On Geography

Geography Literally, ‘earth-writing’ from the Greek geo (earth) and graphia (writing), the practice of making geographies (‘geo-graphing’) involves both writing about (conveying, expressing or representing) the world and also writing (marking, shaping or transforming) the world. The two fold in and out of one another in an ongoing and constantly changing series of situated practices, and even when attempts have been made to hold geo-graphing still, to confine its objects and methods to a formal discipline, it has always escaped those enclosures. In consequence, as Livingstone (1992: 28) insisted, ‘The idea that there is some eternal metaphysical core to geography independent of circumstances will simply have to go.’ While the HISTORY OF GEOGRAPHY is neither bounded by its disciplinary formation nor the North Atlantic, recent historians of Geography have paid close attention to the institutionalization of Geography as a university discipline in Europe and North America from the closing decades of the nineteenth century onwards. This focus on the academy overlooks two important considerations. First, ‘the institutional and intellectual form of the university is itself a series of [situated] practices that have changed over time’: the present sense of a ‘discipline’ was alien to the early modern university, but this did not prevent the provision of instruction in both descriptive and mathematical Geography (Withers and Mayhew, 2002: 13-15). Secondly, like Molière’s M. Jourdain, who was astonished to learn he had been talking prose all his life without knowing anything about it, many scholars (and others) have produced what could be regarded as geographical knowledge in the course of inquiries that they construed in quite other ways. More than this, their reception within the discipline has been uneven. Some contributions have been recognized (and even appropriated) as Geography, while others have been disavowed for nominally ‘professional’ reasons: so, for example, research in spatial statistics may be seen as central to the discipline by some geographers, while TRAVEL-WRITING may be rejected as the impressionistic work of the amateur. As these examples suggest, however, such evaluations are themselves necessarily historically contingent, and Rose (1995) has cautioned that disciplinary Geography ‘has so often defined itself against what it insists it is not, that writing its histories without considering what has been constructed as not-geography is to tell only half the story.’

All boundary-drawing exercises are fraught with difficulties, therefore, and intellectual landscapes are no exception: such projects are never ‘only’ about ideas but also about the grids of POWER in which they are implicated. The boundary question became intrusive with the creation of modern disciplines and the inclusion of modern Geography among them. Its disciplinary formation was a response to political and economic concerns (most viscerally the demand for a MILITARY GEOGRAPHY in the service of modern WAR and, in Britain at least, a commercial geography to underwrite international trade) and also to pedagogical ambitions (the desire to transmit particular, nationalistic geographical knowledges through school curricula) (see EDUCATION; NATIONALISM). These practical considerations were hardly unique to the nineteenth century. Geography had long articulated political and commercial interests – in the seventeenth century Varenius had emphasized the importance of Special Geography (or REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY) to both ‘statecraft’ and the mercantile affairs of the Dutch Republic, for example – and it was already deeply invested in what Withers (2001) calls ‘visualizing the nation’. But its academic institutionalization raised questions about the distance between ‘professional’ and ‘popular’ geographies and about the very possibility of Geography as a field of scholarly research (rather than the compilation of others’ observations) that continue to resonate today. Soul-searching (or navel-gazing) about the ‘spirit and purpose’ or ‘nature’ of Geography has become markedly less common in recent years, however, as the contingency and fluidity of intellectual inquiry have been embraced. There has been much greater interest in charting future geographies whose variety confirms the radical openness of geographical horizons: there is no single direction, still less a teleological path, to be pursued (cf. Chorley, 1973; Johnston, 1985).

It follows that no definition of Geography will satisfy everyone, and nor should it. But one possible definition of the contemporary discipline is: (The study of) the ways in which space is involved in the operation and outcome of social and bio-physical processes. When it is unpacked, this summary sentence provides six starting-points for discussion:

(1) As the opening brackets indicate ‘geography’, like ‘history’, has a double meaning: it both describes knowledge about or study of something (most formally, a discipline or field of intellectual inquiry) and it constitutes a particular object of inquiry, as in ‘the geography of soil erosion’ or ‘the geography of China’ (so that ‘soil erosion’ and ‘China’ have geographies just as they have histories). In fact, the relations between Geography and History have long exercised philosophers. Classical humanism distinguished between CHOROLOGY and chronology, for example, orderings in space and orderings in time, while ENLIGHTENMENT aesthetics asserted that the object of the visual arts (painting or sculpture) was the imitation of elements co-existing in space and that of the discursive arts (narrative poetry) the expression of moments unfolding in time. In the course of the twentieth century, disciplinary Geography was increasingly troubled by both ways of making the distinction.

