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Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American

Human Geography since 1945, 7th Edition

Mark Boyle, Kim England, Matthew Farish, Guy Baeten, Mary Gilmartin,

Michael S. DeVivo, Lauren Rickards, Ron Johnston & James D. Sidaway

To cite this article: Mark Boyle, Kim England, Matthew Farish, Guy Baeten, Mary Gilmartin,

Michael S. DeVivo, Lauren Rickards, Ron Johnston & James D. Sidaway (2017) Geography and

Geographers: Anglo-American Human Geography since 1945, 7th Edition, The AAG Review of

Books, 5:1, 48-61, DOI: 10.1080/2325548X.2017.1257291

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2017.1257291

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The AAG Review OF BOOKS

The AAG Review of Books 5(1) 2017, pp. 48–61. doi: 10.1080/2325548X.2017.1257291.

©2017 by American Association of Geographers. Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.

BOOK REVIEW FORUM

The AAG Review OF BOOKS

Geography and Geographers:

Anglo-American Human

Geography since 1945,

7th edition

Ron Johnston and James D.

Sidaway. London and New York:

Routledge, 2016. xxii and 544

pp., figures, index. $64.95 paper

(ISBN 9780340985106); $165.00

cloth (ISBN 9780415827379).

Introduction by Mark Boyle,

Department of Geography/

National Institute for Regional

and Spatial Analysis (NIRSA),

Maynooth University, Maynooth,

Ireland.

Spring 2016 saw the publication by

Routledge of the seventh edition of

the classic book Geography and Geographers: Anglo-

American Human Geography since 1945 by Ron John -

ston and James D. Sidaway. Since publication of the

first edition by Edward Arnold in 1979 (Sidaway joined

as co-author in 2004), this book has proven itself to

be an invaluable companion—and in many cases a

critical life support—to undergraduate, master's, and

PhD-level modules on the history and philosophy of

Anglo-American human geography, throughout the

Anglo-American world and beyond. It is a book that

has commanded not only widespread admiration and

recognition as a seminal source, but also the affec-

tion and loyalty of generations of faculty and students.

I would argue that it has done more than any other

textbook to awaken and catalyze interest in the his-

tory of human geography as a distinct intellectual

enterprise.

How does a book galvanize an acclaim-

ing readership and survive to reach a

seventh edition? We might turn the

analytical framework developed in Ge-

ography and Geographers back against

itself to help us to answer this ques -

tion. The book is structured around an

analytical, interpretive, and framing

"outer part" and a broadly chronologi-

cal "inner part" marching through the

substantive twists and turns taken by

human geography in the Anglo-Amer-

ican world, principally since 1945.

At the heart of the outer book is the

claim that disciplinary trajectories are

shaped by three interacting processes:

the prevailing occupational structure,

the organizational framework that

guides research, and the external environment. If this

framework helps us to make sense of the waxing and

waning of philosophical approaches in human geography,

then perhaps it might also help us to understand better

how this specific book has managed to gain traction, pros-

per, and remain relevant over a nearly forty-year period.

In terms of occupational structure, it is no accident that

Geography and Geographers ascended to the status of a

classic as a complex set of relationships intensified be-

tween the expansion of the higher education sector in

the Anglo-American world and subsequent onset of man -

agerial and neoliberal reforms, generational and intergen -

erational competition for advancement in the academy,

historically unprecedented and accelerated rates of turn-

over of human geographical "isms," and growing interest

in philosophical approaches within human geography.

WINTER 2017 49

Put bluntly, competition for the attention of peers has in

part fueled new turns within the discipline and change

and volatility has begotten a need for textbooks capable

of narrating unfolding events and rendering them intel-

ligible. First published in the wake of Kuhn's (1962) The

Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Foucault's (1970) The

Order of Things, Feyerabend's (1975) Against Method, and

only a year after Lakatos's (1978) The Methodology of Sci-

entific Research Programmes, perhaps the key attribute of

the book was that it brought the story of human geog-

raphy's recent history into sustained conversation with

a wider research program, one centered on the legibility

of the biographies of academic subjects; how they evolve,

mutate, and expand or atrophy over time. It was written

at a historical moment when the Anglo-American world

was coming to terms with the demise of the Fordist-

Keynesian panacea and after the Age of Empire and a

West suf fering exi st en tial cr is es, th ra sh in g to s us ta in h e-

gemony, and a capitalist modernity debilitated by perni-

cious maladies and neuroses. It is not difficult to locate the

book in world historical context and to appreciate how its

foregrounding of contested visions of the core mission of

Anglo-American human geography might resonate with

the wider zeitgeist.

Geography and Geographers now finds itself in the com -

pany of many excellent historiographical accounts. There

has emerged a whole slew of both complementary and

rival resources, textbooks, dictionaries, encyclopedias,

national historiographies, "Geographers on Film" ar-

chives, and key thinkers and biobibliographical studies.

On inspection, there would seem to be much imitation

amidst the newness. The unfolding in sequence of human

geography through various schools of thought—envi-

ronmental determinism, possibilism, cultural geography,

regional geography, spatial science and the quantitative

revolution, behavioral and then humanistic approaches,

Marxist and then critical approaches, culminating in the

preeminence of feminist, poststructural, postmodern, and

postcolonial approaches and pluralism in the present—

seems to be constantly reworked in different guises.

Theorization of scientific endeavor and intellectual la-

bor has itself developed at an electric pace over the past

number of decades and some of these competitors have

perhaps made better use of, say Latour's actor network

theory, Kaufmann's complexity theory, and Haraway's

feminist treatise on situated knowledges than Geography

and Geographers, which has continued to place center

stage Kuhn's paradigm theory. This said, in their response

later, Johnston and Sidaway provide a compelling ac -

count of why the Kuhnian framing was and continues to

be of fundamental importance and value—for a myriad of

historical, intellectual, and political reasons. Some con-

tributions perhaps also take more seriously the data revo-

lution that is upon us and the claim that we dwell on the

eve of a postparadigmatic world centered on a data-driven

epistemology. For the most part, though, for reasons of

competence and manageability, attention across the

board has continued to be limited to Anglo-American

human geography. The task of provincializing, historiciz-

ing, and relativizing metropolitan ways of thinking about

the world and narrating historiographies of non-Western

human geographies remains firmly on the nursery slopes.

Amidst the growing chorus of voices, Geography and Ge-

ographers has proven itself an especially tough and endur-

ing competitor. In addition to benefiting from first mover

advantage, it has achieved resilience by engaging effec -

tively with both continuity and change. The model of the

outer and inner parts has remained consistent over time,

and much of the content in each part has survived intact.

In each part, in an attempt to provide comprehensive

updating and referencing, there has accreted further lay-

ering, qualifying, texturing, and nuancing of arguments.

The authors note the challenge of navigating between "a

fine grained road map" and a "crammed and wearisome

Atlas." Although for the most part they find the correct

balance, in places the seventh edition might have ben-

efited from some simplification and decluttering alongside

enrichment and supplementation. The inner part of the

book was subject to significant structural change in the

sixth edition: the discussion of behavioral geography was

curtailed and a previous chapter on the "cultural turn"

was broken into two longer chapters examining poststruc-

turalism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and feminism

and this part witnesses comparatively less surgery in the

seventh edition. In this latest edition, though, the outer

part and in particular the final chapter has been reworked

and extended to reflect more comprehensively on, among

other matters, the complex ways in which the history of

human geography might be apprehended, the import of

new theories of science and knowledge production, what

it might mean to speak of progress in human geography,

and the implications of the 2007 crash for the human

geographical enterprise.

Based on an Authors Meet Critics panel convened at

the American Association of Geographers (AAG) An-

nual Meeting in San Francisco in March 2016, this AAG

Review Forum incorporates six commentaries (by Kim

England, Matthew Farish, Guy Baeten, Mary Gilmartin,

Michael S. DeVivo, and Lauren Rickards), and a response

from the authors. On the occasion of the publication of

this latest edition, collectively these commentaries help

us to celebrate the contributions of the book and its long

50 THE AAG REVIEW OF BOOKS

service to the discipline. More than this, they underscore

the book's ongoing significance as a vital and lively prov-

ocation in what, as noted, has become an increasingly

crowded marketplace, and its continued standing as a

recommended textbook and for many still the preferred

book of choice. The commentaries touch on a number

of topics: the extent, meaning, and implications of the

formative influence of Geography and Geographers over

faculty and students; the organizing narrative that guides

the book; its development through the years and changes

and additions made in this seventh edition; specific chap-

ters and sections that have inspired and provoked faculty;

the by now well-rehearsed but still crucial question of its

focus on Anglo-American scholarship; the silences no-

table for some communities; its ongoing role as a widely

recommended student textbook; maximizing its pedagog-

ical value; and its relationship to other historiographical

accounts and texts.

