Moving beyond Anglo-American economic geography

Abstract

Over the last fifteen years, we have been observing an increasing fragmentation of economic geography, concerning both schools of thought, perspectives, paradigms, themes and the educational background of researchers. The poly-vocal character of economic geography includes a variety of language areas, a phenomenon so far unknown to a large part of Anglo-American economic geographers. Particularly in the literature about theories, perspectives and paradigms, the non-English speaking world is largely ignored as a basis for debate. Even worse, leading scholars in the field increasingly use the term Anglo-American economic geography to refer to the whole field, although they describe trends and theories in both general and authoritative terms. The aim of this paper is to move beyond Anglo-American economic geography by introducing and reviewing economic geography literature in some other main languages, namely Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese. The purpose of doing so is not merely to show that there is more than Anglo-American economic geography, but also to derive from these non-English voices insights in how to move to an integrative paradigm of a truly international economic geography.

De‐Centering in Practice: Governance through Co‐ordination in Spanish Economic Geography

“…My perspective is that of an insider who has engaged in English‐driven research and published with German and Norwegian colleagues since 2008. Despite Hassink et al’s (2019) claim for Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish publications to be read to develop a truly international EG, Table 1 shows that de‐centering has not reached Spain yet. Hereby, I argue that a small but dynamic network of Spanish economic geographers has developed a research agenda that dialogues with the Anglo‐American core.…”

“…What is the balance between theory and empirics, and between English and home languages, and why? To my knowledge, mainstream attempts to discuss these issues come from powerful academic environments such as the Anglosphere (Rosenman et al, 2020) or the German‐sphere (Hassink et al, 2019; Schurr et al, 2020), which has become rather influential after Bathelt and Glückler’s (2003) proposal about relational EG.…”

“…Before concluding, I need to complain about a truly colonialist and irritating mistake that undermines our participation in the Anglosphere. Even Hassink et al (2019), allegedly sensitive to our academic community, fail to quote Spanish names properly. Many Spanish people bear two given names, and all of us have two surnames, one from each parent.…”

Through troubled times: reflections on Ron Johnston’s Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Human Geography since 1945 (1979) and Peter Taylor’s Political Geography: World Economy, Nation-State and Locality (1985)

“…As Fiona McConnell wonders, how you can bring the margins centre stage in a geographical textbook, especially if the desired end-result is a coherent whole ready for undergraduate teaching? One promising outcome from the debate is a re-engagement with a more multilingual approach to geographical praxis (Ferretti 2019;Hassink et al 2019) where a textbook embraces being various and incorrigibly plural (Barnes 2019). There might be value in rediscovering the distinctive merits once theorized in Dutch-language political geography that became backgrounded by the dominance of Political Geography as Virginie Mamadouh recalls.…”

Where’s Europe?

“…The European arena is largely absent from Johnston's history of post-war human geography, which is presented as an essentially Anglo-American and Anglophone intellectual project, albeit emerging from an earlier European tradition. The implications of this Anglo-American framing have been re-assessed in recent years by Johnston, Sidaway and others, notably in connection with the role of language in modern geographical inquiry, to consider whether an Anglo-American perspective is an acceptance of an intellectual reality or a statement of prejudice (Berg and Kearns 1998;Hassink et al 2019;Minca 2000;Johnston and Sidaway 2004;Rodríguez-Pose 2006;Samers and Sidaway 2000). Despite these nuances, Johnston's now hegemonic account of post-war human geography, when juxtaposed with equally influential histories of earlier periods in this discipline's past, has constructed a widely accepted narrative arc in which geography is considered in European terms prior to 1945 and as an Anglo-American story thereafter (see Stoddart M. Heffernan (&) School of Geography, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK e-mail: mike.heffernan@nottingham.ac.uk 1982, 1986Livingstone 1992).…”