The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute

The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute (The GIEI) is a global citizenship education initiative exploring how people imagine, understand, and relate to the world through geography, culture, systems, stories, and lived experience. Rooted in the belief that geography is not simply the study of places but the study of relationships, The GIEI creates opportunities to examine the mental maps through which we understand ourselves, others, and the planet. At the center of this work is a question: How do the stories, systems, places, and experiences around us shape our understanding of the world—and our responsibility to it?

The GIEI began as a multimedia storytelling project and evolved through several forms: visual storytelling and mapmaking, followed by Geographical Imaginations: Radio Expeditions into the Geographies of Everything & Nothing, a long-form radio essay and podcast series broadcast from Radio Fabrik in Salzburg, Austria, between 2014 and 2020. Across 60 episodes, the project explored migration, memory, identity, borders, tourism, inequality, landscape, and everyday life through dialogues with educators, artists, geographers, activists, and communities. Expeditions from Central Europe to Tanzania, Cuba, the United States, and the Arctic brought distant places into conversation with local realities and encouraged listeners to move beyond what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has described as “the danger of a single story”.

Today, The GIEI 2.0 is taking shape as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational institute and an intellectual home for exploring how we encounter the world and one another. Its purpose is global citizenship education. Human geography provides an intellectual lens. The GeoHumanities offer modes of inquiry and expression through story, image, sound, memory, and culture. Expedition is the method: setting out with questions, paying attention, encountering other perspectives, following connections, and remaining open to where inquiry leads. Storytelling, dialogue, simulation, research, and writing are among the practices through which this work happens.

This architecture allows GIEI to work at different scales and in different forms. The World as a Village of 100 People compresses global demographic realities to human scale, creating spaces to explore inequality, interdependence, dialogue, imagination, and shared responsibility. Geography courses and coaching develop the capacity to read the relationships among people, places, cultures, economies, environments, and systems. Local and global expeditions begin with particular places and ask what they can reveal about larger worlds. Research turns curiosity into sustained inquiry. And Worlds, our developing literary initiative, approaches global citizenship through personal nonfiction about place, identity, movement, culture, memory, belonging, and encounter.

What connects these seemingly different activities is the geographical imagination: the capacity to understand a particular life, place, or experience in relation to larger patterns and relationships. The local can illuminate the planetary. Data can meet lived experience. A classroom can become a village. A story can complicate a map. A conversation can cross a border. An expedition can begin by walking out the front door.

At its core, The GIEI believes that imagination is a civic practice. Understanding the world matters, but so does developing the capacity to question what appears inevitable, encounter perspectives beyond our own, imagine alternatives, and participate in shaping shared futures. In a world characterized by profound interdependence, the challenge is not simply to know more about one another. It is to learn how to live together.

The GIEI therefore does not aspire to be a place that simply provides answers. We want to create a place where worthwhile questions can be asked. Questions about who we are, where we are, how we are connected, whose stories we hear, what systems we inhabit, what responsibilities follow from those relationships, and what kinds of worlds we might create together.

That is The GIEI 2.0: an Expedition and an Institute. The Expedition takes us outward—toward places, people, stories, questions, and encounters. The Institute creates a place to bring those encounters back—to study them, write about them, discuss them, teach with them, and allow them to generate the next set of questions.

The expedition continues. The Institute is taking shape.

The GIEI Board