It is to be hoped that this forum will whet the appetite

and rejuvenate the enthusiasm of those for whom Geog-

raphy and Geographers is a trusted old companion as well

as introduce to students who are embarking on history

of human geography modules today a reliable and sage

counsel. Of course, the commentaries provide early food

for thought for the authors, to be drawn on when they

contemplate the possibility of an eighth edition! It re-

mains for me to thank Kent Mathewson for commission -

ing the forum, Andrew Mould from Taylor and Francis

for providing access to an advance copy, commentators

for their insightful deliberations and ruminations, and of

course the authors, for the gift that is the seventh edition

of Geography and Geographers.

Commentary by Kim England, Department

of Geography, University of Washington,

Seattle, WA.

Reading the seventh edition of Geography and Geographers

almost felt like reading my academic biography: recogniz-

ing the familiar names half forgotten, remembering gen -

erations of geographers' intellectual disagreements, and

nodding with approval on seeing sections on feminist ge-

ography and queering geography. I know the earliest edi-

tions of this book very well. The first edition (1979) was

assigned reading for the history and philosophy of geogra-

phy course when I was an undergraduate at the University

of Leicester. I still went to the library to borrow well-worn

copies of original sources on a one-hour loan, but having

Geography and Geographers was a godsend. It allowed me

to navigate fascinating but confusing intellectual terrain

and to make sense of human geography. Indeed, it helped

cement my identity as a geographer.

The general format of the seventh edition is comfortingly

familiar. It remains a book within a book, although this

time the story narrated in the "outer book" (Chapters 1

and 10) is more nuanced than in the earliest editions.

The book still offers an introspective exploration of ge-

ography as a discipline and an occupation—"the society

within a society" with the academic division of labor,

the brutalizing experience of the RAE (research assess-

ment experience), and the scramble for ever scarcer re -

search funding. The newest version of the final chapter is

(thankfully) more reflexive and more tentative than ear-

lier editions, perhaps benefiting from feminist and post-

structural insistences that knowledge creation is partial,

situated, and power-laden. I also appreciate the acknowl-

edgment that intellectual activities are shaped by the

historical circumstances, normative expectations, and

cultural beliefs of the time and place in which they are

created. It is certainly fantastic to see science and tech-

nology studies (STS) and actor network theory (ANT)

scholars like John Law and Bruno Latour invited to the

party. Still missing, though, are feminist science studies

scholars, like Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, and Judy

Wajcman, among others. Whereas these nongeographers

do not get past the door, Thomas Kuhn still retains his

VIP status, stepping past them to claim, again, the prize

for most appearances by a nongeographer.

The "inner book"— Chapters 2 to 9—charts a range of

human geographies: their negotiated concepts, conflicting

opinions, shared understandings, and sometimes interne-

cine squabbles. In keeping with the academic biography

meme, I comment on Chapter 3, "Growth of Systematic

Studies and the Adoption of the Scientific Method," and

the "Feminist Geography" chapter. This pair also repre -

sents one of the long-standing chapters and one of the

newer ones. In both these chapters I feel I am among

friends. In Chapter 3 are found scholars whose work has

literally been with me since I was in high school: Walter

Christaller and August Lösch, Richard Chorley and Peter

Haggett. I learned about central place theory, locational

analysis, and systems theory at an early age. Johnson and

Sidaway remark that "the role of certain individuals and

institutions in the promotion of change was . . . crucial"

(p. 76) and a goodly chunk of the chapter covers the

Washington School (my current department). Although

Ohio State (where I did graduate work) does not rise to

the level of its own subtitle, it is there, too. Still in the

mix is the debate over regional geography and exception-

alism: I felt a little schadenfreude (surely I am not alone?)

WINTER 2017 51

when reading again of Richard Hartshorne's years of ac-

cusing the dead Fred K. Schaefer of "serious falsification,"

"ignor(ing) the normal standards of critical scholarship,"

and "total fraud" (p. 612). I marveled once more at the

tremendous work of William Garrison, Donald Hudson,

and Edward Ullman to create the Washington School (I

have daily reminders of them, as rooms and awards in my

department are named for them). I enjoyed the reminder

about the various individual people who successfully

promoted the scientific method such that in the 1960s

geography was recognized by the National Academy of

Science–National Research Council. So it was with some

surprise that the same close treatment of "certain indi-

viduals" was not afforded Christaller and Lösch. These

men have been part of my intellectual life since I was

in high school. Discovering much later that Christaller

was a Nazi collaborator and created a Volk sd eut sche -only

plan for West Poland was shocking for me. Learning that

Lösch had resisted the Nazis, refused to swear allegiance

to Hitler, and died at thirty-nine literally at the end of

World War II, was heart-breaking. How could I not have

known this? The Geography and Geographers reader does

not get to know that either; the rendition is so much more

innocent with the briefest of mentions (p. 74).

As a graduate student at Ohio State, I took yet another

class on the history and philosophy of geography: The sec-

ond edition (1983) was required reading. By then I was a

fledgling feminist geographer. This time I was aware of

the "oversight" of the exhilarating (and, for me, forma -

tive) writings marking the emergence of feminist geogra-

phy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Certainly this was

a small but growing literature, yet it was absent from the

first two editions of Geography and Geographers (Doreen

Massey and Wilbur Zelinsky were mentioned, but not

for their work on feminist geography), reinforcing for me

the apparent invisibility of both feminist geography and

even of women as geographers. Now enjoying an entire

chapter, the seventh edition offers a serviceable overview

of feminist geography, including some of its history and

debates, and the contributions of feminist methodologies.

Of course, this is a seventh effort to synthesis the notes,

chords, and keys of "Anglo-American Human Geography

since 1945." Six previous editions have provided an epic

amount of feedback, reviews, criticism, and praise, and

thus plenty of opportunities to fine-tune and update. The

newer chapters have had less of that. What I really enjoy

about the earlier chapters in the seventh edition is that

they are richly referenced. By comparison, the "Feminist

Geography" chapter is heavily reliant on other people's

interpretations of the published record (e.g., dictionary

and encyclopedia entries), which is disappointing. Also

the "Sexuality and Space" and "Queering Geography"

sections seem tacked on. It is not that they should not be

there, but following a section on "Feminist Geographies

of Difference," I wondered why feminist scholarship of

other social categories was not here, too. Of course, it is

impossible to be an expert on everything, but where, for

instance, is the fantastic work on black feminist geogra-

phies and geographies of blackness (e.g., the 2007 collec-

tion edited by Katharine McKittrick and Clyde Woods)?

More generally, I hoped for a more robust engagement

with intersectionality—given that many geographers,

feminist and otherwise, are working hard to seriously

engage intersectionality in their research, teaching, and

daily practices.

In the preface we read that the book is "just two author's

take on 70 years of disciplinary histories: others take dif -

ferent positions" (p. xvii). Certainly this is a historiogra -

phy of Anglo-American geography since 1945. As such, it

is neither neutral nor complete, not all geographies and

geographers are included, and particular viewpoints are

privileged more than others. Geographer and Geographers

in its various editions has been a textual companion over

the course of my career as an Anglo-American human ge-

ographer: To critique it feels slightly churlish. The authors

do rehearse their own self-critiques about whether "a fur-

ther edition was both desirable and feasible" (p. xvii).

Their decision to go ahead has allowed me to enjoy being

reacquainted with an old "friend" and seeing how it, like

me, has changed over the years.

Commentary by Matthew Farish, Department of

Geography and Planning, University of Toronto,

Toro nt o, O N, C an ada.

What has a book become by the time of its seventh edi -

tion? According to two of the familiar names on the back

cover (scholars who themselves have figured prominently

in the telling of geography's histories), Ron Johnston and

James D. Sidaway's Geography and Geographers is a "super-

lative piece of intellectual cartography" and "a comfort-

ing and reassuring presence." As I considered how I might

grapple with this long and rather fortified volume—in

that it circles back to quote and subtly reframe earlier edi -

tions, and even reviews of earlier editions—I kept mulling

over these compliments. Not because they contain some

secret profundity, but because, read directly, they offer

windows onto what this book represents—or, to put it dif -

ferently, what it does, and what it does not, accomplish.

