Whose biography; whose history? A response to Driver and Baigent

Becoming a geographical scientist: oral histories of Arctic fieldwork

“…Driver and Baigent argue that it ‘is equally important to tell the life stories of the apparently more conventional and indeed low‐profile men and women who contributed’ (2007, 102) 6 . Johnston defends himself against the charge of neglecting those who may also have contributed to geographical knowledge, such as surveyors and explorers, arguing that instead his ‘concern was the biography of the academic discipline , as illuminated by the ODNB biographies of academic geographers’ (Johnston 2007c, 108, original emphases). For geographical biographies, these politics of selection reveal many assumptions about disciplinary boundaries.…”

Knowing our own history? Geography department archives in the UK

“…At the same time, revitalised attention to biographical scholarship in geography's intellectual history has moved away from ‘Great Men’ narratives and paradigmatic tales of unproblematic lineal descent in the subject's traditions. The effect has been to raise different questions about the relationship between individuals’ accounts and institutional histories, about who exactly may be cited as a geographer – and, if a geographer, a ‘key thinker’– and, thus, about the nature of the geographical community and the histories of it within and beyond formal institutions of geographical teaching and research (Baigent 2004; Boyle 2005; Daniels and Nash 2004; Driver and Baigent 2007; Johnston 2005 2007).…”

New Zealand geography, biography and autobiography

“…As well as his university teaching and research commitments, Cumberland was involved with preparation of textbooks that employed a quite rigorous regional model and as Pawson's paper in this issue also highlights, he had an extraordinarily successful engagement with the development of soil conservation programmes in the 1940s and in the 1950s in the Auckland scene in terms of regional planning and environmental management. Cumberland, in the New Zealand setting, sits comfortably with Johnston's (2007) views on who was a geographer and what was geography. Pawson shows how Cumberland while having a quite precisely defined perspective on the nature of geography, also developed a very expansive view about the value of geographical knowledge with regards to land use, urban planning and environmental management.…”

“…Withers has examined memory and the history of geographical knowledge and although his example of Mungo Park is far removed from New Zealand it is pertinent, when it to comes to considering why some comparable geographical careers are recognised in society publications and retained in institutional memory while others are not (Withers 2004). The papers in this special issue are framed by Peet's reminder that, ‘biography has to be investigative, it has to be deeply appreciative, it has to contextualise the haphazard, and to disturb the structured with the mistakes and accidents that really make things happen’ (Peet 2005, 165) and by the exchange between Driver and Baigent (2007) and Johnston (2007) over who is counted as a geographer in the British Online Dictionary of National Biography and what constitutes geography. Johnston opts for the narrower professionally qualified university staff member, Driver and Baigent are open to a broader interpretation.…”