History and philosophy of geography III

Abstract

Using ideas on the pedagogy of geographical thought from John Henry Newman and Neil Smith as inspiration, this progress report discusses recent work in the history and philosophy of geography. In doing so, it identifies a series of emergent themes including concerns for canonicity, biography, institutional history and enchantment. A tension in current work between historical geographies of geographical knowledge that are attuned to sites, institutions and materiality and a resurgent history of geographical concepts is discussed. In concluding, it is argued that historians of geography need to engage with related developments in intellectual history about materiality and spatial approaches.

‘German Theory’: Cosmopolitan geographies, counterfactual histories and the (non)travel of a ‘German Foucault’

“…The Frankfurt School might qualify for that label, or phenomenology, or Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. Or worse, the denominator ‘German’ might simply end up as a proxy for ‘Nazi geographies’ (Powell, 2015: 830), tainting the theoretical interest in the work of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt (Korf and Rowan, 2020).…”

An untimely geographer: Friedrich Engels, ideas and geography in Oxford

“…8 As Powell (2012: 340) noted, when discussing the question of a geographical canon, particular 'figures, texts and practices have been associated with particular sites -even specific Departments of Geography'. This means, as Keighren et al (2012: 343) argued, that because the 'preferences and prejudices of individual academics can shape what, for generations of students, counts as and becomes geography', it is vital that the processes of canonisation be understood at the level of the institution (see also Powell, 2015). There are varying anecdotal accounts of how the texts were chosen and much of what remains, in terms of archival material, is in the form of exam papers.…”

Wordplay, world‐play, and interdisciplinary imaginations

“…The RGS’s manual Hints to Travellers , published from 1854, featured a sub‐section on language in its “Ethnology and Statistics” section (Raper & Fitzroy, 1854, p. 358; Driver, 1998; 2001, p. 21). Linguistically sensitive geographers have catalogued geographical words in scientific discourses, mapped words about notionally natural worlds, and conducted historical geolinguistic studies (Jenkins, 1998; Jessop, 2012; Keighren, 2017b; Lorimer, 2008; Macfarlane, 2017; Powell, 2015; Withers, 1988, p. 834). They have reached a phenomenological awareness of gendered ways of seeing, methods of identifying, writing and speaking languages, and registers of speech (Maddrell, 2009; Monk & Schmidt di Friedberg, 2011).…”

“…Belying claims that “structural aspects of language influence ways of looking at the world more than do vocabularies” (Lowenthal, 1961, p. 255), John Henry Newman’s asserted that “one single word ” can serve “as a sort of text” that “affords matter for a sufficient examination of a youth in grammar, history, and geography” (Newman, 1852, pp. 256–257, original emphasis in Powell, 2015, p. 827). Geographical words thus constitute stories; their etymological temporo‐spatial journeys, and shifting meanings, are akin to historical geography.…”