52 THE AAG REVIEW OF BOOKS

As a "working map of the territory," to quote the first of the

back cover commentators, David Livingstone, again, Geog-

raphy and Geographers is nothing if not thorough. Building

on previous editions, Johnston and Sidaway have trawled

exhaustively through the history of English-language geo-

graphical publication over the last seven decades. I occa-

sionally teach the history and philosophy of geography, and

I have written about the history of geographical knowledge

after World War II, and I still found sources in the bibliog-

raphy that I did not recognize (this is not to say, of course,

that the list is "complete," whatever that means).

What is the "territory" in question? The answer, for John -

ston and Sidaway, is staked out in the first chapter, titled

"The Nature of an Academic Discipline." Presumably

this intervention is directed at student readers who are

puzzled by both geography's outlines and the institutional

oddities of universities. There is utility in this approach,

but for all of their concern with intellectual pluralism,

and their repeated demand that "The study of a discipline

must be set within its societal context," it is a discipline,

or a particular model of a discipline, that emerges intact

from this chapter, such that what follows is a particular

version of geography (p. 27). The many "social" threads

introduced in the waning pages of the first chapter seem a

little frayed in subsequent sections of the book.

It is telling, perhaps, that the relevant heading here is

"The External Environment," which does not quite sound

the same as setting something "within its social context"

(p. 26). Rather, the internal–external separation is one

of two such divisions that are not just acknowledged or

analyzed in Geography and Geographers; they are affirmed.

A discipline, we read on the first page, is akin to a "min-

iature society" (p. 1). This move to place geography under

glass (even if it is pocked with holes) is consequential.

To ca l l Geography and Geographers a story told "from

within" (to poach once more from the back cover) there -

fore seems imprecise: It seems more like a story told from

without, that creates a "within." Its "map of the territory"

is littered with individuals, mostly dressed in the costume

of their respective intellectual cohort, and located firmly

within strange places called university departments (ge-

ography, then, is largely what academic geographers have

written). Beyond that, the detail is erratic. Even at the

departmental scale, the emphasis is clearly on English

and U.S. contexts, whereas other sites within the "Anglo-

Academic" sphere appear occasionally, only to fade away

for substantial stretches.

And that "wider society," that "external environment?"

This is not a text where readers learn a great deal about

the historical geographies of "Anglo-American" states af -

ter World War II, even as these states were the terrain for

much of the research conducted by the geographers who

populate this book. The places of and for geographical

research are missing, or only briefly noted. Is it significant,

to take a single example, that there are no references to

the prominent historical scholarship of University of Brit -

ish Columbia's Cole Harris, after his more philosophical

interventions in the 1970s. If this work is not part of the

history of geographical thought, so be it, but the "why"

question lingers.

Worldliness is, of course, present in this book. It slides in

more and more as we proceed toward the present. In the

early chapters, its relative absence matches the abstrac-

tions of midcentury "spatial science" and its predecessors.

Of course, this relationship is not inevitable; worldli-

ness can only come and go as a narrative device. This

is the trap of the disciplinary model (and even more so

the single-discipline model), a bind that raises the crucial

double question of other geographies and other geogra-

phers: not just, "why aren't they here?" but "what are the

consequences of excluding them?"

Geography and Geographers, according to Trevor Barnes,

is to be counted on; it is a "comforting and reassuring

presence." Staying with our cartographic metaphor, John-

ston and Sidaway have produced an indisputably valuable

guide through thickets of debate—debate, they usefully

show, that loops as much as it leaps. But should texts—

even this sort of text—be comforting? Are there enough

jolts, diversions, and intersections on the pathway, or is

the route rather relentlessly signposted? After seven edi -

tions, is it ever harder to see the map differently, even as

it grows? Is the book ultimately "comforting" because it

reaffirms our belief in a distinct entity called academic

geography? Is that sufficient, or necessary, for a history of

geographic thought?

The second key division in Geography and Geographers,

then, is really a variation of the first: the division between

"academic" and "popular" geography. A quote from an-

other piece by Johnston (2009), on the discrepancy in

content between geographic magazines and academic ge -

ography, is used to make this point. I'm not convinced,

though, that the comparison is effective. Surely it would

also hold in the case of many other disciplines; it might

be even stronger, because few subjects possess the equiv-

alents of popular geographic magazines. When we look

elsewhere, the division breaks down. Yet despite John-

ston's comments on the unfortunate ignorance, on the

part of geography's historians, of other, popular geogra-

phies, Johnston and Sidaway immediately turn back to

WINTER 2017 53

the discipline. If there is to be an eighth edition—and

why not, eventually—I encourage the authors to provide

a less comforting and more surprising take.

Commentary by Guy Baeten, Department of

Urban Studies, Malmö University, Malmö,

Sweden.

I was delighted when asked to review Geography and Ge-

ographers: Anglo-American Geography since 1945 because

it is one of those books that I had always planned to read

but never did. It is a classic tome that helps teachers just

as much to refresh our knowledge of the history of geogra -

phy as it would help students on their way to getting some

grip on the meaning and the content of the discipline of

geography. As a document that covers the history of a

discipline, it is plainly invaluable.

After working for ten years within Anglo-America, and

at a geography department, I left Anglo-America and

now find myself in its nearest periphery, in Sweden. I also

"left" the discipline of geography for an urban studies

department, which belongs to geography's nearest disci-

plinary periphery. Where I am now, discipline is a bit of a

dirty word. Malmö University, including my new depart-

ment, prides itself on being multidisciplinary. I find my-

self working among architects, environmental scientists,

organization theorists, political scientists, and indeed

geographers. Multidisciplinarity constitutes the core of

the identity of Malmö University—it is a new university

in the shadow of that old university next door with that

historically famous geography department and still pretty

much organized along disciplinary lines, Lund University.

To be honest, I have not noticed much difference because,

as the book stresses over and over again, the discipline of

geography—if it is a discipline at all—generously imports

knowledge and trends and philosophers from the outside,

probably more than any other discipline. Multidiscipli-

narity and theoretical and methodological eclecticism

are constitutive of what human geographers do. So my

first concern or comment when reading through this vol -

ume is this: Is there a need to construct ourselves as some

kind of discipline with some kind of common history if

we have always had an exceptionally relaxed attitude

toward disciplinarity? Is this loose disciplinarity not a

strength rather than a weakness of what geography is and

what geographers do? I, for one, with a bachelor's degree

in sociology—which is characterized by a well-known

strict disciplinary tradition—have always appreciated the

lack of disciplinarity in geography as it allows renewal of

ideas to unfold with a certain magnitude and speed that I

have not encountered elsewhere. Certainly in times when

disciplines are more difficult to sell than generic topics

such as urban studies, for example, do we want to give our

students a textbook like this? It is not difficult for faculty

to show an interest in what their fellow geographers were

doing in the recent past, but what do we expect students

to know about the history of geography? It is, of course,

important that students know about the history of the

discipline if only to learn from mistakes and understand

the noir side of geography. Today's revival of environmen -

tal determinism is unfolding in front of our eyes as if no-

body knows about the history of geography, and we need

to remember geography's historical knowledge production

that has been instrumental in the conduct of war, colo-

nialism, and violence. Geography is arguably the prime

discipline to understand global environmental issues, and

to understand today's raging geopolitical violence, and is

therefore needed more than ever before.

How do we sell the need to understand geography's his-

tory to understand today's challenges to students? All

of us who have been or are teaching the history of ge-

ography, including myself, know it is difficult to trigger

enthusiasm for things historical among students. Simply

speaking, in a book that is about history, the link be-

tween past and present is not prominent enough in my

view. We have to spoon-feed our students more and better

with the relevance of history to conduct geography today

and to make sense of the world today without making the

mistakes of the past, or without repeating what we already

know. If we do not make it sufficiently clear how we can

understand the present through the past (which might be

obvious for ourselves), students might be left wondering

why they need to know what's in the book. Hoping that

students will go and discover themselves how they can

connect past to present might be too optimistic.