First, Hartshorne’s attempt to legislate The Nature of Geography (1939) had treated Geography and History as non-identical twins born under the sign of EXCEPTIONALISM. They were held to be different from one another because they classified phenomena according to their co-existence either in space (Geography) or in time (History), but this also made them both different from all other forms of intellectual inquiry which classified phenomena according to their similarity to one another (see KANTIANISM). This, in its turn, was supposed to limit concept-formation in Geography and History to particularity rather than generalization, to the IDIOGRAPHIC rather than the NOMOTHETIC (which was the preserve of the sciences). These distinctions proved to be constant provocations. Most geographers insisted that TIME and history could not be excluded from geographical inquiry, and Hartshorne eventually conceded the point. Indeed, studies of landscape evolution, physical and cultural, were regarded as such mainstays of geographical inquiry that Darby (1953: 11) could describe geomorphology and HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY as its twin foundations: even then, ‘space’ was not understood as a static stage. More than this, however, particularly after the QUANTITATIVE REVOLUTION of the 1960s, the study of DIFFUSION, the development of dynamic modelling and the capacity to capture the modalities of environmental and social change required any rigorous analysis of the concrete specificities of geographical variation to be informed by the theories and methods of the mainstream sciences and social sciences: Geography could not be separated from other fields by philosophical fiat.

Secondly, the emphasis on geographical change raised what Darby (1962) called ‘the problem of geographical description’: how was it possible for a field that placed such a premium on the visual to convey any sense of PLACE and LANDSCAPE by textual means? Darby’s original sense of this reactivated that Enlightenment sensibility: ‘We can look at a picture as a whole,’ he wrote, ‘and it is as a whole that it leaves an impression upon us; we can, however, read only line by line.’ The question (and Darby’s way of framing it) later seemed problematic to many human geographers, who inquired more closely into practices of REPRESENTATION and interpretation. They examined the visual ideologies of CARTOGRAPHY and the POETICS of prose, for example, both the nominally objective prose of scientific inquiry that dominated geographical journals and more evocative modes of expressing places and landscapes. En route, Geography’s connections with the HUMANITIES spiralled far beyond History to include ART history, dance, FILM studies, the literary disciplines, MUSIC and PERFORMANCE studies. These were more than exercises in critical interrogation or deconstruction; they also involved creative experiments in writing (see, for example, Pred, 2004; Harrison, Pile and Thrift, 2004) and collaborations with artists, curators, film-makers and performance artists.

(2) These close encounters with the sciences, social sciences and humanities have ensured that there is no single PARADIGM or method of inquiry in Geography. In order to elucidate the multiple ways in which space is involved in the conduct of life on Earth and in the transformation of its surface, geographers have been drawn into many different conversations: human geographers with anthropologists, art historians, economists, historians, literary scholars, psychologists, sociologists and others; physical geographers with atmospheric scientists, botanists, biologists, ecologists, geologists, soil scientists, zoologists and others. These conversations have varied through time, and the HISTORY OF GEOGRAPHY is an important part of understanding how the contemporary field of geographical inquiry has come to be the way it is, marking both its ruptures from as well as its continuities with any presumptive ‘geographical tradition’ (Livingstone, 1993). These conversations have also varied over space, so that there is a geography of Geography too. The same claims can be made about any discipline, but in Geography they have been increasingly interconnected. Most recent studies of the history of Geography have recognised the importance of the spaces in which geographical knowledge is produced and through which it circulates. This has involved attempts both to contextualize Geography – to understand the development of geographical ideas in relation to the places and situations from which they have emerged and the predicaments to which they were responding – and to de-territorialize Geography: to open the disciplinary ring-fence, to appreciate that geography is not limited to the academy and to interrogate the production of geographical knowledges at multiple sites (Harvey, 2004).

