George H. Johnson Prize Presentation and Talk with Elizabeth Olson

Elizabeth Olson, Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography will receive the 2020 George Johnson Prize for Distinguished Achievement by an IAH Fellow. After the presentation of the award, Professor Olson will give a lecture entitled, “Care as meeting place.”

Dr. Olson holds an M.A. in Political Science/Public Policy and a Ph.D. in Geography, both from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Prior to joining UNC in 2012, she worked at Lancaster University and the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, where she developed many of her interests in the intersections between care, ethics, and geographies of inequality. Her current research engages these themes through care ethics and the experiences of young people who are caregivers in their families. She has published widely on topics related to normative ethics, the geographies of religion and spirituality, and youth and young people, and is co-editor of Religion and Place: Landscapes, Politics and Piety (2012) and the Routledge Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies (2020). She loves teaching and offers classes related to global inequality and global theory, cultural landscapes, and geographies of religion.

Dr. Olson currently serves as Chair of the Geography Department at UNC-Chapel Hill and Co-Chair (with Shannelle Campbell) of the UNC Caregiving Work Group, which will consider caregiving needs and supports currently available to students, employees, and faculty. She is also co-founder of the Caregiving Youth Research Collaborative and works to raise awareness of and research on behalf of youth caregiving families in the US. She is a long-term member of the Fly Less Campaign and the AAG Climate Action Task Force.