My Very SAD Dinner Party
The part of "Spatial Analytics + Data: The Interviews" where I answer some of my own questions
Some Long but Necessary Exposition
In the spring of 2020 the academic world largely came to a screeching halt. Conferences and workshops were cancelled. Teaching shifted—or pivoted, as they like to say in my adopted country—to new online formats. And research and writing, for many of us, were set aside for more pressing responsibilities, like figuring out how to record lectures whilst also parenting small children.
It was in this broader setting—upheaval and stress, but also boredom and a desire for interaction with our peers—that Levi Wolf and I hatched the initial idea of the Spatial Analytics + Data seminar series. Or, SAD 2020, as I like to call it. A fully online set of talks, our aim was to leverage the virtual to do things that weren’t normally possible, especially in terms of inclusivity, where speakers and audience are concerned.
A year into SAD 2020, Daniel Arribas-Bel came to us with another innovation he’d been pondering for a while: why not expand SAD to include a set of informal conversations, or interviews, with notable figures in the field? With the support of the Royal Geographical Society and the Quantitative Methods Research Group (QMRG), Dani, Levi, and I produced an initial set of interviews with Mike Batty, Luc Anselin, Helen Couclelis, Alison Heppenstall, and Danny Dorling. Our second series, which ran in 2021–2022 and was supported by the Alan Turing Institute, featured Sara Fabrikant, Trisalyn Nelson, Antonio Paez, and Sarah Elwood.
The structure of the interviews was always the same (although if you’ve watched them, you’ll have noticed that each interviewee brought their own distinct approach to handling the inquisition from the three of us). Levi would generally get us started with a discussion around people’s professional, and sometimes personal, trajectories, the places they’d been, and how these experiences shaped them as academics and researchers. Dani would come in at the middle to talk ideas and research. Neither of these were hard and fast categories: we’d have an hourlong pre-meet with each interviewee, in which we’d chat and get a sense for narratives and stories, and then figure out roughly who would take which topics.
My piece of the interview was different. The final 15 minutes of each SAD interview were given over the “SAD Dinner Party”, a brief conversation where we’d talk through the ideal Spatial Analytics + Data dinner party, including guests, conversational topics, and even reading material.
The SAD Dinner Party Protocol
Here are the guidelines I’d provide interviewees in advance of our conversation:
For the last 15 minutes of the interview, we switch gears. We borrow from the popular UK radio show, “Desert Island Discs,” which asks prospective castaways to list 8 records or tracks, a luxury, and a book that they would take with them to a desert island.
Our proposition is a bit different.
You’re invited to a dinner party, a SAD dinner party. When you ask the hostess (Rachel) what you can bring, she suggests:
4 people. These are the only invitees at dinner, so prepare well.
1 book. In case conversation is boring and you need to entertain yourself.
For the after-dinner drinks and discussion, you’re also asked to bring:
1 formative memory or experience
1 accident, fortuitous or otherwise
1 nugget of wisdom
1 regret, professional or otherwise, for when the group has had a bit to drink and conversation turns inwards
On Desert Island Discs, the castaways are given the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. We may not have time to get to it, but I’d be curious what two books you think should be a given at any proper SAD dinner party.
I’d also be curious what you’d want to eat for main course and dessert at this SAD dinner party.
Some suggestions:
Time will be tight to get through all this in 15 minutes, so if you could make notes of your answers and send to me in advance of the interview, that will help me decide which bits to focus on!
Also, the above are guidelines and you can feel free to interpret as loosely or strictly as you please!
Let’s Make This About Me
Every time we’d do this part of the interview, Levi, Dani and I would speculate about how we’d each answer these questions and how we should definitely interview each other at some point.
This never happened.
However—for reasons—we’ve now each completed the SAD Dinner Party protocol. One immediate takeaway for me, anyway, was that we sure asked a lot of our interviewees to put some of this down on paper! Regrets?! Formative experiences?! That’s some real soul-bearing there.
Another takeaway is how much practice is required in order to talk about some experiences, even provided one is willing. With that in mind (and also for the archives), I’ve gone back over the SAD Dinner Party questions and recorded my answers below.
4 Dinner Guests: These are the only invitees at dinner, so prepare well
Wow, Rachel. Coming in strong with the tricky questions, right out of the gate.