These studies have produced a heightened sensitivity to the specificity and partiality of Euro-American and, still more particularly, Anglo-American geography. Contracting Geography’s long and global history, Stoddart (1985) proclaimed that modern Geography was a distinctively European science that could be traced back to a series of decisive advances in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. It was then, so Stoddart argued, that ‘truth’ was made the central criterion of objective science through the systematic deployment of observation, classification and comparison, and in his view it was the extension of these methods from the study of NATURE to the study of human societies ‘that made our subject possible’. But the critique of the assumptions that underwrote such a claim, sharpened by the rise of POSTCOLONIALISM, prompted many commentators to re-situate that project as a profoundly Eurocentric and, more recently, Euro-American science (see EUROCENTRISM) (Gregory, 1994). Geography has thus come to be seen as a SITUATED KNOWLEDGE that, of necessity, must enter into conversations with scholars and others who occupy quite different positions.

This is not only (or even primarily) a matter of interdisciplinary dialogue; it also implies inter-locational dialogue. The more restricted idea of an Anglo-American Geography was largely a creature of the 1960s and 70s when, at the height of the QUANTITATIVE REVOLUTION, it seemed that a unified and coherent MODEL-based Geography was emerging on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘Theory’, too, seemed to offer a universal language that held out the promise of a unified, even unitary discipline. The subsequent critique of SPATIAL SCIENCE opened up many other paths for geographers to explore, and in that sense promoted diversification, but in Human Geography in particular it also heralded divergence as it prised apart the commonalities that once held the Anglo-American corpus together (cf. Johnston and Sidaway, 2004). This coherence (or rigidity, depending on your point of view) has also been assailed by a growing concern about the grids of power and privilege that structure the international academy, and in particular the silences and limitations of a narrowly English-language geography. If, as Wittgenstein observed, ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’, then a geography that privileges one language is not only limited: it is also dangerous (Hassink, 2007). This poses an obvious difficulty for dictionaries of Geography like this one (cf. Brunotte, Gebhardt, Meurer, Meusburger and Nipper, eds., 2002; Levy and Lussault, eds., 2003).

That said, Anglophone geographers have not been wholly indifferent to work in other languages. Hartshorne’s (1939) inquiry into the nature of Geography was an exegesis of a largely German-language tradition, and British and American historians of Geography have long acknowledged the foundational role of figures like Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), Karl Ritter (1779-1859), Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) (see ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY) and, in France, Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918). From the closing decades of the twentieth century, however, as Human Geography took an ever closer interest in continental European PHILOSOPHY – Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Jürgen Habermas, Julia Kristeva and Henri Lefebvre have all occupied prominent positions in contemporary discussions – there was, until very recently, little or no equivalent interest in continental European Geography (apart from the work of Nordic geographers available in English). One of the ironies of Stoddart’s thesis about Geography as a European science has been the extraordinary indifference of much of the Euro-American discipline to the multiple European genealogies of geographical discourse (cf. Godlewska, 1999; Minca, 2007). COLONIALISM and IMPERIALISM continue to cast long shadows over the discipline too: outside DEVELOPMENT GEOGRAPHY there has been a comparable lack of interest in the work of geographers from the global South (cf. Slater, 2004).

It is true that conferences under the auspices of the International Geographical Union and major national GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETIES (especially the Association of American Geographers and also the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers) attract participants from all over the world, but being together is not the same as talking together. Smaller, more focused meetings have usually been more successful at encouraging dialogue, and the activities of the International Critical Human Geography Group, the Aegean Seminars and international conferences in historical geography and ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY have all helped to dissolve these parochialisms. But it has proved remarkably difficult to facilitate a less episodic, global exchange of ideas, and concern continues to be expressed about the HEGEMONY of English-language Geography in nominally ‘international’ meetings and journals (Garcia-Ramon, 2003; Paasi, 2005). It may be that physical geographers have been more successful in resolving these issues, and that their ideas travel through more effective and multi-directional channels. Their main journals attract contributions from authors in many countries, and the International Association of Geomorphologists has promoted a series of international and regional conferences. But this apparent success may also reflect a problematic conviction that ‘science’ is itself an international and‘interest-free language (cf. Peters, 2006).