Another point I would like to raise concerns the subtitle

and its relation to the main title. If someone were to write

a book titled Geography and Geographers: Swedish Geog-

raphy since 1945, eyebrows would be raised because of the

contradictory combination of generality and universalism

in the main title and geographical narrowness in the sub-

title. It is almost as if only Anglo-America seems to get

away with that: claiming universalism through a very par-

ticular history. I had never given it much thought when I

was working in Britain, or more precisely in the south of

England. My academic interests, my social and environ-

mental concerns (rising from reading the London-biased

The Guardian), and the political debates of the day around

me coincided more or less with the debates I would find in

54 THE AAG REVIEW OF BOOKS

academic geography journals. There seemed to be no ob-

vious disconnection between the real world and what the

discipline of geography was actually doing. Already when

I moved to Glasgow, though, this relation was no longer

evident. Debates were different, there were other concerns

in those days and at that place related to independence

and depopulation, among other issues The Guardian only

reported about in a piecemeal way. The connection be-

tween mainstream geography and the real world exactly

around me became less obvious. This certainly became

the case when I moved to Sweden (even though Sweden

belongs to the nearest periphery of Anglo-America). I am

becoming increasingly frustrated by the agenda-setting of

Anglo-American geography in journals, while claiming

some sort of universalism. In my opinion, this book, too,

should have more carefully thought through the relation

between Anglo-American geographical knowledge pro-

duction and its periphery.

Having said that, I strongly believe there is no better

documentation of the (geographically specific) history of

a discipline. For me, it functions as an indispensable, con -

cise encyclopedia of a discipline I have worked in most of

my life, and I always have it close at hand.

Commentary by Mary Gilmartin, Department

of Geography, Maynooth University, Maynooth,

County Kildare, Ireland.

Geography and Geographers is a creation myth: a story

about this thing we name geography. The idea of this book

being called a creation myth might not sit well with its

authors, but if we think about the form and the purpose

of a creation myth—that it is a story that tries to explain

where we are and why—my claim makes more sense. Ge-

ography and Geographers is a story and, as King (2003) said,

"the truth about stories is that that's all we are" (2).

If we are stories, then what does Geography and Geogra-

phers tell us? I want to focus on just one aspect of the book:

the figure of the geographer. The geographer is central to

this story: Early on, the book suggests that untangling in -

dividual and collective biographies "is the key to under-

standing" geography (p. 14). The book uses two key tropes

to tell the story of the geographer. The first is the geogra-

pher as worker. The second is the geographer as fighter.

I conclude by suggesting other key tropes that are either

striking in their absence or that offer alternative stories.

In this book, the geographer is primarily a worker. The

book is framed to tell this story. Its opening chapter is

on the academy as a place of work. Its first visual repre-

sentation, Figure 1.1, is the academic career ladder: the

modernization fantasy of work in the modern academy

that doesn't include the reality of postdocs, adjuncts, or

contract workers. Throughout, one particular version of

the geographer as worker is prioritized. This is through

the production of written work, in a limited number of

forms—primarily books and articles—that is assumed

to advance knowledge. We pay attention to books and

to other written texts, King (2003) said, because they

are "quantifiable" (97). The geographer works not just

through the production of written academic texts, how -

ever. All kinds of work go into these final, polished prod-

ucts: the messy, frustrating work of research and writing

and collaborating with others. The work of geographers

also involves teaching, a notable absence from this book.

These experiences are missing from this particular cre -

ation myth.

In this story of geography, the geographer is also a fighter.

In this book, the geographer fights against stories he or

she disagrees with, and for stories that make more sense.

Chapter 5, for example, describes how humanistic geogra-

phers argued, rebuffed, were vocal in opposition, reacted

against, were unhappy, and complained (pp. 169–70).

Chapter 6, on radical geography, describes attacks, viru-

lent debates, polarized exchanges, and forceful arguments

(pp. 227–29, 238). We read about the "early militancy" of

feminist geography (p. 287) and the "rants" of feminist

geographers (p. 303). This particular way of telling the

story of geographers, where new and original work and

insights emerge following, or as a result of, contestation,

constructs the geographer as fighter. Yet, as writers from

the Great Lakes Feminist Collective pointed out in their

manifesto for slow scholarship, "we can recognize the

value of collective authorship, mentorship, collaboration,

community building, and activist work in the germina-

tion and sharing of ideas" (Mountz et al. 2015, 1250). A

creation myth that foregrounds the geographer as fighter

misses the presence and the pleasure of collaboration.

What we don't have in this book, though, is a sense of

the geographer as lover, in the broadest sense of the term.

A passion for ideas, knowledge, research, teaching, or for

changing the world we live in is not really part of this cre-

ation story. Although the book refers to communities of

scholars, it is often deeply uneasy about the interpersonal

relationships that underpin them. Indeed, it asserts that

important encounters for the development of geographers

"need not be interpersonal" (p. 361); that networks must

include "inanimate objects" (p. 364); and that context

"need not always be important" (p. 364). In fact, the book

WINTER 2017 55

insists on the importance of the contributions made by

"lone scholars" who "work almost entirely independently"

(p. 364). Care work—very often an act of love—is miss-

ing here, perpetuating "the myth that our successes are

achieved as autonomous individuals" (Lawson 2007, 5).

Missing, too, is the extent to which the stories of geog-

raphers are also stories of people involved in relation -

ships of love and care. These relationships are with ge-

ographers and others, and they shape (often in unspoken

ways) this thing we call geography. Passion, emotion, and

complex ties—with people, things, and places—are im-

portant for the story of geography and geographers. They

are unfortunately occluded in this version.

I opened my comments with the words of King, an aca-

demic and a writer of Native descent. In Native stories,

creation myths often involve the trickster, an ambiguous,

masked, complex, unreliable, and often disruptive figure,

who serves as both a figure of levity and an astute cul-

tural commentator. For anthropologist Toon van Meijl

(2005), the trickster offers a more revealing trope for the

social scientist, because the trickster is both involved and

detached. Of course, the trickster is also a shape-shifter,

which makes it difficult to capture in a story that is told in

this way. Chapter 10, the final chapter, begins to grapple

with the geographer as trickster although not, of course,

using the term. The tension between detachment and in-

volvement surfaces here, uncomfortably and temporarily,

but it offers the beginnings of an attempt to tell a differ-

ent story of geography. In this alternative story, the figure

of the geographer at its center is more complex and con-

tradictory and, indeed, capable of joy and laughter.

"It's an easy job to be critical," King (2003, 164) said, and

he was right. I should also acknowledge the strengths of

this book, which is now in its seventh edition. It offers a

solid overview of the work of some geographers, and serves

as a starting point for geography students trying to get

their heads around what, exactly, this thing called geogra-

phy is. That is not an easy task. I'm grateful to the authors

for their continued efforts, for their willingness to engage

in this forum, and for our opportunity to think about the

story of geography. Because stories? That's all we are.

Commentary by Michael S. DeVivo, Social

Sciences Department, Grand Rapids Community

College, Grand Rapids, MI.

The authors of this thought-provoking account of the in -

tellectual jousting engaged in by the discipline's manda-

rins and their disciples since the end of World War II are

quick to point out that their "book should be read with

the caveat that it remains a survey of key debates within

English language human geography in the past sixty

years, with a primary focus on the UK and Anglophone

North America" (p. xv). This is unfortunate, for the his-

tory of geography in other Anglophone countries is left

for others, as are important segments of our discipline's

past, and physical geography is by and large sadly ignored.

Indeed, the title is misleading; Ideological Debates in An-

glo-American Human Geography since 1945 is one that is

more fitting.

Although the first chapter, "The Nature of an Academic

Discipline," offers an introduction to the role of univer -

sity faculty in typical research institutions, no discussion

of those programs solely devoted to undergraduate studies

occurs, and it should, for an overwhelming majority of

U.S. academic geography programs are housed in depart-

ments that do not award the PhD. Among them are those

in community colleges, which enroll approximately 40

percent of all undergraduates in the United States; there

as elsewhere in academe, adjunct faculty are increasingly

making up a large proportion of the professoriate—and

this must be addressed.

