Area studies and geography: Trajectories and manifesto

Abstract

We introduce the following set of essays on reformatting the relationship between area studies and geography and reflect on our individual and collective negotiation of this relationship. This leads us to revisit some key area studies' controversies and agendas, notably strategies for comparison. Drawing on the work of Benedict Anderson and other comparatively minded scholars, we advocate staging comparisons in terms of difference/similarity, expectancy/ surprise, present/past and familiarity/strangeness.

In Search of the Global East: Thinking between North and South

“…Внимательное рассмотрение отношений обнаруживает сближение понятия Глобального Востока с третьей волной региональных исследований, сформировавшейся за счет обращения к инструментам социальной и культурной теорий, а также погруженности в процессы глобализации, связывания и мобильностей (Middell, 2013;Mielke, Hornidge, 2016;Sidaway et al, 2016). Эта третья волна, занимающая рефлексивную позицию, критически оценивает прошлые описания регионов как замкнутых сущностей.…”

In Search of the Global East: Thinking between North and South

“…It decentres the West and universal knowledge claims emerging from there (Robinson 2016;Sidaway 2013). 8 The focus on relations reveals the affinities of the concept of the Global East to a third wave of area studies, much shaped by processes of globalisation, connection and mobilities, and the engagement with social and cultural theory (Middell 2013;Mielke and Hornidge 2016;Sidaway et al 2016). This third wave, self-reflexive as it is, critically assesses previous assumptions of areas as bounded and the colonial production of knowledge about areas from the centre, seeking to push towards an analysis of global connections and a decentring of knowledge production.…”

“…In this way, embracing its liminality inscribes the Global East not just into multiple unfurling debates around the geopolitics of knowledge (Mignolo 2002)a third wave of area studies that interrogates the politics of representation and foregrounds transnational links (Sidaway et al 2016) and theorising from the South (Connell 2007)it also invites to tease out what thinking with the East means for conceptualising the paradoxes and uncertainties that mark globalising societies and that have gained so much traction in scholarship in the past decades (Bauman 2006;Prigogine 1996;Žižek 2011).…”

Teaching Anarchist Geographies: Elisée Reclus in Brussels and “The Art of Not Being Governed”

“…Recent work reconsidering area studies has shown the different political views lying behind the division of the world into different regions (Sidaway et al 2016), while scholarship on anarchist geographies shows their pioneering efforts towards empathy for different cultures, including reading sources in the original languages (Ferretti 2013a (Dirlik 1991), and Japanese and Korean activists did the same (Pelletier 2013). …”