Batterbury, S.P.J. 2005. Johnson R.J. and M. Williams (eds.) A Century of British Geography. The Geographical Review 95(1):145-148. (original) (raw)
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This article offers a critical appraisal of institutionalised knowledge production and exchange on the history and philosophy of geography in the United Kingdom. We examine broad epistemic trends over 41 years (1981e2021) through an analysis of annual conference sessions and special events convened by the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group (HPGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG). We show how organisational, sociocultural, and epistemic changes were coproduced, as expressed by three significant findings. Organisationally, the group emerged through shared philosophical interests of two early career geographers at Queen's University of Belfast in 1981 and received new impetus through its strategic plan 1995e1997, which inspired long-term research collaborations. Socioculturally, the group's activities contributed to national traditions of geographical thought and praxis in masculinist academic environments, with instances of internationalisation, increasing feminisation, and organisational cooperation. Epistemically, the group's events in the 1980s shaped contextualist, constructivist, and critical approaches, and coproduced new cultural geography, but the emphasis shifted from historically sensitive biographical, institutional, and geopolitical studies of geographical knowledges, via critical, postcolonial, and feminist geographies of knowledge-making practices in the 1990s, to more than-human and more-than-representational geographies in the early twenty-first century.
This introduction to the special issue Reflections on Histories and Philosophies of Geography discusses the context and content of nineteen articles written to mark the fortieth anniversary of the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group (HPGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGSIBG). The group was founded in 1981, two years after the early career researchers who set up the group, Richard T. Harrison and David N. Livingstone, published jointly their first critical interventions in support of human geography's paradigmatic shift away from positivism, based on an early form of social constructivist argumentation. We argue that the subsequent proliferation of epistemic pluralism, which is discussed in the contributions to this special issue and has characterised the activities organised by the HPGRG, exemplifies the considerable value of three historiographical practices: first, engaging with the history and philosophy of geography collectively in one research group; second, situating methodologies within the history and philosophy of geography; and third, critically interrogating the discipline's evolving geographical knowledges, professional practices, and material cultures from different authorial positionalities.
GeoJournal
This article introduces the commentaries and rejoinders collated in this collection about the longevity and contemporary relevance of two landmark textbooks in human geography: Geography and Geographers and Political Geography. After putting the emergence of both books in their historical context we discuss their meandering route through the development of geographical thought since. Reflecting on the commentaries and the rejoinders, the impossibility of writing a contemporary textbook with even a veneer of comprehensiveness takes centre stage. Resultanly we debate the future of the geography textbook and what strategies can be surmised to brigde the increasingly self-referential siloes in geographical thought. First appearing within 6 years of each other, both Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Human Geography since 1945 (1979) and Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality (1985) have each since gained a co-author and each are now in a seventh edition. The trajectories of both books trace, reflect and sometimes collide with the changing tides of the social world and the way that world is represented in geographical scholarship. Making these traces, reflections and collusions visible says much more than an assessment of the continued value of two well-established textbooks. It likely reveals features of the wider state of contemporary geography. Both books first appeared when there were relatively few competing titles, so they quickly found niches. There have since been many more alternative textbooks, edited collections, dictionaries, enclyclopedia's that guide readers to the domains of political geography and the history of geography. In subsequent edtions, Political Geography and Geography and Geographers came to represent one possible flavour among peers. The essays that follow arise from a panel held on 29 August 2019, at the Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) in London. We took advantage of the fact that both Ron Johnston and Peter Taylor were able to attend the conference to stage a discussion about the trajectory (past, present and future) of their two landmark textbooks. The panellists and the essays they wrote embody a range of backgrounds, career
[Ron_Johnston,_James_Sidaway]_Geography_and_Geography_since_1945.pdf
Geography and Geographers provides a survey of the major debates, key thinkers and schools of thought in human geography in the English-speaking world, setting them within the context of economic, social, cultural and political, as well as intellectual, changes. It focuses on the debates among geographers regarding what their discipline should study and how that should be done, and draws on a wide reading of the geographical literature produced during a seventy-year period characterised by both growth in the number of academic geographers and substantial shifts in conceptions of the discipline’s scientific rationale. The pace and volume of change within the discipline show little sign of diminishing; this seventh edition covers new literature and important developments over the past decade. An insightful and reflective examination of the field from within, Geography and Geographers continues to be the most comprehensive and up-to-date single volume overview of the field of human geography. This seventh edition has also been extensively revised and updated to reflect developments in the ways that geography and its history are understood and taught. Providing a thoroughly contemporary perspective, the book maintains its standing as the essential resource for students and researchers across the field.