Much is discussed concerning the pathways to achieve a

rich academic lifeway (e.g., "patronage," "rewards," and

"sources of status," pp. 7–8), but no mention is made of

how professors shape the lives of young men and women

through teaching, mentoring, and advising, in addition

to ways in which many are devoted to community and

humanitarian service. Surely, needed here is discussion of

the importance of transformational leadership, which has

been shown to be a superior form of leadership in the ad -

ministration of successful academic geography programs

(DeVivo 2015), as well as rebranding efforts; whereas de-

partmental autonomy facilitates the discipline's viability,

conversely it is threatened by the willingness of some to

sell their souls and forsake the name of geography in de-

partmental amalgamations. For example, Texas Christian

University's Department of Geography recently achieved

autonomy, largely through a united effort launched by

its dedicated faculty. Regrettably, I am embarrassed to

report that after four decades of autonomy, the geogra-

phy department faculty at my own alma mater, Southern

Connecticut, with one dissenting vote, volunteered its

absorption into a multidisciplinary department through

an initiative engineered by the most recent geography de -

partment chair. Our field's history shows that geographers

have often contributed to geography's worst nightmares,

shortchanging the discipline that is their home, and here

is one case in point. Some discussion of these matters is

56 THE AAG REVIEW OF BOOKS

crucial, for it is not only pertinent, but also valuable to

those who will be charged with leading the geographic

discipline in the twenty-first century.

Regardless, throughout the book, the authors seemingly

seek to explain the path the discipline trod by providing

glimpses of the history of geography with heavy doses of

some key debates. Yet, the short shrift given cartography is

unsatisfactory, for although Arthur Robinson at Wiscon -

sin is discussed, other leading figures are not mentioned,

such as Erwin Raisz, John Sherman, George Jenks, and

Norman Thrower (Yacher 1982). "Human Geography as

Spatial Science" is the book's longest (and perhaps most

unwieldy) chapter; it occupies sixty-eight pages. In con-

trast, "Humanistic Geography," deeply rooted in histori-

cal and cultural traditions, takes up only twenty-seven

pages, and a dearth of commentary on historical geog-

raphy weakens this section. Certainly, ample scholarship

in historical geography has not only withstood the test of

time, but historical geographers have brought geography

into public discourse, creating for the discipline much-

needed relevance to a large segment of U.S. society. For

example, Brown's (1949) textbook remained available

from the publisher for more than forty years. Moreover,

it is certainly telling that within days following Hurri-

cane Katrina, National Public Radio interviewed Craig

Colten, author of Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New

Orleans from Nature (Colten 2005), which was published

eight months previously.

Nevertheless, ideas pertaining to the notion of "sense of

place" are adequately discussed in reference to the con-

tributions of J.K. Wright, Anne Buttimer, and Yi-FuTuan

(who the authors mistakenly place in Arizona rather than

New Mexico at an early stage in his career; p. 179). Un-

fortunately, however, although commented on, the nature

of field work is all too briefly addressed. A relatively even-

handed commentary on radical geography offers discus-

sion, debate, and denouncement of the Marxist posture,

although the authors might have drafted Brian Berry's

acerbic comment, rather than the one they present:

I find particularly disgraceful, I have said it many times

and in writing, the kind of left wing intellectual who

moves from England to the USA, who lives very com-

fortably in the USA, making a comfortable living by

being a left wing dialectician criticizing the very basis

of his material confidence. It is remarkable how many

left wing radicals who came to the USA from elsewhere

were quite adamant about not becoming American citi-

zens until just before the retirement age. They did it to

defer the taxes they would have to pay if they were US

citizens. In other words, they are not so much opposed

to personal capitalistic accumulation and to personal

material gain. (Trevino 2004, 15)

Nonetheless, a subsequent chapter, "Postmodernism, Post -

structuralism, Postcolonialism," prompts the georeader to

ponder social justice issues and consider whether or not

human geography is (or should be) merely an intellec-

tual exercise. "Feminist Geography" offers a broad view

of this theme, but ignores some important aspects of the

history of women in academic geography, as well as some

of the more recent foreign area field work carried out by

a number of feminist geographers, some of which is appli-

cable to geopolitical issues. Special reference is made to

the work of Gilbert White and the geographic discipline's

role in shaping public policy in the chapter on applied

geography; however, like much of this volume, geography

in Britain is center stage and practice in the U.S. domain

is often ignored. Missing, for example, is discussion of

historical and cultural geography in reference to applied

geography.

At base, after much thought and consideration, I agree

the richness of this book is a given. After all, it is in its

seventh edition. The reader is compelled to realize that

along with the Beatles, Monty Python, and a number of

academic geographers from the British Isles, Geography

and Geographers is another element of the "British Inva -

sion." As I reflect on my tour through this most recent ver -

sion, I notice that I have underlined numerous passages,

marked many pages with notes, and find myself smiling as

I am reminded of geographers mentioned here and there

that have contributed to the shaping of our discipline and

the debates concerning the essence of geography. Yet, it

is an unwieldy read. The authors' Anglo-centricity might

make this volume apropos for postgraduate students

across the pond; however, its suitability as the principal

textbook for U.S. graduate students enrolled in a course

devoted to the history of geography must be questioned.

Still, it is recognized by many throughout the discipline

as a key contribution.

Commentary by Lauren Rickards, Centre for

Urban Studies, RMIT University, Melbourne,

Australia.

Like a pointillist painting, Geography and Geographers

meticulously layers intricate conceptual discussions to

gradually reveal the discipline as a whole. It is a skillful

way of describing the discipline while avoiding subdisci-

plinary disputes. Perhaps because of my subdisciplinary,

national, and personal biases, however, the result is an

outline that is somewhat missing what I, like some of the

geographers quoted, feel should be at its heart: human–

nature relations.

WINTER 2017 57

Somewhat ironically, the book itself helps me understand

the unease I feel about it. As I read it I kept wondering

where nature was. Not as in "Why is there not more on

animal geography?" (although that, too, did occur to me),

but "Where is nature, the physical world, acting within

this history?" This is about the presence of nature in the

analysis, not merely as a specialized topic of interest, but

as a force, a contextual factor, a collection of agents, a

material outcome. Geography and Geographers is a history

of intellectual endeavor grounded occasionally by social,

institutional, economic, and political factors, but rarely

intersecting with anything resembling an "environmental

factor" or the physical world, despite that world's historic

upheaval over the period narrated.

Of course, writing a history that accounts for the mate -

riality of geographic scholarship—the interplay of geo-

graphic research, teaching, and nature (whether "the

environment," bacteria, animals, infrastructure, planes,

or wind)—would be extremely difficult, not the least be-

cause of multidirectional, diffuse lines of influence. In

keeping with the calls that Johnston and Sidaway humbly

recognize for a "geography of geography" rather than just

a "history of geography," however, let us consider briefly

what such an account might look like.

To begin with, a more materialist view of geography's

evolution could draw from important moves in this di-

rection by the likes of Sarah Whatmore, J. K. Gibson-

Graham, Donna Haraway, and those investigating "gritty

materialisms" (Kirsch 2013). Second, a more materialist

account of geography would balance the focus on intel-

lectual work with one on field and body work, bringing

to the fore the unsettling contingencies and visceral ef-

fects of "the real world" on knowledge production. Third,

a more materialist account of geography would critically

reflect on human geographers' learnt recoil from anything

resembling environmental determinism. Johnston and

Sidaway lightly illustrate this in their discussion of the

foundational debate between environmental determinists

and possibilists, arguing that geographers who "strongly

promoted environmental determinism" were afforded lit-

tle respect, whereas possibilists "avoided the great gener-

alizations which characterized their antagonists" (p. 45).

Although this evaluation is likely accurate, and we obvi-

ously need to avoid excessive naturalism and determin-

ism, we also need to ask whether we have gone too far

in dismissing nature's influence on society. Are we too

set on distinguishing and distancing ourselves from physi -

cal geography? Is this implicitly reinforced by the sort of

narrative about our history presented in Geography and

Geographers? Although the book has important sections

on "Geography and Its Environment," the environment

in question is purely economic and social; the stuff of

physical geography is nowhere to be seen. To the extent

this communicates a presumed independence of humans

from nature, this erasure of the physical environment is

not merely a division of labor; it presents a particular uni-

versal perspective, inclined heavily to the possibilism of

geography, at least when it comes to nature.

Arguably, human geography's disciplinary lean away from

considering natural influences is unevenly distributed

across human geography due to spatial variation in such

influences themselves. This raises the well-recognized

problem of the partiality of the human geography story

told by Johnston and Sidaway. Not only does the Anglo-

American focus exclude many voices and particular ex -

periences, it encourages a certain view of how the whole

world works. This is outlined by a rare Australian voice

in the book, T. Griffiths Taylor, described as "the dough -

tiest advocate of the determinist cause." An outspoken

critic of the frontier mentality in 1950s Australia, Taylor

argued that such a view was not only deeply possibilist in

outlook, but especially inappropriate for the Australian

environment because "possibilists had developed their

ideas in temperate environments," whereas "in most of

the world, as in Australia, the environment is much more

extreme and its control over human activity accordingly

much greater" (p. 45). Applyi ng this to Geography and Ge-

ographers, we need to ask whether its unspoken temperate

zone focus has ironically helped obscure such environ-

mental influences, encouraging a false sense of academics

floating free.

