Tag / cutter

by Konstantin Greger

Wrap-up: 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG)

From February 24th to 28th the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) was held in New York City, NY. Due to the large number of participants (~8,600) and sessions offered (~3,500) the conference was held in both the Hilton New York and the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers. The conference ended more than one month ago, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to write down my comments about it earlier.

I have been trying to attend as many sessions as possible, and after detailed preparation have been able to attend a session in every time slot offered, except during the two field trips I participated in. Furthermore, I presented my own research in one session.

This is a summary of the sessions I attended and the most interesting papers and topics covered there. (The numbers in brackets refer to the session IDs in the conference program.)

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by Konstantin Greger

Nailing Down Vulnerability

The main topic of my research is the vulnerability of urban areas for terrorism. But what exactly is vulnerability, and how can it be defined and operationalized? There are many discussions going on about these questions in the social sciences community. Albeit only very few of them are related to terrorism threats, the ideas and approaches presented there turn out to be very useful for me in finding my very own definition – in nailing down the quite abstract idea of vulnerability into a quantifiable measure.

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