Historical geography 2007—2008: Foucault's avatars — still in (the) Driver's seat

New geographies of story and storytelling

“…The past several years have seen a profusion of interest among cultural and historical geographers in the small, the local, the specific, the particular, the intimate, and the mundane (Mayhew, 2009; Naylor, 2008; Powell, 2007). In a review of recent historical geographic scholarship, for example, Naylor (2008: 265, 266) documents ‘a growing number of studies in historical geography that take individual lives as their centrepoint’ and an ‘increasingly common approach in historical geography to prioritize the local and the particular at the expense of larger-scale and more general studies’.…”

“…Studies of ‘microhistory’, ‘oral history’, and ‘local stories’ have become increasingly common, and many frame these studies as responses to the perceived limitations of emphasizing large-scale, systemic, and discursive processes. 1 Indeed, it would seem that, for many scholars, both ‘Foucault’ and ‘discourse’ have come to stand in for interest in the large-scale, systemic, and pervasive (see Mayhew, 2009), and efforts to ‘move beyond Foucault’s ambit’ (Mayhew, 2009: 393) and to ‘find non-Foucauldian ways of practicing’ (p. 392) have tended to cluster around ‘local practices and knowledges’ (p. 393), ‘telling different stories’ (p. 393), and ‘an attendance to the affective and the material’ (p. 393). However much the association of Foucault’s work with the large-scale, structural, and systemic may rest on a simplification and misrepresentation of his writings (discourse is not equivalent to ‘metanarrative’, for example, nor does it preclude a focus on the specificity of the small and local), recent work in cultural and historical geography has been substantially informed by an interest in coming to terms with the ‘“big questions” surrounding processes and structures’ (Short and Godfrey, 2007: 47) in different ways than Foucault’s writings have tended to encourage.…”

Historical geography I

“…Each of my three predecessors has progressively identified the geography of knowledge, and of science in particular, as a maturing tradition within historical geography (Holdsworth, 2003; Mayhew, 2009; Naylor, 2005). Livingstone (2010b: 3, 4) identifies space as ‘a central organizing principle for making sense of scientific knowledge’, and sees this as part of ‘a more general geographical turn in science studies' (see also Livingstone, 2003; Mayhew, 2010b; Naylor, 2010; Withers, 2007).…”

Historical geography, 2009-2010: Geohistoriography, the forgotten Braudel and the place of nominalism

“…It may also relate to the comparative maturity and fertility of this field of inquiry. So well established is the study of the history of science through a spatial lens that we have seen two review essays by historical geographers canvassing this area of inquiry (Powell, 2007;Finnegan, 2008), while both I (Mayhew, 2009) and two predecessors (Naylor, 2005;Withers, 2005) pivoted our progress reports around this rubric. This nexus of ideas continues to prove fruitful.…”