More than just another intellectual dispute, this is a

question of real significance. The subtitle of Geography

and Geographers points to some of the implications. The

period since 1945 that the book focuses on is clearly

characterized by more than an upswing in geographic

scholarship. As Johnston and Sidaway highlight, capital -

ism, technology, and urbanization, among other things,

were also proliferating. This vision of exploding growth

lies behind the recent designation of the period as "the

Great Acceleration" (Steffen et al. 2015). Regardless of

what one thinks about this particular term or the concept

of the Anthropocene with which it is associated, what

it attempts to draw attention to—the enormous, largely

negative changes that have occurred to the planet during

this time—cannot be shrugged off. Yet these changes—

including anthropogenic climate change and biodiver -

sity loss, as well as processes such as resource extraction,

urbanization, and agriculture that underlie them—are

strikingly absent from Geography and Geographers. Their

58 THE AAG REVIEW OF BOOKS

absence might itself be symptomatic, reflecting the way

the technology boom and urbanization of this era has

tried to overcome nature's constraints.

In the book, some geographers' work on environmen-

tal issues is usefully discussed. There is also a valuable

section on the production of nature, including work by

Margaret Fitzsimmons. But her vital point about human

geographers' neglect of the material reality of social Na-

ture (Fitzsimmons 1989) is elided. That material nature

in Geography and Geographers generally features as an ex-

ternal, specialized research object, rather than being ac-

knowledged as an actual influence on all geography and

geographers, then illustrates Fitzsimmons point. Such a

gap is especially concerning given the myriad effects flow -

ing from climate change, for example, that are looping

back onto human life, and all life, in multiple and com-

plex ways. This includes the unacknowledged influence

of such effects on research and teaching, where they are

not only opening up new research questions or opportuni-

ties for interdisciplinary collaboration, but are directly in -

fluencing geographers and their work in more direct and

subtle ways, in the field and beyond.

Perhaps the more important question prompted by the

unacknowledged overlap between the book and the Great

Acceleration is the relationship between geographers and

the problems encapsulated by the latter. To what extent

are geographers indicative of the Anthropos? As Johnston

and Sidaway mention, Eden argued in her comprehensive

review of twentieth-century British geography that the

discipline has regularly taken its eye off the "environmen -

tal ball" and discouraged radical critique, allowing, we

can surmise, environmental problems to proliferate. More

generally, if the very limited role given to nature in Geog-

raphy and Geographers is anything to go by, there has been

a tendency to externalize and deny nature explanatory

force in the discipline. Whether tethered to the concept

of the Anthropocene or not, asking about the discipline's

impact on the planet, above and beyond its involvement

in environmentalism per se, is an important move, which

more recent scholarship in the discipline has begun to

engage (e.g., Castree 2015a, 2015b). The Anthropocene

offers yet another prompt to develop a more material -

ized geography of geography, one sensitive to not only

all of the discipline's impacts, positive and negative, but

the related ways in which the physical world affects its

knowledge production and self-knowledge. Such an em-

bedded account of geography would demonstrate what

the discipline has to offer, building on the masterful ac -

count of its intellectual debates presented by Johnston

and Sidaway.

Responses by Ron Johnston, School of

Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol,

Bristol, UK, and James D. Sidaway, Department

of Geography, National University of Singapore,

Singapore.

When the first edition of Geography and Geographers was

being written by one of us in the late 1970s the Anglo-

phone discipline had recently passed through a major pe-

riod of turmoil in which those committed to its transition

from idiographic regionalism to nomothetic quantitative

spatial science had fought a major battle for its core. They

hadn't totally succeeded, but had established more than

a foothold in its central redoubt (Burton 1963; Gregory

1983)—and then were faced with battles to defend their

newly gained position of dominance, if not predominance,

against others who contested the value of their approach.

Those battles were strongly fought, sometimes vitupera-

tively and personally. The term revolution was often used

as each party vied for the discipline's heart and soul by

disparaging their opponents' views (as some personal his-

tories illustrate; see Berry 2006). Kuhn's paradigm model

was frequently called on not only as a framework within

which to locate those struggles (as in Geography and Ge-

ographers), but also as a rallying cry behind whose banners

a struggle for hegemony could be mobilized. There was no

revolution that displaced all existing approaches, however,

and the struggles were never finally resolved in one group's

favor; but the battle cries went on for some years.

Geography and Geographers was first written in that con -

text. Over the succeeding decades the revolutionary fer-

vor died away considerably and conflict rarely featured in

the discipline's journals—just intermittently resurfacing

as somebody expressed discomfort, or more, with contem -

porary trends. Human geography didn't settle down into

a comfortable, unchanging coexistence between groups

pursuing different agendas (some more incompatible than

others), however. Instead, as more students—both un-

dergraduate (in the United Kingdom) and postgraduate

(widely across the Anglophone realm)—chose it as the

focus of their work, this provided both stability and the

grounds for expansion for many university departments.

The resultant growing number of human geographers now

occupied a more stable and recognized set of positions

within the social sciences and related disciplines, and a

wider range of perspectives was introduced—some totally

new, others linked to existing approaches. There were

fewer overarching battles for the discipline's heart and

soul, however, like those of the preceding decades, and

few would-be revolutionaries wanted to take it over and

WINTER 2017 59

eliminate their "competitors." Instead human geography

broadened in its scope and in its links to a wide range of

other disciplines and subdisciplines; it now has a "messy

and unconventional profile" according to one professor of

physical geography, with human geography rather surpris-

ingly presented as "by nature, humanistic and qualitative"

(Clifford 2016, 35). No longer were there proponents of

a disciplinary core, with anything else committed to its

margins; in many ways the discipline became a collage of

margins, of groups coexisting and carrying on regardless

(as suggested in Cresswell 2013). There were still conflicts,

of course, although minor relative to what had gone be-

fore. Groups jockeyed for status within individual depart-

ments, when new positions were to be filled, for example,

and there were examples of textbook writers seeking to de-

fine the discipline by promoting their own approaches and

sometimes silencing others (Johnston 2006). For the most

part, though, the different approaches to the discipline

operated with their adherents not only not challenging

those promoting other approaches but also being largely

unaware of them in any detail (Johnston et al. 2014).

This period of quiescent change and expansion was char -

acteristic of the emergence of those portions of the disci-

pline treated in the second half of the book within a book

that most of our commentators recognize as a key feature

of Geography and Geographers —with that altered situa-

tion also, and perhaps belatedly, recognized in the sev-

enth edition's revised final chapter. Strident debates are

now rarer, and the discipline is characterized by growth

through accretion; an ever-expanding Venn diagram with

few substantial overlaps. So is Kuhn any longer relevant?

In part, yes: there have been no more references to par-

adigmatic revolution since the 1970s but the discipline

comprises a multiplicity of paradigms—at all three scales

eventually recognized by Kuhn—coexisting as a myriad

shared positions within a wide range of knowledge. Kuhn

is also relevant in a historical sense, because of the ways

in which references to paradigms and scientific revolu -

tions were internalized within the discipline, having been

adopted by some of those who sought to reshape it—with

lasting consequences. Debates about the wider value and

impacts of Kuhn's ideas continue. A recent review and

reevaluation of Thomas Kuhn's Revolutions noted that,

"Although the paradigm concept was not original with

Kuhn—philosophers Georg Lichtenberg, Wittgenstein,

and Toulmin used it earlier—Kuhn certainly made it

popular . . . Indeed Kuhn's concept eventually exploded

in the literature, especially among members of various

disciplines searching for epistemic legitimacy to justify

their discipline, as scientific or at least comparable to sci -

ence" (Marcum 2015, 177).

Marcum did not mention geography, although a key

the reference he cited in developing this argument does

(Perry 1977). That Kuhn's ideas became entangled with

the remaking of Anglophone human geography in the

second half of the twentieth century seems undeniable,

even if we might want to bring other perspectives to bear

in interpreting how and why this happened.