Scottish geography is dead: long live Scottish ���g���eography!
2008
It has been claimed that geography journals located in so-called 'small nations' face special challenges. This paper suggests that three processes have demanded rapid responses from all geographical journals: globalisation of research-publishing, changing professional practices and the restructuring of the institutional context within which research is undertaken. These processes have been powerful in reshaping geographical research. Examining the case of Scottish Geography over the last 20 years, the paper concludes there is much to be optimistic about, even though some might regret that 'Geography', as we once knew it, no longer exists. Recognising the challenges of the current research environment provides a useful starting point for the Scottish Geographical Journal to chart a new future for itself and for Scottish geographical endeavours.
Reconstituting Geography for the 21st century
Environment and Planning F, 2021
We write as the inaugural editors of a new addition to the Environment and Planning family of peer review journals. It is called EPF: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice (phonetically, our subtitle sounds as pee-tee-em-pee). Geography today should be more than the sum of its many lively parts, but as a discipline cannot dance to one tune-be it ontologically, epistemologically, methodologically or otherwise. We believe that the action lies in forging connections, in mutual learning and in productive disagreement. In this editorial, we detail the context, aims and scope of the journal. At the end, we call for guest editors of special sections and issues, and for articles that fit the remit of this exciting new venture. As a discipline, Geography today is both distinctive and exceedingly vibrant. Many other disciplines are increasingly interested in people-environment relationships, in local-global connections, in the nature and significance of various boundaries and borders, in movements (e.g. of people, goods, knowledge and information) between places and regions, in landscape and land use change, in the difference that proximity and distance make, and in the functioning of biogeochemical systems at various scales-but Geography has historic pedigree in all these areas. It remains the discipline dedicated to understanding why, how and with what effects people utilise-and are affected by-both natural and created environments (in both a material and semiotic-representational sense). In the Anglosphere, if not necessarily elsewhere, the discipline is also extraordinarily heterodox: variety of focus, methods and aims in both research and degree-level teaching is the rule, not the exception. This heterodoxy is both the product and lubricant of Geography's breadth of focus, of the virtues of specialisation and-in some parts of the discipline-of a belief that we can learn valuable things by eschewing orthodoxy. Today, albeit not equally across the globe and in different modalities, Geography is burgeoning. Its practitioners have formed lively communities with shared interests in some of the most important issues of our time, such as destruction of the nonhuman world, voluntary and forced migration, rapid urbanisation, new patterns of economic development, the identification and amelioration of concentrated poverty, reduction of the impacts of various natural hazards, emerging geopolitical rivalries and the new cartographies of war, trans-border political struggles for justice, environmental conservation and restoration, infrastructure development and planning for the future, multicultural localities and cities, and much more besides. Even so, many geographers might believe all is not well in the house of Geography. Some lament the lack of unity of purpose and focus in the discipline; others feel that Geography does not offer enough exemplars of 'integrated analysis' that make a virtue of the many specialists we have working side-by-side in the same departments. Yet others believe Geography's public image remains too weak in several countries, allowing other disciplines to encroach on its fundamental research and teaching areas; some assert that geographers borrow too much from other disciplines and do not make formative contributions of wider significance; and still others maintain that what passes for 'geography' in many departments is really 'geography lite' practised by geologists, sociologists or ecologists with little to no sense of the history and achievements of Geography over the last century or so. This is the immediate academic context in which EPF is being launched. The wider context is febrile: the first pandemic in a century, with grave economic and social knock-on effects; the forced 1005376E PF0010.