111, 103102.

Franks, B., Webb, C., Gagliano, M., & Smuts, B. (2020). Conventional science will not do justice to nonhuman interests: A fresh approach is required. Animal Sentience, 4(27).

Hubbard, P., & Brooks, A. (2021). Animals and urban gentrification: Displacement and injustice in the trans-species city. Progress in Human Geography, 45(6), 1490-1511.

Jerolmack, C. (2008). How pigeons became rats: The cultural-spatial logic of problem animals. Social problems, 55(1), 72-94.

Johnston, J. (2021). Incongruous killing: Cats, nonhuman resistance, and precarious life beyond biopolitical techniques of making-live. Contemporary Social Science, 16(1), 71-83.

Johnston, J. (2024). Transspecies liminality: unpacking the politics and patchy legitimization of urban human-cat relations. Social & Cultural Geography, 25(6), 928-946.

Johnston, J. J. (2026). Insignificant otherness: Manufacturing killability of native animals living in Florida's urban spaces. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 25148486261437568.

Kornherr, E. (2025). Caring with abject urban animals: Tensions between exclusion and inclusion of Egyptian geese in the city. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 8(2), 536-556.

Nagy, K., & Johnson II, P. D. (Eds.). (2013). Trash animals: How we live with nature's filthy, feral, invasive, and unwanted species. U of Minnesota Press.

Narayanan, Y. (2023). Animating caste: visceral geographies of pigs, caste, and violent nationalisms in Chennai city. Urban geography, 44(10), 2185-2205.

Palmer, A. (2024). Digital animal deathscapes: The online circulation of animals killed for conservation. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, e12733.

Pitas, J. H. (2022). Deathly storytelling in the ecological city: How pigeons became falcon food in Baltimore, Maryland. Social & cultural geography, 23(1), 29-46.

Sebo, J., White, A., & Sims, T. (2024). One Health and Multispecies Urban Infrastructure. One Health in the Law (Jane Kotzmann & Katie Woolaston eds., 2025).

Shcheglovitova, M., & Pitas, J. H. (2022). Deadly intersections: Living and dying with non-humans in everyday life. Social & Cultural Geography, 23(1), 1-9.

We are pleased to invite abstracts for this paper session on legal and political animal geographies, open to virtual and in-person participants alike.

As animals inhabit and move across material landscapes, they simultaneously traverse territories, jurisdictions, regulatory areas, properties, and an array of informal, liminal, and border spaces. In so doing, animals are subject to a variety of classifications constructed through the interaction between what kind of animal they are regarded to be and in what sort of legal geography they are found: an animal may thus become native, non-native, wild, domestic, feral, or invasive; a commodity, a companion, a nuisance, or a threat (Johnston, 2026; Kornherr, 2025; Srinivasan, 2013). These classifications help to determine which human–animal relationships become legally intelligible, such as that of ownership, authority, responsibility, or legal standing, and which remain unintelligible, such as that of companionship and care (Allen et al., 2025; Gillespie, 2016). All of this in turn can involve serious material consequences for animals, including confinement, exclusion, forced relocation, and legalized killing; alternatively, the law enables certain animals to be protected, rehabilitated, or liberated (Braverman, 2011; Collard & Dempsey, 2017; Neo & Ngiam, 2014; Ojalammi & Blomley, 2015).

But law does not straightforwardly produce the geographies of animal life; the spatial designations, animal classifications, interspecies relationships, and material consequences described above manifest unevenly across spaces and scales, as legal and political processes overlap, contradict one another, and are continually re-articulated through practice and encounter (Berseth & Matthews, 2021; Johnston, 2026; Ojalammi & Blomley, 2015; Stenseke Arup, 2025). Legal geographies are likewise produced through contestation in and over the spaces of animal life and death, including, at times, through the creation of new legal spaces, whether territorial designations or openings within legal process (Bollig, 2024; Brown et al., 2019; Kleibert et al., 2020). Contestation can take many forms, including claims for animals' legal rights: to space, mobility, freedom from sites of harm, or a place in the court of law (Fasel & Butler, 2023; Wise, 2018). Animals themselves participate in this contestation through embodied resistance that can reshape the structures that govern their lives, opening up the possibility of human action that supports rather than supersedes animal agency (Brown et al., 2019; Colling, 2020; Hribal, 2007). Legal animal geographies are often organized as jurisdictions, or 'scales of law,' which are often misaligned with the spatial extent of animal life, leaving resistance and contestation to operate at a lower scale than the structures they oppose (Lunstrum & Havice, 2025; MacKinnon, 2011; Robinson & Graham, 2018).

