The Imprecise Wanderings of a Precise Idea: The Travels of Spatial Analysis

Barnes, Trevor J.; Abrahamsson, Carl Christian

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-44654-7_6

Cited by 16 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 28 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This is not to deny either that ideas developed in one country travel and have an effect on ideas in another. That also requires a geographical and historical contextual account of the general sort I've tried to pursue in this article and elsewhere (Barnes and Abrahamsson, 2017). 2.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The discipline that came in from the cold: American human geography becomes a Cold War social science

Barnes

2022

Environment and Planning F

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The high–Cold War period – from the Truman doctrine to the Cuban missile crisis – brought not only profound changes in geography but also profound changes to Geography. The discipline moved from a museum-like, fusty subject to aspiring to be a Cold War, cutting-edge hybrid social science (or behavioural science) ‘cross-bred’ with physical and applied sciences. The vehicle was social physics. Its origins were in the 17th century, but the actual name was not coined until 1835 and then in French, ‘Physique Sociale’, by the Belgian astronomer, statistician and social tabulator, Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874). As a project, social physics rested on the belief of monism in which the same formal explanatory scientific principles held in both natural and social worlds. In the particular case of Cold War geography, monism meant asserting that specifically Newtonian equations describing the movements of celestial bodies in the heavens could explain equally as well movements of human bodies down on earth. In American human geography, social physics was pioneered from the early 1950s by William Warntz, who collaborated early on with the Princeton astrophysicist, John Stewart, who, in turn, had previously worked with the Harvard linguist, George Zipf. Together Warntz and Stewart using home-made early computing devices and drawing on Newtonian formulations of potential cast geography as social physics, extolling its virtues as ‘macrogeography’ and on par with other disciplines that already had entered the Pantheon of Cold War social science.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The discipline that came in from the cold: American human geography becomes a Cold War social science

Barnes

2022

Environment and Planning F

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…asking, "Why are places in Africa not … there, or Asia, or Australia?" (508), and recently there have been moves to uncover alternative histories and geographies of the quantitative revolution (Barnes and Abrahamsson 2017;Ginelli 2018). As Power and Sidaway (2004, 587, 595) noted, there is value in pursuing these absences, to provide "disruptive" alternatives to the ways in which "the discipline is conventionally narrated.…”

Section: Investigating Geography's Exclusionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Based on his quantitative urban work and broader esteem, over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, Mabogunje also held visiting professorships in several places central to the quantitative revolution, such as Lund, Northwestern, and Cambridge (CV of A. L. Mabogunje 1979). Recent work has suggested that histories of the quantitative revolution should stretch further than a few institutions in the United States and United Kingdom (Barnes and Abrahamsson 2017;Ginelli 2018), and this account suggests that Nigeria, too, could be a stop-off on the flight map of quantitative disciplinary development (Taylor 1977).…”

Section: Ibadan's International Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Happens If We Start from Nigeria? Diversifying Histories of Geography

Craggs

Neate

2019

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article asks this question: What if, rather than starting from the United States or the United Kingdom in histories of geography, we start from Nigeria? Focusing on Nigerian geographers working in Nigeria's first university from 1948 to 1990 and drawing on archival evidence and new oral history interviews, this article argues that the view from Nigeria offers significant new perspectives on the history of geography. First, it highlights the intellectual contribution of Nigerian scholars, illustrating the partial and exclusionary nature of many traditional histories. Second, it illuminates the as yet unacknowledged impact of the Cold War on the discipline far beyond the United States and Soviet Union. Third, this new perspective makes it possible to consider afresh the contemporary Anglo-American hegemony of international geography, providing evidence of the consequences of this hegemony for scholars working beyond the West and revealing the less hierarchical alternatives that at some moments appeared possible. Fourth, by highlighting the shifting structures that facilitated and foreclosed opportunities for participation in the international geographical community, the article provides an original insight into the conditions of academic labor and considers the crucial question of what, for the work of constructing a more equal academic community in the future, we might learn from this earlier period.

show abstract

“…This culminated in Frontiers and models . Cambridge (and nearby Madingley) emerged as what Barnes and Abrahamsson () – drawing on Gieryn's (, , ) cultural cartographies of science – call a “truth spot”, where ideas come together and are codified and from where they enter diverse networks of influence. While curricula are a key means through which such truths are disseminated (in which fields of power and contests figure), individual agency and structures/economies of publishing form also part of the complex networks of interaction that produce geographical truth.…”

Section: School–university and “Truth Spots”mentioning

confidence: 99%

Geography textbooks, pedagogy and disciplinary traditions

Sidaway

Hall

2017

Area

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We consider Geography textbooks in the context of discussions of canonicity, disciplinary histories and genre. Our paper, an introduction to the set that follows, presents an argument about the importance of textbooks and the shifting relationship of Geography at different levels (school and university) to disciplinary history in the context of changes in the modes of publication. The papers that follow draw on material from a range of anglophone textbooks with reflections from Aotearoa/New Zealand, the UK, the USA and Singapore.canonicity, pedagogy, quantitative revolution, textbooks | INTRODUCTIONTextbooks, it has been argued, shape disciplines (Johnston, 2006). They certainly reflect disciplinary mores and fashions. Consider, for example, the influence of Geography and gender produced as a collectively authored textbook by the Women and Geography Study Group (1984) of the Institute of British Geographers. It soon became a conduit for feminist critique in Geography. A quarter of a century on, Susan Hanson observed how:As I re-read the book recently, I was struck by how the core message -pay attention to gender if you really want to understand geographic processes -still resonates. Yet in 1984, when Geography and gender first appeared, this message was revolutionary! The disciplinary norm was to ignore gender with abandon. Undoubtedly, this key text played a key role in creating some of the changes we have seen in geography over the past 20 years, e.g., the increased presence of women in academic geography, the recognition that gender thoroughly infuses geographic processes, and the now-rather-large and rapidly growing body of literature in feminist geography. (2008, p. 93) Cause and effect in disciplinary change is likely more complex than Hanson allows, yet her views on Geography and gender remind us that despite textbooks' importance to the discipline, discussions about their production and consumption are too often either relegated to footnotes in disciplinary histories or considered only when course descriptions are prepared for students. An invitation to debate textbooks that followed an exchange of views of editors and publishers in the Journal of Geography in Higher Education more than two decades ago (Davey et al., 1995) elicited few immediate responses and has accumulated only limited citations since. Likewise Mitchell and Smith's (1991) claim that introductory textbooks reified states, failing to account for their historical contingency, and thus offered succour to a renewal of western imperial warmaking has not led to much discussion, despite such war-making becoming banal.Continuing technological and political/socio-economic shifts as well as discussions on disciplinary pasts and futures mean that the publication and utilisation of textbooks in Geography merits fresh reflection. This set of papers brings together a range of textbook authors and editors, mindful of shifting mores and modes in publishing and higher education. We open with reflections on the place of textbooks in disciplinary histo...

show abstract

The Imprecise Wanderings of a Precise Idea: The Travels of Spatial Analysis

Cited by 16 publications

References 28 publications

The discipline that came in from the cold: American human geography becomes a Cold War social science

The discipline that came in from the cold: American human geography becomes a Cold War social science

What Happens If We Start from Nigeria? Diversifying Histories of Geography

Geography textbooks, pedagogy and disciplinary traditions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About