Would Kuhn play such a similar role if a new book were

being conceived now? Undoubtedly not—but the sev -

enth edition was not a wholly new book; it built on the

foundations of one first conceived forty years ago and

that, despite its age, our commentators still find valu-

able as a structuring of human geography's recent history.

Of course, there are silences, although we would like to

think these are now more relative than absolute. We al -

ready accept that more might have been said in the sev-

enth edition about cartography, military geography and

militarism's wider impacts, as well as considering further

the relationship between human and physical geography,

including debates about the Anthropocene—although

recall that the book was being written in 2014, not 2016.

(For a recent restructuring of human geography linking

human and physical perspectives, see Dorling and Lee

2016, but more can be said.) Some issues and approaches,

especially feminism, came later to the earlier editions

than they should have. When James became a co-author

on the sixth (2004) edition, there was an extensive re-

working, especially in the second half of the book, that

yielded the ten chapters retained in the seventh edition.

We have never claimed to be universal, however, never

argued that what we were doing was celebrating all that

was being done; the focus was on change, however it

happened. We were explicit that we were only covering

work in English—although, apart from Hägerstrand's

adroit contributions, what was being written about in

English from outside the Anglophone North Atlantic

probably didn't get the treatment it deserved. Nor have

we ever claimed Anglophone superiority; a book that

treated the discipline's history across all language realms,

drawing out their particularities and linkages—perhaps

including physical geography, too—would be a massive

task (probably impossible for a pair of authors, certainly

this one). All we could provide is a particular perspec -

tive about a part of that total, about a margin full of its

own margins.

We have treated the North Atlantic Anglophone realm

(basically the United Kingdom and Ireland with the

United States and Canada) as a single unit because the

parts are so interlinked, yet not creating a homogeneous

whole. We have elsewhere recognized the trans-Atlantic

60 THE AAG REVIEW OF BOOKS

heterogeneity (both for human geography as a whole

[Johnston and Sidaway 2004] and for one of its smaller

subdisciplines [Johnston 2005]); but we write largely on

UK foundations, and that might well stand out in how

we present the history we have experienced (and there

are excellent alternative views; e.g., Cox 2014). Although

work in English from Scandinavia and the Netherlands

and some from Australasia (as well as Singapore) is pres-

ent in Geography and Geographers, a history of geography

from one of those sites or centred on Anglophone North

America or just the United States (as in Martin 2015,

which was not yet available when we finalized the seventh

edition) would look different.

So do we, and the students to whom Geography and Geog-

raphers is addressed, need to know our (recent) history: In

whatever context we are writing, can we know who we are

without knowing what we have emerged from? To quote

Clifford (2016) again, if we are to "undertake a sober sur-

vey of the territory that we are now traversing—[in order

to] . . . consider where we might go before we get irrevo-

cably lost" then a conspectus of the present without some

historical context will almost certainly be fairly unpro-

ductive. That context might not be set within the frame-

work provided by Geography and Geographers, but some

framework is definitely needed. There is some hint in the

commentaries that by providing such a framework, which

has been widely employed in teaching the discipline's his-

tory for four decades, we have in one sense "invented"

the (or perhaps more precisely, a) discipline—having ac -

cepted that a discipline is needed (recall the discussions

as to whether the title of Livingstone's [1992] essential

book should begin with an indefinite rather than definite

article!). That needs no apology, however: All sciences

and the humanities move forward by both building on

as well as challenging and sometimes revisiting the foun-

dations already laid down. Indeed, the insights of fresh

work on the histories of science (see Wotton 2015 for a

recent account) and feminist science scholarship (which

Geography and Geographers ought to have more carefully

responded to, as Kim England notes in her commentary)

points to the range of forces that need to be taken into

account.

We l ook for wa rd t o r ea di ng th os e ne w ch al le nges, to v is it-

ing alternative stories. Moreover, institutionally "geogra-

phy" needs those stories if it is to survive in challenging

times. At this juncture, however, we thank Mark Boyle

and our interlocutors here for unpicking some of the

threads in the narrative that Geography and Geographers

weaves, while anticipating continuing conversations and

fresh patterns.

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... For example, there was the long-standing debate about the merits of studying, respectively, formal and functional regions. That debate served to highlight some of the key philosophical and epistemological differences between traditional regional geography and its positivist spatial science (Johnston and Sidaway, 2004). According to Jonas (2012) recent encounters between realist geographers and poststructuralists continue this tradition of discussion for all the age-old distinction between formal and functional regions. ...

... During the research we used geographical literature from domestic and international journals of recent date, which refers to the issue of regional development (Agnew, Livingstone and Rogers, 1996;Brenner, 2002;Castells, 2000;Dierwechter, 2008;Hall and Pain, 2006;Herrschel and Newman, 2002;Harrison and Hoyler2015;Jessop, Brenner and Jones, 2008;Johnston and Sidaway, 2004;Jonas, 2012;Jonas and Moisio, 2016;Jonas and Ward, 2007;Kantor, Lefevre, Saito, Savitch and Thornley, 2012;Murphy and O'Loughlin, 2009;Etherington and Jones, 2009;Rodriguez-Pose, 2008;Scott, 2001Scott, -a, 2001Storper, 2013;Wishart, 2004, etc). In order to show the role of regional geographers in contemporary researching at the UBFG, we used their articles published in international journals in the last seven years (Šabić et al., 2017;Potić, Golić and Joksimović, 2016;Jovanović-Popović et al., 2015;Joksimović et al., 2014;Šabić et al., 2013-a;Šabić, Miljković, Vujadinović, Milinčić and Gajić, 2013-b;Vujadinović et al., 2013-b;Milinčić et al., 2013;Belić, Radosavljević, Milinčić and Šabić, 2012;Šabić et al., 2012;Stanković et al., 2012;Djurdjić, Stojković and Šabić, 2011). ...

... A number of internal historiographies in both geography and area studies have enabled us to better understand the divergence between the two (including Livingstone, 1992;Lockman, 2016;Martin, 2015;Johnston and Sidaway, 2016;Szanton, 2004). Additionally, as part of the area studies turn in geography, geographers have produced a plethora of studies on the split between geography and regional geography, as well as the neglect of area studies (Ashutosh, 2017;Barter, 2015;Mills and Hammond, 2016;Sidaway, 2013). ...

... After decades of drifting apart, geography and area studies are converging. As many geographers have recently noted, the Anglo-Americanness of human geography has grown as a cause of concern in the discipline (Agnew and Livingstone, 2011;Barnes, 2014;Gregory and Castree, 2011;Johnston and Sidaway, 2016). Geographers are increasingly questioning, for instance, how the traditions of Arab, Chinese or Indian geographies can be incorporated into the conventional histories of geography (Gregory and Castree, 2011), coupled with a growing scholarship on spatial knowledge across different cultures and a translation of it (Ledger, 2016). ...

• Deen Sharp

After decades of geography and area studies drifting apart, I argue there has been an area studies turn in geography. The long divergence between the two, however, has resulted in a certain misunderstanding by geographers of what area studies scholarship is and what this field can contribute to the discipline. Area studies should not be considered as an approach that merely concentrates on the representation of difference but rather as a milieu in which difference is practiced and geographical concepts can be 'diffracted'. Area studies can offer geography new ways to think about its place in, and entanglement with, the world.

... Writing in another forum for The AAG Review of Books, Mary Gilmartin (in Boyle et al. 2017) questioned histories of our discipline in which geographers are depicted as "fighters," constantly staging academic turf wars around particular paradigms and struggling to occupy ever more intellectual and institutional "territory." She wondered about deploying an alternative portrayal of "the geographer as lover" and doing more to recover histories-and to tell stories to ourselves-about geographers' "passion for ideas, knowledge, research, teaching, or for changing the world" (Boyle et al. 2017, 54). ...

... J€ ons, Monk, and Keighren (2017), building on feminist historiographies of geography (Domosh 1991;Monk 2004;Maddrell 2009), have recently called again for "more inclusive and comparative perspectives" in disciplinary histories. Yet, as Boyle et al. (2017) have argued, "The task of provincializing, historicizing, and relativizing metropolitan ways of thinking about the world and narrating historiographies of non-Western human geographies remains firmly on the nursery slopes" (49). This article begins to address this issue. ...

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. Key Words: academic labor, Anglo-American hegemony, Cold War, decolonization, history of geography, Nigeria.