This session invites work on the many dimensions of legal and political animal geographies, including how they are produced, negotiated, enforced, and resisted; the role of human-animal relations in such processes; how animals figure not merely as objects upon which law operates, but as active participants in shaping it; and the material stakes involved, along with their implications for justice, liberation, and flourishing. We understand law broadly, including not only formal animal law and policy, as well as other forms of law that affect animals, but also the everyday and exceptional practices, relations, processes, and encounters through which it operates on animal lives. Work situated in wild, urban, industrial, domestic, or other settings is equally appropriate. We are especially interested in analyses grounded in specific contestations. Contributors whose work has not previously been framed as legal animal geography, but who see an opportunity to draw out these connections, are encouraged to do so here. Early-stage projects and developing ideas are welcome.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Martin Sinel (msinel@uwo.ca) by October 9, 2026. All abstracts must also be submitted to the AAG portal by October 15. Feel free to reach out in advance with any questions or ideas.

References

Allen, D., Arathoon, J., & Walliss, J. (2025). An exploration of dog‐related policy through a legal animal geographies lens. Geography Compass, 19(9). https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.70047

Berseth, V., & Matthews, R. (2021). How "wild" are hatchery salmon? Conservation policy and the contested framing of nature in Canada and the United States. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4(3), 1077–1098. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848620945315

Bollig, M. (2024). Wildlife corridors in a Southern African conservation landscape: The political ecology of multispecies mobilities along the arteries of anthropogenic conservation. Anthropology Southern Africa, 47(2), 216–235. https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2024.2327467

Braverman, I. (2011). States of exemption: The legal and animal geographies of American zoos. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 43(7), 1693–1706. https://doi.org/10.1068/a4420

Brown, K. M., Flemsæter, F., & Rønningen, K. (2019). More-than-human geographies of property: Moving towards spatial justice with response-ability. Geoforum, 99, 54–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.12.012

Collard, R.-C., & Dempsey, J. (2017). Capitalist natures in five orientations. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 28(1), 78–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2016.1202294

Colling, S. (2020). Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era. Michigan State University Press.

Fasel, R. N., & Butler, S. C. (2023). Animal Rights Law. Bloomsbury.

Gillespie, K. (2016). Nonhuman animal resistance and the improprieties of live property. In I. Braverman (Ed.), Animals, biopolitics, law: Lively legalities (pp. 116–132). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315672731-7

Hribal, J. C. (2007). Animals, agency, and class: Writing the history of animals from below. Human Ecology Review, 14(1), 101–112. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24707647

Johnston, J. J. (2026). Insignificant otherness: Manufacturing killability of native animals living in Florida's urban spaces. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486261437568

Kleibert, J. M., Hess, M., & Müller, F. C. (2020). Sites of contestation in global fur networks. Geoforum, 108, 39–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.11.009

Kornherr, E. (2025). Caring with abject urban animals: Tensions between exclusion and inclusion of Egyptian geese in the city. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 8(2), 536–556. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486241302587

Lunstrum, E., & Havice, E. (2025). Introducing jurisdiction. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 115(5), 1005–1028. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2025.2467326

MacKinnon, D. (2011). Reconstructing scale: Towards a new scalar politics. Progress in Human Geography, 35(1), 21–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132510367841

Neo, H., & Ngiam, J. Z. (2014). Contesting captive cetaceans: (Il)legal spaces and the nature of dolphins in urban Singapore. Social & Cultural Geography, 15(3), 235–254. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2014.882974

Ojalammi, S., & Blomley, N. (2015). Dancing with wolves: Making legal territory in a more-than-human world. Geoforum, 62, 51–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.03.022

Robinson, D. F., & Graham, N. (2018). Legal pluralisms, justice and spatial conflicts: New directions in legal geography. The Geographical Journal, 184(1), 3–7. https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12247

Srinivasan, K. (2013). The biopolitics of animal being and welfare: Dog control and care in the UK and India. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38(1), 106–119. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00501.x

Stenseke Arup, G. (2025). A legal geography of wolves in Swedish landscapes: A morphogenetic approach. Journal of Property Planning and Environmental Law, 17(2–3), 118–130. https://doi.org/10.1108/jppel-01-2025-0003

Wise, S. M. (2018). The struggle for the legal rights of nonhuman animals begins – The experience of the nonhuman rights project in New York and Connecticut. Animal Law Review, 25(3), 367–393. https://lawcommons.lclark.edu/alr/vol25/iss3/6/

The study of war, violence, militarism, and security in political geography has historically privileged human actors, largely treating nonhumans, Nature, and ecological processes as either background contexts or objects of political struggle. Recent pivots toward environmental security (Dalby 2002; Peluso and Watts 2001), critical geopolitical ecology (Graddy-Lovelace and Ranganathan 2024), militarized ecologies (Lamain et al. 2026; Peluso and Vandergeest 2011; Rodenbiker 2023), and political ecologies of war (Jones 2026) have increasingly challenged this anthropocentric focus by showing the multiscalar inextricability of war, militarization, geopolitical power, and ecological change. Studies of the political ecology of war and resource conflict (Le Billion 2001), militarized landscapes and the weaponization of nature (Peluso and Vandergeest 2011), green militarization (Lunstrum 2014), slow violence (Nixon 2011; O’Lear 2021), and toxic landscapes, necropolitics, and sacrifice zones (Davies 2018, 2022; Juskus 2023; Thomas et al. 2026) have established not only how conflict, militarization, and the political economies of extraction transform environments but also how such ecological relations and nonhuman actors produce and shape the conditions, possibilities, and outcomes of war and violence.

