Journal of Historical Geography最新文献

This essay argues for a connection between studying the history of geography as an academic discipline and the research experiences and knowledge productions of undergraduate geography students. The whereabouts of undergraduate dissertation research and the conceptions of what the field actually constitutes shapes geography students’ perceptions of the discipline, and thus affects shifts in what future and novice practitioners see as geography, or geographical knowledge. When comparing the local educational versions of academic geography taught at one university to more traditional, perhaps canonical, narratives on the history of geography, it becomes obvious that although there are many similarities, the timelines between disciplinary trends and educational practices never fully match.

In the context of class and culture wars over the social purpose of the university, it is time to revisit a pivotal question: to whom is the discipline of geography accountable and for what? In the spirit of looking back to look forward, we wonder to what extent and in what ways historiographies of geography that critically interrogate geographers' statements on the discipline's social mission might help and guide us at this hour? Specifically, we work to extract added value from the so-called relevance debates which animated anglophone geography in the 1970s. Characterising the present historical conjuncture as a Gramscian moment of interregnum when the ‘old is dying and the new cannot be born’, we tender the provocation that it is the responsibility of geographers to advance the cause of a ‘progressive populism’. To prosecute this public mission, it will be necessary to recentre the discipline around the figure of the geographer as scholar policy activist, immersed in and a progenitor of a vigilant, contestatory democracy. We conclude that whilst the relevance debates failed to theorise, codify, professionalise and valorise such an academic identity, these debates did bequeath logics and legacies that can fast track this work now.

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 (RGS-IBG). 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.

This paper argues for the relevance of the history and philosophy of geography and provides a personal perspective on the origins of the Working Party/Study Group/Research Group by one of its founders. Intellectually, the paper identifies the role of its history and philosophy as the construction and sanctioning of meta-narratives by which meaning is conferred on ‘geography’. Practically, the paper summarises the descriptive, normative and personal justifications for the establishment of the Working Party in 1981 in the context of Queen's University Belfast as a zone of civility exemplifying the politics of hope in a militarised, segregated and sectarian society.

This article explores the overlooked history and significance of physical relief models in the development of geographical knowledge and education. By examining their use in academic, educational and public settings, it argues for a broader appreciation of these models as integral to the discipline's material culture. Historical debates around their function and purpose are highlighted amidst developments in modelling techniques, materials, and instructional guides. A deeper investigation into the models, their creators, and their influence on geographical learning and public engagement is advocated for and illustrated through the production and impact of the 1951 book The Earth's Crust.

This reflection traces my intellectual journey to geography. It focuses on the emergence of Global Black Geographies as a key methodological framework in my PhD research. The article explores its application to my work alongside my move from Jamaica to the United Kingdom. Global Black Geographies, which takes some of its cues from Black Geographies, is a field that powerfully interrogates the multiply complex definitions and geographies of Blackness in many parts of the world, including the Caribbean. I thus use the experience of my PhD research as a lens to demonstrate how Caribbean scholarship bridges Black Geographies scholarship and some of its more global concerns. In doing so, I reveal the central role Caribbean Studies have played in the development of Black Geographies, which ultimately connects my research interests to a context of several globally Black concerns.

This paper introduces to an international audience the ‘encyclopaedic approach’ to geographical historiography. This approach was developed at the Free University of Amsterdam between 1961 and 1987 by Marcus Heslinga and Andries Kouwenhoven. Signalling how contemporary geography is hampered by the silofication of different subdisciplines and how a better understanding of our shared and pluriform histories can help overcome these silos, the encyclopaedic approach demonstrates how an ‘engaged pluralist’ historiography of geography could take shape. Testifying to its bridge-building character, the approach was developed in response to decades of acerbic conflict between rivalling schools of human geography in the Netherlands. Its central premises involve an acknowledgement that geography is a dynamic discipline with shifting formal and material objects and an empirical strategy to map and relate these different conceptual fields.

After a career devoted to studying aspects of the geography of France, compiling biobibliographies has provided a comfortable niche for the author in his retirement. Attention is drawn in this short article to the types of source employed, informants consulted, and the range of French and British scholars memorialized in Geographers Biobibliographical Studies and in other publications.

This article identifies the recurring expression ‘scope and method/s’ in three published lectures by Henry Sidgwick, Halford Mackinder and James George Frazer between 1885 and 1921. It tracks transdisciplinary connections between the thought and practice of late nineteenth-century philosophy, economic science and geography, and early twentieth-century anthropology, thereby illuminating shifting perceptions, and applications, of historical geographical knowledge and imaginations in a broader speculative evolutionary epistemological scheme. At a time when science and humanities subjects were thought to be diverging, it shows that metaphorical uses of optical instruments helped draw synoptic spatio-temporal frames of reference which shaped transdisciplinary and trans-institutional practices.

This commentary reviews the papers in the special issue on the history of the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group, part of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). It outlines three main themes: methodological approaches in history and philosophy of geography; the need to consider history and philosophy of geography together; and critical approaches and politics. It draws attention to the important work that HPGRG has done during its four decades of existence. It argues for enduring resonances in the history and philosophy of geography around peace, biographies and invisible labour.