... This is a point that many others have reflected on; as one of us has argued elsewhere, in a textbook account of Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Human Geography since 1945, geography comprises "a set of linked yet frequently anarchic communities" (John-ston and Sidaway 2016, 399). Such an interpretation was also reiterated in a set of commentaries on Geography and Geographers that appeared in this journal (Boyle et al. 2017). Moreover, according to Springer: "The sheer diversity of topics that geographers could potentially engage from an anarchist perspective speaks to the notion that the discipline of geography is highly undisciplined . . . it is the freedom of geography that positions the discipline as an ideal location from which to explore the ongoing relevance and potential of anarchist thought and practice" (p. ...

... Geographical work on anticipation has mirrored the internal diversity of the social sciences, as the following two illustrations will make clear. The first is a paper by Peter Haggett, called "Prediction and predictability in geographical systems" (1994) and exemplifies what one may call traditional, non-critical, social science ( Johnston and Sidaway, 2016). Haggett points out that even though "the notion of predictability is…weakly developed in the geographical literature" (1994: 6) and constitutes an area in which "the making of mistakes 5 create a useful echo for my own investigation of the place-making and space-opening of surprise. ...

• Dragos Simandan

Surprises are refuted expectations and therefore an inevitable concomitant of errors of anticipating the future. This paper argues that the timing is just right for a spatial account of surprise, or rather, for a geography of personal and social change that deploys the trope of surprise to help explain how and why change happens. Whether we are surprised by what transpires in our surroundings or we are surprising ourselves by leaping forward in impetuous deeds of reinventing who we are, the common denominator of these processes of becoming is that they produce geographical space and are produced by it. How to cite: Simandan, D., 2020. Being surprised and surprising ourselves: a geography of personal and social change. Progress in Human Geography, 44(1), pp. 99-118. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518810431

... Human geography has a distinctive position within the social sciences by its relentless focus on developing a spatial way of thinking about social phenomena (Johnston and Sidaway, 2016). The same social entity would be conceptualized differently and understood differently by the various social sciences. ...

• Dragos Simandan

Individual and collective actors are typically engaged in several simultaneous co-evolutionary matching dynamics with their opponents, and this process creates a relentlessly evolving political-economic landscape. When an actor makes a move that is detrimental to another actor, the latter is likely to strike back with a countermove that nullifies the initial threat, or compensates for it. To understand the time-geography created by these move-countermove dynamics, the paper (a) delineates criteria for classifying competitive counterforces, (b) provides a detailed typology of delays encountered in competitive landscapes, and (c) illustrates the relevance of this research to economic and political geographies. How to cite: Simandan D (2019) "Competition, delays, and coevolution in markets and politics", Geoforum , vol.98, pp. 15-24, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.09.014

... It contains in itself the results of capitalist functioning, ideological gaze, power relations and discourse. Marxist and radical geography and geographers pay more attention to these aspects (Johnston and Sidaway, 2015;Cox, 2013;Setten and Myrvang Brown, 2013). From this perspective there is no much benefit to concentrate on representations, cultural meanings and similar phenomena brought up by postmodern and poststructuralist thinkers mostly as material conditions worsen day by day for the working class and the poor. ...

In this study, we will try to explain what landscape is and its theoretical framework. Landscape is widely being used in geography especially in cultural geography. Like every concept landscape has transformed as it takes on new meanings and loses some at the same time. There is a close connection between the emerging new meanings and dominating approach, paradigm and theories in a discipline. In general, every emerging approach or paradigm can affect and transform related concepts in a given discipline. Therefore, it is proper to use concepts and terms in their context. From 15th century onwards, landscape has been used in different contexts in different disciplines in different ways. For this reason, landscape will be treated from different approaches, meanings and theories like cultural landscape, quantitative revolution, feminist theory, Marxist and radical geography, humanistic geography, postmodern and poststructuralist approaches, non-representational theory and actor-network theory.

... They bring not only the world into being, but also guides to action on the social life Wood [39]; pickles [40]. Genealogy of produced spatialities from Geo-human relations in the thoughts and actions of geographers show that the depictions has always been done by using some of the representations Johnston and Sidaway [41];Couper [42]; Cox [43]; Cresswell [9];Nayak andJeffrey [44]; Holt-Jensen [45]; Martin [46]; Pickles [40]; Peet [47]; Unwin [48]; Livingstone [13]; Stoddart [49], among other. For example, before the modern era, the spatialities of Geo-human relations was based on the metaphors of poetic, philosophical, religious, idealistic and symbolic in a special worldview Cosgrove [12], and with the beginning of the modern period, there have been used the mosaic, organic, arena, stage, mechanical, systemic, network and flow metaphors and in a special scientific discourse. ...

• Mahmood Shoorcheh

This article describes a personal perception of one of the most important issues in the geography science: new theorizations for new understandings of the new geographies. New theories are among the major ambitions and forces in the development and promotion of geographic knowledge. However, what principle has there been for geographers for theorization? Can we track a common theme among geographic theories?This article attempts to explain that there is such a common theme. Although this theme has meant different things to different people by different representations at different times and places, it has played the role of a common horizon to guide geographers in theorizing.This is an important point to comprehend the identity of geography as well as pedagogical purposes; because, based on such a reading, a researcher in geography will have a more coherent and systematic perspective towards the subject from the beginning of his/her research.

Table of Contents Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations for Archival Sources American and German Geography circa 1820's to 1919 Geography and the American Normal School Toward the Emergence of Geography in the Universities The Physiographic Provinces The Study of Geographical Regions Commercial and Economic Geography Environmentalism and Its Varieties The Quest for Definition c. 1870-1919 World War I: Geographers and the Path to War World War I: Geographers and the Path to Peace The Millionth Map of Hispanic America The Science of Settlement: Studies of the Pioneer Fringe The Ecological Tradition in American Geography: A Perspective The Emergence of a Political Geography The Nature of Geography and Perspective on the Nature of Geography Geography, Geographers, and World War II The AAG and the ASPG: Schism and Rapprochement The Quest for Definition Continued c. 1920-1970 Envoi Appendix Earliest Known (U.S.) College/University Courses of Their Kind Index of Names Index of Subjects

• Craig E. Colten

Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first what geographer Peirce Lewis called an "impossible but inevitable city." How New Orleans came to be, taking shape between the mutual and often contradictory forces of nature and urban development, is the subject of An Unnatural Metropolis. Craig E. Colten traces engineered modifications to New Orleans's natural environment from 1800 to 2000 and demonstrates that, though all cities must contend with their physical settings, New Orleans may be the city most dependent on human-induced transformations of its precarious site. In a new preface, Colten shows how Hurricane Katrina exemplifies the inability of human artifice to exclude nature from cities and he urges city planners to keep the environment in mind as they contemplate New Orleans's future. Urban geographers frequently have portrayed cities as the antithesis of nature, but in An Unnatural Metropolis, Colten introduces a critical environmental perspective to the history of urban areas. His amply illustrated work offers an in-depth look at a city and society uniquely shaped by the natural forces it has sought to harness. © 2005 by Louisiana State University Press. All rights reserved.

• Noel Castree

This article explores the relationships between geographers and the 'Anthroposcene'. The latter comprises the networks, institutions and publications devoted to comprehending and responding to a fast-changing Earth departing from Holocene boundary conditions. The Anthroposcene necessarily mediates peoples' understanding of what are said to be epochal alterations to our planetary home. It is currently dominated by geoscientists and certain environmental social scientists. Some geographers are among their number. Whilst these researchers are working hard to alert decision-makers and publics to the epic scale, scope and magnitude of 'the human impact', their work currently tends to screen out the insights of both critical social science and the environmental humanities. Both forms of inquiry are strongly represented in contemporary Anglophone Geography and have been central to human geography's 'environmental turn' this last 20 years. The article suggests reasons why many geographers who are not currently part of the Anthroposcene might want to get their voices heard therein and thereby change the 'scene'. Global change research (and politics) is entering a formative moment, and it's important that a range of epistemic communities shape its content and tenor looking ahead. The stakes are high and place responsibilities on a wide range of environmental researchers and educators.

• S. Gregory

The 1960s saw the growth of quantitative geography in Britain and its first appearance in the Transactions of the IBG. Most of the lively material, especially in physical geography, has been published in specialist journals rather than by the Institute. The role of the Quantitative Methods Study Group and its publications is noted, as are joint meetings with for example the Royal Statistical Society. -J.ClaytonDept. of Geog., Univ. of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK.

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