This session seeks to extend these conversations by approaching warfare, political violence, and militarization as ecology (Jones 2026) through more explicit and intentional attention to hybrid and more-than-human geographies (Adey 2015; Dittmer 2014; Forsyth 2016, 2017; Grove 2019; Khayyat 2022; Pugliese 2020; Richardson 2024), as well as multispecies entanglements and political animals (Johnson 2015; Leep 2023; Margulies and Karanth 2018; Narayanan 2025; van Wingerden 2026). We invite papers that bring explicit empirical attention to the agency and influence of animals, plants, organisms, materials, infrastructures, technologies, and ecological processes as dynamic actors in situations of political violence, rather than merely its’ victims or instruments. We encourage analyses that challenge human exceptionalism and advance debates about ecological justice by attending to the hybridity, plurality, vitality, agency, and affective capacities of matter. In particular, we seek papers that show how thinking with more-than-humans might complicate theories of warfare and violence without speaking for nonhumans or overstating matter’s efficacy or distributed agency (Klinke 2019). We ask: What counts as war, and who or what can be a combatant or target? How do more-than-human approaches trouble conventional distinctions between war and peace? What happens to the spatial and temporal boundaries of war when its effects unfold across generations, many species, and ecological processes? What counts as war when violence targets species or ecosystems rather than–or alongside–human populations? And what might “peace” mean when ostensibly peacetime relations remain structured by global environmental crises, extinction, and other persistent forms of harm against human and nonhuman life?

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Political animals and multispecies geopolitics

• Critical environmental and animal military histories and geographies

• Multispecies mobilities, borders, and displacement

• Cyborg, technological, and hybrid ecologies

• Infrastructural geographies and material geographies of violence

• Elemental, atmospheric, hydrological, or geological geographies of warfare

• Soundscape ecologies and ecoacoustics of warfare and militarization

• Emotional, sensory, and affective ecologies of war, violence, and militarization

• Decolonial and Indigenous approaches to environmental security

To be considered, please send your name, position, affiliation, email address, paper title, and a 250-word abstract to Ariel Otruba (aotruba@vt.edu) and Jenny Isaacs (jenny.isaacs@rutgers.edu) by October 10, 2026. 

We will notify participants of selection by October 12, 2026.

References

Adey, Peter. 2015. “Air’s Affinities: Geopolitics, Chemical Affect and the Force of the Elemental.” Dialogues in Human Geography 5 (1): 54–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820614565871.

Dalby, Simon. 2002. Environmental Security. University of Minnesota Press.

Davies, Thom. 2018. “Toxic Space and Time: Slow Violence, Necropolitics, and Petrochemical Pollution.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 108 (6): 1537–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018.1470924.

Davies, Thom. 2022. “Slow Violence and Toxic Geographies: ‘Out of Sight’ to Whom?” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 40 (2): 409–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654419841063.

Dittmer, Jason. 2014. “Geopolitical Assemblages and Complexity.” Progress in Human Geography 38 (3): 385–401. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513501405.

Forsyth, Isla. 2016. “More-than-Human Warfare.” Social & Cultural Geography 17 (6): 798–802. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1147060.

Forsyth, Isla. 2017. “A Bear’s Biography: Hybrid Warfare and the More-than-Human Battlespace.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35 (3): 495–512. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816664098.

Graddy-Lovelace, Garrett, and Malini Ranganathan. 2024. “Geopolitical Ecology for Our Times.” Political Geography 112: 103034. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.103034.

Grove, Jairus Victor. 2019. Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478005254.

Johnson, Elizabeth R. 2015. “Of Lobsters, Laboratories, and War: Animal Studies and the Temporality of More-than-Human Encounters.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33 (2): 296–313. https://doi.org/10.1068/d23512.

Jones, Craig. 2026. “Geographies of War and Violence II: Terraformations and Political Ecologies of War.” Progress in Human Geography. Published online September 4, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325261485489.

Juskus, Ryan. 2023. “Sacrifice Zones: A Genealogy and Analysis of an Environmental Justice Concept.” Environmental Humanities 15 (1): 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10216129.

Khayyat, Munira. 2022. A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520390003.

