Comments from the outside: The sixth annual applied geography conference, 12–15 October, 1983

Discourse on Method and the History of Discipline: Reflections on Dobson's 1983 Automated Geography∗

“…It is, therefore, another productive coincidence that in 1983 Martin Kenzer noted that applied geography was lacking in critical perspective (Kenzer 1984), a lack that has apparently been perpetuated and has resulted in a "strikingly unself-assessing" form of applied geography in 1992 (Kenzer 1992, 207). In the United Nations Year of the World's Indigenous Peoples (1993), Cartesian method, objectivist epistemologies, and statehstics must become more critically engaged with the central questions of the day, questions which emerge in part as a result of the very automation with which we are concerned, and questions which are at one and the same time empirical, technical, theoretical, and political.…”