Saturday Plenary Spotlight
Dr. Johnny Finn
Professor of Geography
Chair, Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Anthropology
Christopher Newport University
Geography for the People! Community Geography in Action
Geography is about far more than states and capitals, rivers and mountains. And it’s much bigger than just what fits inside a Geography classroom, textbook, or curriculum. Geographical inquiry gives us the power to identify patterns, visualize the invisible, and illuminate all kinds of social and environmental inequalities—opening pathways toward building a more just future. In this keynote, Dr. Johnny Finn reflects on a decade of community-engaged geography, showing how maps and spatial analysis can shape public debate, inform journalism, support civil rights litigation, and empower environmental justice movements. Drawing on many field-based collaborations with K-12 teachers, he also demonstrates some of the ways that community geography can be translated into classroom practice, arguing that geography is not just something we teach, but something we do. And as such, geography becomes something our students can use to understand and transform the world around them.
About the Speaker
Dr. John C. Finn holds a Ph.D. in Geography from Arizona State University and is Associate Professor of Geography and Chair of the Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Anthropology at Christopher Newport University. His research examines the enduring economic, environmental, and health impacts of racial segregation in the United States. For the past eight years, he has directed a mixed-methods project titled Living Apart: Geography of Segregation in the 21st Century, which combines oral history interviews, experimental photographic methods, and interactive mapping to trace how discriminatory 20th-century housing policies produced and sustain landscapes of profound racial, economic, environmental, and health inequality. Finn has published over 50 articles, book chapters, reports, and op-eds and has delivered more than 150 invited lectures across North America, Latin America, and Europe. Through a sustained practice of public scholarship, Finn collaborates with journalists, artists, activists, legal teams, and medical researchers to make geographic research accessible and actionable in the pursuit of racial, environmental, and health justice.