APCG Distinguished Service Award

The Distinguished Service Award recognizes members who have made an extraordinary and sustained contribution to the APCG and the region through their service, the education of students, and to the discipline of geography. A committee of three selects the recipient. This year, the committee decided to make one award to a highly deserving candidate. This year's recipient is Sriram Khé.

Sriram embodies the multidisciplinary nature of geography, which integrates the social sciences, the natural sciences, and technology to address today's most important social, global, and environmental issues.

Sriram completed his undergraduate studies in electrical engineering at the University of Madras, in India. He then earned a master's degree in 1990 and a PhD in 1993 in urban and regional planning, from the University of Southern California. Sriram worked as a transportation manager for six years. His first academic position was at California State University, Bakersfield, teaching economics, where he also held the position of Director of the Environmental Resource Management program. Since 2002, he has been a faculty member in the Department of Geography at Western Oregon University.

Sriram's service to the APCG has been substantial. He was the editor of Pacifica, the APCG's bi-annual newsletter, from 2005 to 2010. From 2007 to 2012 he served on, and chaired, the AAG's Committee on College Geography and Careers. He was president of the APCG in 2013–14, and is currently our region's AAG Councilor, serving a three-year term until 2019.

A peer who has collaborated closely with our award winner shared, "He is a thinker. Sriram always ponders the larger issues of academic geography in higher education, the role of social media, and particularly about how technology is transforming geography…Similarly, he also thinks about larger contemporary social questions, and how we as geographers, can better engage the public. He has spent most of his academic career blogging and writing articles to broadcast these larger issues to the public—who are eagerly looking for answers—with his geographic lens."

In his Presidential Address titled "Geography as Public Scholarship," Sriram stated, "I wanted to engage with the public, and not to merely converse with a few academic colleagues…I worried that the traditional research emphasized hyper-reductionist approaches to problems, whose importance is lost on the general public…" He added, "I would argue that we geographers have to engage the public with our scholarship and inquiry, and not assume that the world will come to us seeking answers to the big and contemporary questions."

Sriram appropriately reminds us that, as geographers, if we want to reach people outside the walls of academia and shape public policy and opinion, we need to disseminate our scholarship using language and media that are accessible to the public.

Finally, Sriram reflected, "My rich academic and professional experience has been possible only because of the welcoming attitude towards this immigrant—an immigrant not only to the U.S., but more importantly to geography, home to scholars of various intellectual interests."

For all that he has done for our organization, for students, and for geography, the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers is pleased to present the 2017 Distinguished Service Award to Sriram Khé.