Greetings!

I am writing to welcome each of you to the newly formed Rural Geography Specialty Group (RGSG) that was created at last March’s AAG meetings in Los Angeles. Over the course of the last year, CARLU and the Rural Development Specialty Group started talking about a possible merger, and thanks to the coordination of Leslie Duram and Bill Forbes, the merger was successful. I have the honor (or curse) of serving as chair of the new group for this coming year. The merger is beneficial for several reasons. First, there is considerable overlap in both the interests and membership for both groups, so the merger creates a larger and more consolidated membership. Second, the AAG has been exerting pressure to reduce the number of smaller "idiosyncratic" specialty groups. By merging, we send a message to the AAG that research interests in the arena of Rural Geography are united, and the increased size of RGSG demonstrates the vitality of the field. And third (but certainly not last), during scheduling of upcoming AAG meetings, we will reduce the likelihood of competing concurrent sessions.

The topic of upcoming AAG Meetings brings me to the next and more important motive for this letter. As the dust settles around another completed academic year and we pull our doctoral regalia out of the closet for various graduation exercises, it is also time to start pulling together sessions for the 2003 New Orleans meetings. If you have an idea for a session you would like to organize, the time to start organizing is now. I’d like to try to keep track of the organized sessions so that we might be able to put people with similar research interests in touch with session organizers. If you are organizing a session, let me know by giving me an idea of what the topic is, and who the participants are.

Finally, I would like to propose a session or two similar to the economic geography specialty group’s "New Voices" sessions. New Voices sessions allow advanced doctoral students or recent PhDs to present their work in a venue with others of similar interests. I’d be happy to organize these New Voices sessions, so if you have doctoral students or know of emerging rural geographers, please have them submit their abstracts to me over the summer. I will also be organizing sessions related to rural social capital and population/economic development in the rural US (with Alex Vias). If you are interested in participating in any of these sessions, you can also contact me.

I look forward to leading the RGSG through this transition phase, and to working with each of you in the future.

Sincerely,

Peter B. Nelson
Assistant Professor of Geography
Middlebury College
Middlebury, Vermont 05753
pbnelson@middlebury.edu