(3) To make ‘space’ focal to geographical inquiry is not to marginalize PLACE, REGION or LANDSCAPE. These constructs have often been opposed in Geography’s theory-wars, but while they are certainly different concepts with different entailments, genealogies and implications (all of which need to be respected) they all also register modes of producing SPACE as a field of differentiation and integration. To say this is to recognize Geography’s dependence on a series of technical and theoretical devices. This was so even when Geography was conducted under the sign of a supposedly naïve EMPIRICISM, what William Bunge and William Warntz once called ‘the innocent science’, because the production and certification of its knowledges involved a series of calculative and conceptual templates. Technically, the ongoing formation of Geography has been intimately involved with the changing capacity to conceive of the Earth as a whole (Cosgrove, 2001) and to fix and discriminate between positions on its surface (in geodesy, navigation and the like), and thus with the development of CARTOGRAPHY and GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS (GIS) that provide compelling demonstrations of the relevance of ‘location, location, location’ to more than real estate sales (Pickles, 2004; Short, 2004). The history of these procedures is closely associated with that of EXPLORATION, the politico-economic adventures of CAPITALISM, the occupations and dispossessions of COLONIALISM and IMPERIALISM, modern WAR and the deep interest of the modern STATE in the calculation and imagination of TERRITORY. To list these entanglements is not to imply a simple history of complicity, but this in its turn is not a plea for exculpation of ‘Geography Militant’ (Driver, 2001): it is merely to note that many of these technical devices can be (and have been) turned to critical account, as the development of critical or radical cartographies and critical GIS attests (Crampton and Krygier, 2006; Harvey, Kwan, Pavovska, 2005), and to underscore that the ‘technical’ is never far from the political. These means of knowing and rendering the world have been reinforced by formal theories about location, spatialization and interdependence that have offered an increasingly sophisticated purchase on geographies of UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT and the variable intersections between capitalism, war and GLOBALIZATION (Smith, 1984; Harvey, 2003; Sparke, 2004). These formulations are themselves marked by their origins, and the privileges of location that they address – and incorporate (Slater, 1992) – have been underwritten by less formal but no less rhetorically powerful IMAGINATIVE GEOGRAPHIES that not only inculcate a ‘sense of place’ that is central to identity-formation and the conduct of EVERYDAY LIFE but also work to normalize particular ways of knowing the world and to produce allegiances, connections and divisions within it (Gregory, 2004) (see also GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINARIES).

By these various means, ‘space’ has been produced, at once materially and discursively, through a series of what are profoundly political technologies. Hence, for example, Pickles’s (2004: 93) pithy sense of the PERFORMATIVITY of cartography: ‘Mapping, even as it claims to be reproducing the world, produces it.’ Attempts to understand these processes of production have involved historical accounts of the development of concepts and the systems of practice in which they have been embedded, in both Physical and Human Geography (see, e.g., Beckinsale, Chorley and Dunn, 1964; 1973; 1991; Gregory, 2008). They have involved explorations of other versions of those spatializations too: experiments with different concepts of LANDSCAPE, PLACE, REGION, and SPACE itself (see, e.g., Holloway, Rice and Valentine, 2004). In the same vein, there have been repeated forays into the vexed question of SCALE, which most physical geographers – in the wake of Schumm and Lichty’s (1965) classic essay – seem to regard as the very skeleton of their subject (Church and Mark, 1980) while at least some human geographers see it as the disarticulation of theirs (cf. Sheppard and McMaster, 2004; Marston, Jones and Woodward, 2005). The interrogation of these concepts has been an increasingly interdisciplinary project – none of them is the peculiar possession of Geography, even if geographers have done their most characteristic work with the tools they provide: ‘Space is the everywhere of modern thought’ (Crang and Thrift 2000:1) – and some commentators have identified a ‘spatial turn’ across the whole field of the humanities and the social sciences (Thrift, 2002).

(4) This turn has been sustained, in part, by a recognition that the outcome of processes differs from place to place. The variable character of the earth’s surface has long driven inquiries into AREAL DIFFERENTIATION in both Physical and Human Geography, and contrary to the predictions of prophets and critics of MODERNITY the transformations brought about by globalization have not planed away differences: instead, they have produced new distinctions and juxtapositions. Physical Geography has always been acutely sensitive to macro- and meso-variations in landforms and processes, particularly those related to climate and geology. But we now have a clearer sense of the ways in which those variations have been culturally coded and constructed: W.M. Davis’s once canonical (1899) description of fluvial erosion in temperate regions as the ‘normal’ cycle of erosion (which would startle people living in other regions), for example, and the vast discursive apparatus of TROPICALITY that yoked land to life in low latitudes. Spurred on by the rapid rise of Earth Systems Science, we also have a much surer understanding of the global regimes and interdependencies in which environmental variations are enmeshed (Slaymaker and Spencer, 1998). In much the same way, Human Geography retains its interest in the particularity of PLACE but now usually works with a ‘global sense of place’ (Massey, 1994; cf. Cresswell, 2004). Similarly, REGIONS are now rarely seen as the independent building blocks of a global inventory; a revitalized REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY focuses instead on the porosity of regions and on the intersecting processes through which their configurations are produced and transformed (Amin, 2004). Here too, Geography is not alone in its interest: AREA STUDIES, International Relations and International Studies have declared interests in these issues too, though where these interests have been wired to the conduct of foreign policy they have typically provided a narrower, more instrumental framing of interdependence than is now usual in Geography.

