UFMS celebrates Geographer's Day with academic integration and professional development

The world is changing faster than most of us can track. Climate shifts, sprawling cities, dwindling resources, the widening gap between rich and poor neighborhoods—these are the problems geographers spend their careers trying to understand. They read the landscape the way others read a book, finding in the arrangement of rivers and roads and buildings the story of how people and nature have learned to live together, or failed to. In a moment when those failures are becoming harder to ignore, the work feels urgent.

On May 28 and 29, the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul held the sixth edition of an event called "Practicing Geography" at its campus in Aquidauana, a small city in the heart of Brazil's Pantanal wetlands. The occasion was Geographer's Day, celebrated annually on May 29 to mark the founding of Brazil's national statistics and geography institute in 1936. What began as a simple commemoration had grown into something more substantial: a two-day gathering that brought together nearly 90 students, faculty, and professionals from across the region to think seriously about what geography is, what geographers do, and where the profession is heading.

The centerpiece was a roundtable discussion on professional formation and practice. Three speakers—Eva Teixeira dos Santos, who coordinates the geography program at UFMS Aquidauana; Edwina Santos da Costa, a geographer and master's degree holder; and Alfredo Aguirre da Paixão from a regional technical institute—laid out the two main paths a geography student can take. One leads toward teaching, preparing students to stand in classrooms and shape how the next generation sees the world. The other is more technical, training analysts and planners who work in government agencies, environmental firms, and research institutions, using data and models to guide decisions about how land gets used and resources get managed. Both matter. Both require different skills, different ways of thinking.

But the real substance of the event lived in ten specialized workshops that ran alongside the main discussion. A programmer taught the basics of R, a statistical language increasingly essential to anyone working with large datasets. Another instructor walked people through QGIS, the open-source mapping software that has democratized spatial analysis. There were sessions on soil science, rock classification, water quality testing in rivers and streams. One workshop explored satellite data—specifically imagery from NASA's MODIS sensor—and how to use it to track changes in vegetation across a landscape. Another took a different approach entirely, asking participants to create maps based on lived experience and memory, treating geography not as something measured with instruments but as something felt and remembered.

One session stood out for its regional flavor: "Aromas, Flavors, and Knowledge of the Pantanal," which framed the production of space itself as a geographic experience. The Pantanal is not an abstraction to people in Aquidauana; it is the ground beneath their feet, the seasonal floods that shape their calendar, the cattle and fish and birds that define their economy. To study geography there is to study home.

About twenty faculty members, technical staff, graduate students, and undergraduates from UFMS and a partner institution called Polícia Penal worked to pull the event together. Participants came from multiple universities across the state—from UFMS's other campuses, from the state university, from programs in forestry, environmental technology, history, and education. One person traveled from France. The event closed with a themed lunch inspired by the traditional cattle drives of the region, a small gesture toward grounding the academic work in the actual place where it happens.

Emerson Figueiredo Leite, the geography professor who coordinated the whole thing, described it as a moment of professional recognition and institutional integration. "It's an event built through important partnerships," he said, "born from simple communication and made real through the voluntary work of many people. It's a fundamental moment for valuing geographers as professionals and for bringing together teaching, research, and community engagement." In other words: this was not a top-down mandate or a box to check. It was people in a discipline deciding that their work mattered enough to gather and talk about it seriously, and inviting others to listen and learn.