I ruminated over this one for a long while, thinking about famous people it might be fun to talk to (John Snow), people who are no longer with us who I really enjoyed knowing (Art Getis or Waldo Tobler), and people whose company I really enjoy (many).
If you’ve ever dealt with me at an actual conference dinner or social event, however, then…well…my commiserations. Just kidding. You will know, though, that my ideal SAD dinner party would involve comfortable people that I can be myself with. This is true for my “real” life, but especially holds for professional settings. So, really, I just want to have a great meal with the same people I always have great meals with.
If I’ve had a conference meal with you more than once, you are one of these people.
1 book, in case conversation is boring and you need to entertain yourself
A Rand-McNally road atlas and the latest issue of either The Economist or The New Yorker (but definitely not both, because surely the dinner can’t be that boring).
1 formative memory or experience
This one was tough, because I really wanted to convey the variety of impacts this collection of memories had on me.1
My father and stepmother were cultural and linguistic anthropologists who collaborated on almost everything they did. This was formative in subtle and not-so-subtle ways: my expectations around partnership; my exposure to domestic conflict that involved stuff like authorship order; and, of course, the myriad ways the professional continuously bled into everyday home life.
As kids, my sisters and I spent much of our school vacation time in northern Arizona and southern Utah with the San Juan Southern Paiute. For most of my childhood—and the first time I went out in the field was the summer I turned 5, the last time I was probably 11 or 122—the Paiutes were actively seeking federal recognition and much of my dad and stepmother's research was focused on assisting in this effort, showing that this group of Paiutes currently and historically were on the land and also that they were a separate group from other tribes in the area. A lot of this was ethnographical—interviewing members of the community about who was where and when—but it was also very geographical. Lots of walking from place to place and hearing about how land had been used and who had lived where.
All of this experience shaped me. I mean, of course it did. We did all the things that kids of anthropologists did in those days: not just following our parents around, but also learning to make baskets and that sort of thing, helping to slaughter sheep, running around with all the other kids.
It’s the practical aspect, though, that I think of as especially formative: that research and knowledge can be used out in the real world to actually accomplish something. And also that geography matters in really fundamental ways.
There is also nothing like hours in the backseat of a car, or at a campsite, for character development and self-sufficiency. One summer in particular my sister and I managed to survive on one copy of A Wizard of Earthsea between us. That poor book.
1 accident, fortuitous or otherwise
I applied to one PhD program and one PhD program only (Geography at the University of Arizona)—and that decision has shaped my entire academic career.3
I've been so lucky.
When I was finishing my undergraduate degree at Indiana University, I had no idea what to do next. Partly this was because I was young and young people famously don’t know what to do with their lives. It was also partly because I was a French major and, at that time at least, no one sat us down and explained what kinds of jobs French majors could apply for. And it was partly because I was only 20 years old—I couldn’t even drink legally in the US yet, much less get my head around getting a job and finding a place to live.
So I decided to stay in school and get a master’s degree in West European Studies. The US Government offered language fellowships that covered stipend and tuition and I applied and was awarded one in Catalan. The degree, though, was a hodge podge of “European” courses, scattered across disciplines and departments at Indiana. Just by chance, I ended up in a “Population Geography of Western Europe” course, offered in the Geography Department and taught by Brigitte Waldorf. (I had never heard of Geography!) Brigitte was the coolest professor I’d ever met. She also agreed to be on my MA thesis committee, which gave me lasting connection to geography. I enjoyed my first geography course so much that I signed up for another, taught by John Odland. There I learned about discrete choice models and also met my first husband—along with a bunch of other geographers, all of whom were also super cool. All of this made me want to be a geographer so badly.
Fast forward a few years and…I was not a geographer.
Instead, I was a new mom and stuck at home (in Charlotte, North Carolina, of all places), wondering what to do with my life and remembering how much I had enjoyed geography.4 Brigitte, in the meanwhile, had moved to the University of Arizona and strongly encouraged me to apply to the U of A. They admitted me, flew us to Tucson to look around, and just generally made me feel welcome. Surely we can all agree that this qualifies as fortuitous, even if it wasn’t an accident.
