Biography and the history of geography: a response to Ron Johnston

Abstract

paper on the treatment of geographers in the Oxford dictionary of national biography (hereafter ODNB) raises important questions about how the history of the discipline should be documented, and about the place of biographical accounts in the writing of disciplinary histories. 1 Johnston rightly draws attention to the unsung labours of a relatively small number of individual geographers in the business of building a university discipline in Britain during the twentieth century. The story of the pioneering establishment of geography at Oxford and Cambridge is relatively well known. However, without equivalent efforts at other established and newly emergent academic institutions around the country, geography could never have matured into a fully fledged university discipline at national level. The efforts of professional geographers active in universities and other higher-education institutions in the English regions, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have been too easily forgotten, not least because many of these pioneers published relatively little, exerting their primary influence through teaching and through the channels of departmental and university administration, arguing the case for new buildings, library space and new staff. The influence of teachers was perhaps more publicly recognized in earlier generations than in our research-focused one, and is an important strand of any disciplinary history, although, as Livingstone has rightly cautioned, a story of 'handing on the disciplinary baton' is not the same as a critical and contextualized history of a discipline (Livingstone, 1992). The influence of geographers in fighting for resources for their discipline within universities has often eluded the historical record entirely.There are many histories of geography to be written. The British Academy's recent Century of British geography (Johnston and Williams, 2003), for example, has the particular merit of allowing interdisciplinary comparisons, being part of a series of disciplinary Debate

Making their own futures? Research change and diversity amongst contemporary British human geographers

“…As Lorimer argues ‘the resultant accounts are, by definition, dominated by grand, scholarly stories, set in the quasi‐mythological and exclusive spaces of “the academy” ’ (2003, 200). The discipline, it is argued, has been predominantly framed within paradigmatic narratives, which, despite being presented as universal, represented particular hegemonic positions (Purcell , 178), produce accounts that are overly closed, masculine, scholarly, Anglo‐centric, clinical and detached from their immediate contexts (Rose ; Minca ; Driver and Baigent ; Sidaway and Johnston ). These critical commentaries explored alternative conceptual frameworks, contexts, sources and methodologies (Boyle ), advocating greater openness, plurality and contingency in the writing of geography.…”

“…They ranged beyond the academy to excavate the spaces within which geographical knowledge was produced and focused upon the contributions of lower profile figures than was conventional (Lorimer ; Maddrell ). What they produced, despite their differences, were accounts that acknowledged the situated nature of geographical knowledge, which pointed to the inclusion of institutional contexts of geographical knowledge production (Roberts ; Driver and Baigent ). They employed methods such as biography (Boyle ; Peet ; Lorimer and Withers ), autobiography (Moss ), oral history (Jenkins and Ward ), institutional histories and sociological accounts of disciplines (Sidaway ; Sidaway and Johnston ).…”

Whose biography; whose history? A response to Driver and Baigent

“…Although Driver and Baigent (2007; henceforth DB) sympathize with many points made in my paper (Johnston, 2005), they apparently wish I had written a different one. My sole concern, clearly stated in the title, was to use the ODNB to illuminate aspects of the history of the academic discipline of geography in the UK.…”

Fanny Copeland and the Geographical Imagination

“…First, responding to Driver and Baigent's (2007), call for attention to those who may not 'conform to a present-day version of what a "geographer" should look like ' (102), it hopes to demonstrate the value of biographical studies in (the history of) geography beyond Johnston's (2005) focus on the labours of individual university academics. Second, it builds on Matless' (1992) refutation of the inter-War period as 'a geographical Dark Age',its products 'mundane,routine,intellectually arid' (465), and it explores some links between the development of regional studies, geographical fieldwork and contemporary analyses of geopolitical events of the period.…”