Performing a new regional geography

Abstract

In this introduction to the Special Issue ‘Practising a New Regional Geography in Northland’, we call for a new regional geography. We use the experience of a field course to reflect upon the opportunities and challenges associated with doing ‘regional geography’ in the regions, a subdiscipline that has in recent decades been pushed into the backwaters of the discipline. We reinterpret the maxim ‘geography is what geographers do’ in a new way that emphasises pedagogy and research practice. The case of Northland and helping our students to learn experientially about community and environment under the rubric of sustainability allows us to argue the case for a reinterpretation of regional geography in these terms. We position the contributions in this Special Issue in terms of our call.

He Iwi Kotahi Tatou Trust: Post‐development practices in Moerewa, Northland

“…Our approach is founded on our own experiences in Moerewa and other places in Northland and our own hopeful practices – those associated with our Community and Environment field course and our efforts to enliven it with novel pedagogies (see Winder & Lewis in this issue). We bring these stories to geography in this paper as a result of our field experiences, but have also done so first hand through the experiences themselves in which we expose 80 students each year to the stories and dimensions of their lived realities.…”

Reflections on a region: New Zealand geographers and the study of Pacific peoples with special reference to the period 1945–1970

“…In this paper, I revisit some features of regional geography as it was taught and practised at the University of Auckland in the 1950s and 1960s – a ‘golden age’ for research on Pacific places and peoples by staff and graduates in the Department of Geography. Recalling Winder and Lewis's (2010, p. 98) recent case for a ‘new regional geography that will reinvigorate the discipline’, I then conclude with some observations on the prospects for a revitalised interest by New Zealand geographers in a very different Pacific region in the early 21st century.…”

“…When Winder and Lewis (2010) called for a new regional geography to re‐invigorate the discipline, they went to some lengths to distance themselves from what they termed ‘the old regional geography’ that Kenneth Cumberland had championed 60 years earlier. They argued that:…”

“…In 2011, there is no Department of Human Geography or Research School of Pacific Studies at the ANU. At the University of Auckland, geography is now one of several programmes within an interdisciplinary school of geology and environmental sciences where the place of a regional perspective in teaching and research is the subject of considerable intellectual debate (Le Heron & Lewis 2011; Winder & Lewis 2010). Indeed, Geography departments as such have largely vanished from universities in New Zealand and Australia as a result of serial restructurings by successive deans and vice‐chancellors in response to changing political and public expectations for tertiary education.…”

Creating public spaces for geography in New Zealand: Towards an assessment of the contributions of Kenneth Cumberland

“…He later claimed to have attended ‘all these field expeditions for 30 years, unless I was out of the country on leave’. It is a tradition that, reinvented for new times, has persisted at Auckland (Winder & Lewis 2010).…”