History and philosophy of geography II: Rediscovering individuals, fostering interdisciplinarity and renegotiating the ‘margins’

Ferretti, Federico

doi:10.1177/0309132520973750

Cited by 15 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…However, as well as contributing to the area studies turn in geography (Sharp, 2019), this paper also highlights the imperative to look beyond the Occidental centres of learning and rediscover 'Other Geographical Traditions' (Ferretti, 2020a(Ferretti, , 2020b; see also Radcliffe, 2017;Robinson, 2016;Roy, 2016). This requires re-tuning critical geography from treating non-western areas as 'being primarily objects of analysis, to become what Chen (2010: 216) calls a "means of transforming knowledge production"' (Sidaway et al, 2016: 780).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Geography, area studies and Chinese world-writing

Cheng

Liu

2022

Progress in Human Geography

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This paper argues for a ‘provincialised’ critical geography of area studies by tracing the spatial genealogy of three waves of Chinese world regional geography and foreign area studies. The shifting terrains have been shaped strongly by the continually reconfigured power-geometries and Chinese thinking of ‘the international’. The two coeval fields and knowledge production therein are situated in place-specific institutional contexts, which engender contingent disciplinary geographies and their enduring lack of dialogue. The contemporary regeneration of Chinese ‘world-writing’ brings its own identities and discourses, power relations and complex impacts to local-global epistemic (in)equality, which requires and rewards further critical mapping.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Geography, area studies and Chinese world-writing

Cheng

Liu

2022

Progress in Human Geography

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“…Our concern in this essay lies with this paradoxical mixture of hope and revanchist indifference (at best) or hostility (at worst) toward scholarly diversity that seems to increasingly characterize the contemporary “environment” in which long-running debates over the status and future of academic Geography play out. This creates a context in which, even as the crisis of the Anthropocene widens the scope for geographic contributions to interdisciplinary research on grand challenges, a number of reforms across the higher education sector are threatening to reduce the discipline’s scope and diversity—precisely at the moment when Geography’s diversity is more ethically and politically necessary than ever before (Ferretti, 2021; Oswin, 2019). In this short article, we seek to unpack this “environmental” condition and think through its implications for the geographic research in the 21st century.…”

Section: Introduction: Narrating Geography’s Past Present and Future ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Contextualizing narratives of Geography’s past, present, and future: Synthesis, difference, and cybernetic control

Grove

Rickards

2022

Environment and Planning F

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In this article, we seek to open up for critical debate disciplinary narratives that center the “synthesis” qualities of geographic thought. Proponents of Geography often emphasize its integrative, synthesis approach to human–environment relations to underline its value to interdisciplinary research initiatives addressing critical real-world issues such as climate change. But there are multiple styles of knowledge synthesis at work within academia and beyond, and they have contradictory ethical and epistemological effects. More specifically, synthesis is on the rise, but it is not Geography’s synthesis-as-understanding. Rather, an increasingly dominant cybernetic sociotechnical imaginary is installing a specific notion of synthesis—“synthesis-as-solution”—into universities, transforming both the production of knowledge and the institutional management and technological manifestation of that production. This cybernetic sociotechnical imaginary constrains research ethically and epistemologically to reduce knowledge to the synthesizable information flows and continuous innovation that characterize cybernetic control. In this context, non-conforming research—that is, research that disrupts or disdains such smooth synthesis—risks being labeled unprofessional, unimportant, and obsolescent and marginalized institutionally. Geographic disciplinary narratives that unreflexively celebrate synthesis thus risk producing a paradoxical future for Geography, one in which more space for different modes of knowledge production is created, but the type of difference recognized and affirmed is severely constrained. There is a pressing need for geographers to pay more attention to the practices and contexts in which we create disciplinary narratives because, like the content of our knowledge production, they can either challenge or reinforce a cybernetic sociotechnical imaginary.

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“…An attempt to correct this state, that is to overcome its thematic and spatial exclusiveness, can be marked as one of the significant features of the present study of the history of geography (Ferretti, 2019a(Ferretti, , 2019b(Ferretti, , 2021bKeighren, 2018). The study of the geographical traditions of the Global South is emphasised mostly in this context (see e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How should we do the history of geographies during the period of state socialism? Historical period, space and expert knowledge in the post-war Czechoslovakia

Daniel

2022

Moravian Geographical Reports

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A critical reflection on the current state of research into the history of the production of geographical knowledge during the period of state socialism is presented in this report. Using the example of the Czechoslovak administrative reform from 1949, several questionable aspects of current interpretations are identified. In particular, the problematic use of three crucial concepts in the study of the history of geography: time (a politics of memory); space (spatial imaginations); and geographical knowledge. Examples of approaches to each concept are presented, which can overcome the insufficiencies and contribute to a better understanding of the mutual relations between state socialism and the production of geographical knowledge. Research into the history of geography during the period of state socialism is important both to understand the current state of ‘post-socialist’ national geographies, and to add to the production of an inclusive history of global geography. One necessary condition is, however, to leave the current descriptive and encyclopaedic styles, which are marked with ahistoricism and presentism. In contrast, it is essential that the history of geography during the period of the state socialism become a serious issue, which is analysed through critical and reflexive approaches.

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History and philosophy of geography II: Rediscovering individuals, fostering interdisciplinarity and renegotiating the ‘margins’

Cited by 15 publications

References 51 publications

Geography, area studies and Chinese world-writing

Geography, area studies and Chinese world-writing

Contextualizing narratives of Geography’s past, present, and future: Synthesis, difference, and cybernetic control

How should we do the history of geographies during the period of state socialism? Historical period, space and expert knowledge in the post-war Czechoslovakia

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