The accident (although, reading this, there are a lot of accidents going on already) was that Arizona geography was big into regional science—it housed the Journal of Regional Science and the Western Regional Science Association at the time—and the clear path of least resistance was for me to evolve into a regional scientist. This was one of the best things that has happened to me. Super fortuitous! It turns out I am analytically inclined, so that was great. I also ended up working with Dave Plane5, a person I admire enormously for his intellectual curiosity and rigor and friendship. More than that, regional science has provided an intellectual home that has supported me and given me space to grow and become the SAD person that I am.
1 nugget of wisdom
Enjoy the ride. It will have lots of twists and turns and you may not always enjoy the steep drops or the dark tunnels—and maybe it even ends in a place you never thought it would—but to the extent you can, try to focus on the journey.
We only do it once!
1 regret, professional or otherwise, for when the group has had a bit to drink and conversation turns inwards
A common refrain when we did the original SAD interviews was “no regrets”. I admit I was skeptical hearing others say this, but, now that I am in the hot seat, it makes more sense. If I’d taken a different pathway, I wouldn’t be where I am now—so how can I have regrets?
If pushed, though, maybe I wish I’d leaned into my research or disciplinary identity much earlier on. I was so clueless and unsure. As an undergraduate, I studied French and then added Italian and Spanish—but it never seemed like a serious endeavour; it was just fun and easy. When I was finishing my undergraduate degree, I was encouraged to apply for a PhD in French and Italian and didn’t even consider it. Why?
It was the right decision…I think. When I consider how much I enjoy language and reading and dissecting what I’ve read, I wonder if my path would have been easier had I stuck with what I clearly excelled at. Instead, I drifted into a quantitative PhD without any sort of solid analytical foundation, which led to years of insecurity and worry. (I definitely regret that I didn’t take more math as a student!)
All that said, in the end, I am increasingly satisfied with the kind of geographer that I have become. Perhaps we all have gaps and it’s precisely those gaps that can help us create our unique space in the academic world.
2 books you think should be a given at any proper SAD dinner party
Lloyd and Dicken’s Location in Space (2nd edition), so that we can gather around and pore over the amazing visualisations and descriptive text. Central Place Theory like you’ve never seen it taught. Location in Space is the kind of textbook I dream of writing.
Patterns in Human Geography by David Smith. Another book that is evocative of a very particular time and place in quantitative human geography. I really like this book. The 1975 edition includes the subtitle: “An Introduction to Numerical Methods”.
If I could add a third, it would be The Geographical Analysis of Population by Plane and Rogerson. This is another book that defines, for me, what an analytical geography textbook should be like. We don’t make them like this anymore.
I want to wax nostalgic about the eras that produced these books. Each volume is an exemplar of how to organise and explain geographical methods and thinking. I also yearn for conversation—maybe over dinner with some of my favourite geographers!—about how these books illuminate our own current SAD times, especially how we organise and teach geographical analysis.
What would you eat for main course and dessert at this SAD dinner party?
I am not usually a main course person. I’m the person who looks first at the starters and then at the desserts. Anything fruity for dessert—a pavlova or a crisp.
One thing, though: I always order a Negroni if it’s on the menu.
The End
If you haven’t already, check out SAD: The Interviews. Find out who prefers to invite close friends for the SAD Dinner Party and who opts for exciting dead people they’d love to talk to. Discover who’s in the “no regrets” camp.
A personal favourite for me was hearing just how dependent many of us have been on fortuitous accidents.
We are a lucky bunch.
Also, my father and stepmother are both dead and—maybe partially to avoid getting too much up in my feelings—I rarely talk about this kind of stuff, so this was the first time I tried to write about these memories in organised fashion.
This was not the last time I was there: both my parents asked to have their ashes scattered from the top of Tuba Butte, which required the support and help of the Paiutes. This we did in 1998 and again in 2012.
I bet this is true for everyone, so I’m not trying to say I’m special.
I edited this section twice before deciding to opt for transparency: my essay about babies talks about the experience of having a sick parent and a newborn. This part—the floundering around and looking for a point in life—was six months later, after my father had died. In hindsight I was probably depressed. Brigitte’s (and Arizona Geography’s) willingness to take a bet on me was a lifesaver.