Klinke, Ian. 2019. “Vitalist Temptations: Life, Earth and the Nature of War.” Political Geography 72: 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.03.004.

Lamain, Corinne, Esther Marijnen, Nico Edwards, and Thijs Jeursen. 2026. “Picking up Arms against a Collapsing Planet: Militarised Ecologies on a Planetary Scale.” Geoforum 173: 104636. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2026.104636.

Le Billon, Philippe. 2001. “The Political Ecology of War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflicts.” Political Geography 20 (5): 561–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0962-6298(01)00015-4.

Leep, Matthew. 2023. “Toxic Entanglements: Multispecies Politics, White Phosphorus, and the Iraq War in Alaska.” Review of International Studies 49 (2): 258–77. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000158.

Lunstrum, Elizabeth. 2014. “Green Militarization: Anti-Poaching Efforts and the Spatial Contours of Kruger National Park.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104 (4): 816–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.912545.

Margulies, Jared D., and Krithi K. Karanth. 2018. “The Production of Human-Wildlife Conflict: A Political Animal Geography of Encounter.” Geoforum 95: 153–64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.06.011.

Narayanan, Yamini. 2025. “Animal-State Relations: A Critical Multispecies Geopolitics of Animality.” Progress in Human Geography 49 (5): 508–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325251348611.

Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674061194.

O’Lear, Shannon, ed. 2021. A Research Agenda for Geographies of Slow Violence: Making Social and Environmental Injustice Visible. Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788978033.

Peluso, Nancy Lee, and Peter Vandergeest. 2011. “Political Ecologies of War and Forests: Counterinsurgencies and the Making of National Natures.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101 (3): 587–608. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2011.560064.

Peluso, Nancy Lee, and Michael Watts, eds. 2001. Violent Environments. Cornell University Press.

Pugliese, Joseph. 2020. Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478009078.

Richardson, Michael. 2024. Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology after the End of the World. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478027782.

Rodenbiker, Jesse. 2023. “Ecological Militarization: Engineering Territory in the South China Sea.” Political Geography 106: 102932. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102932.

Thomas, Kimberley Anh, Caitlin Joseph, and Britt Crow-Miller. 2026. “Respatializing Toxic Harm: The Case Against Sacrifice Zones.” Antipode 58 (1): e70123. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.70123.

van Wingerden, Enrike. 2026. “Of Wolves and Wars: Infrastructural Violence in a Multispecies World.” Security Dialogue 57 (3): 215–26. https://doi.org/10.1093/secdia/xhaf015.

2027 AAG Annual Meeting - New York City, NY

February 8-12, 2027

CFP – Virtual and In-Person participants are welcome

Organizer: Jacquelyn Johnston, Florida International University, jajohnst@fiu.edu 

Deadline for this CFP:                                         October 10, 2026

The AnGSG is pleased to announce its 2027 Graduate Student Research Competition. We invite submissions from graduate students that (1) are based on original empirical or theoretical research in the field of animal geography and (2) engage directly with animal geography literature.

The competition will be held as a hybrid panel at the 2027 AAG Annual Meeting in New York.

We encourage in-person participation, but will run this as a hybrid panel to encourage the broadest participation and attendance. 

Eligibility

Applicants must be part of the official AnGSG competition panel session and be prepared to present their research for approximately 10 minutes and also field questions for another 5 minutes. Students must be current members of the Animal Geography Specialty Group. Please email if you have any concerns about eligibility.

Please note that you may participate in both a paper session (for other CFPs) and also participate in this Panel Session. Participants may also attend two panels if they do not submit a paper abstract. Please check the full rules for panel and paper session participation for updates. 

Panel participants must be registered for the Annual Meeting, but are not required to submit a formal abstract for the panel (formal abstract submission is required only for paper sessions). 

Award 

The winning panelist will be awarded $150. The award will be announced following the AAG business meeting. AnGSG reserves the right not to offer an award if the research presented is not of appropriate quality.

Judging 

Research presentations will be ranked by a panel of judges based on:

• Scholarship: Contribution to the advancement of animal geography, engagement with literature, appropriateness of methodological approach, substance of findings, and the relation of findings to objectives and conclusions.

• Innovation: Measures how far this research would push the field of animal geography; how much does it engage with new or under-represented fields, research subjects, methods, or somehow otherwise break ground.

• Presentation quality: Organization, clarity, time management, visuals (if applicable), speech, and responses to audience questions.

How to apply 

Submit your title and a brief abstract to Jacquelyn Johnston (jajohnst@fiu.edu). Please include "AnGSG Grad Research Competition" in the email subject line. Submissions must be received by October 1, 2026. We will decide on participants and notify selected participants no later than October 10, 2026. 

Please feel free to circulate this CFP!

Best regards,

Jacquelyn Johnston, PhD

Florida International University