Contemporary Research Strategies in Cultural Geography, Journal of Cultural Geography 31(2) (original) (raw)
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Journal of Cultural Geography, 31(2), 121-126., 2014
This introductory essay situates this edited collection on “contemporary research strategies in cultural geography” in relation to relevant scholarly debates, e.g., around positionality in feminist geography, reflexivity in critical human geography, and world-making in cultural geography. We claim that, taken together, the essays in this collection represent an “embrace” of dissensus, which is to say they stage encounters between often-irreconcilable senses of the world. We suggest that this dissensus in the subdiscipline is a source of dynamism and vitality, which promises to generate new ways of doing cultural geography and therefore new ways of making and knowing the world.
Cultural geography and enchantment: the affirmative constitution of geographical research
Journal of Cultural Geography, 2014
Thrift (2008, p. 65) has identified disenchantment as “[o]ne of the most damaging ideas” within social scientific and humanities research. As we have argued elsewhere, “[m]etanarratives of disenchantment and their concomitant preoccupation with destructive power go some way toward accounting for the overwhelmingly ‘critical’ character of geographical theory over the last 40 years” (Woodyer and Geoghegan 2013). Through its experimentation with different ways of working and writing, cultural geography plays an important role in challenging extant habits of critical thinking. In this paper we use the concept of ‘enchantment’ to make sense of the deep and powerful affinities exposed in our research experiences and how these might be used to pursue a critical, yet more cheerful way of engaging with the geographies of the world.
The scholarly field defined as "critical geography," or more accurately "critical geographies," has experienced a spectacular expansion and tended to become an umbrella gathering a very heterogeneous array of contributions. While labels like critical geography are not always displayed explicitly by scholars, rare are those who would not claim for drawing upon some form of critical thinking, and the geography journals whose editorial programmes are broadly inspired by critical or radical theory are increasingly well established. This expansion poses first the problem of defining what is "critical," what is "radical" and what is "mainstream," considering that the boundaries between these realms, if ever defined, are increasingly uncertain and blurred. This uncertainty also implies interrogations on how to enhance socially engaged scholarly approaches beyond the academy and its frontiers, defined by the social status of the academics and by the limits of academic main dissemination practices, such as publishing and conferencing in English. In the following text, I discuss limits and potentialities of the places and networks where current critical geographical knowledge is prevalently produced. Then, I analyse the variety and plurality of the works carried out in this field and claim for decolonizing geographical scholarship, including its critical and radical strands. This decolonization includes giving more consideration to output produced by non-Anglophone scholars, especially from the South, a problem which has been widely discussed at the International Conferences of Critical Geography but not definitively resolved hitherto. Glossary Academic extractivism. Extractivism is widely studied as a colonial and neo-colonial attitude to predate the natural resources of certain regions (especially in the Global South) at the