More fundamentally, however, the spatial turn has also been sustained through investigations of the ways in which space affects the very operation of processes. It is now widely recognized that processes are not indifferent to the circumstances and configurations in which they operate, and it is this ‘thrown-togetherness’ that has prompted a renewed interest in spatial ONTOLOGY (Massey, 2005). This was, in a way, precisely Hartshorne’s point – and it is also the pivot around which so much of Torsten Hägerstrand’s extraordinary experiments with TIME-GEOGRAPHY moved –but it is now being sharpened in radically different ways. It is also why Geography has always placed such a premium on field work (which was focal to Stoddart’s account too). Unlike field sciences, laboratory sciences can, in some measure, control for disturbances and isolate parameters to create idealized states. In much the same way, spatial science was an attempt to prise apart different spatial structures – the hexagonal lattices of CENTRAL PLACE systems, the wave forms of DIFFUSION processes – and then search for commonalities within these spatializations (market areas and drainage basins as hexagons) or combine them in idealized MODELS (the diffusion of innovations through central place systems). These were all attempts to order what is now most often seen as a partially ordered world: to tidy it up. As the philosopher A.N. Whitehead warned, however, ‘Nature doesn’t come as clean as you can think it’, and it is in this spirit that much of Geography is increasingly exercised by the ways in which the co-existence of different spatializations perturbs, disrupts and transforms the fields through which social and bio-physical processes operate. Physical Geography was in the vanguard of attempts to find the terms for what B.A. Kennedy (1979) memorably described as ‘a naughty world’, and since then Human Geography has also recognized the non-linearity, contingency and complexity of life on earth.

(5) The processes with which Geography is concerned are conventionally and collectively identified as ‘social’ (economic, cultural, political, etc.) and ‘bio-physical’ (biological, chemical, geophysical, etc). These two realms have often been assigned to a separate HUMAN GEOGRAPHY and PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY, and the relations between the two have frequently prompted concern, on occasion even antagonism. In some institutional systems the two are more or less completely separate – in the Nordic countries, for example, there are usually separate university departments of Human and Physical Geography – while in others one more or less dominates to the virtual exclusion of the other (in India Human Geography is considerably more prominent than Physical Geography, for example, while in the United States, until very recently, ‘Geography’ was overwhelmingly Human Geography). Although most major geographical societies publish general journals that include papers in both Physical and Human Geography – in the English-speaking world, these include the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Canadian Geographer, Geographical Journal, Geographical Research, Geographical Review, South African Geographical Journal, and the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers – in recent years many of them have found it difficult to attract physical geographers to their pages. (In Sweden the English-language Geografiska Annaler is published as separate series in Physical and Human Geography). There are some newer, general journals produced by commercial publishers too, notably Geoforum, GeoJournal and Geography Compass, and also technical journals like Geographical analysis and the International journal of Geographical Information Science. Publishing in the same journals does not imply a common discursive community, of course, and neither does it necessarily produce one: the sheer volume of academic publication makes most readers ever more selective (and perhaps idiosyncratic). But in any case the numbers of general journals have been dwarfed by the explosion of specialized, sub-disciplinary journals like Earth surface processes and landforms, the Journal of biogeography, Physical Geography, and Progress in physical geography on one side, and Antipode, Cultural geographies, Economic geography, the Environment and Planning journals, Gender, place and culture, Journal of historical geography, Political geography, Progress in human geography and Social and cultural geographies on the other. Many of these journals advertise themselves as ‘interdisciplinary’, but the two groups reach out in opposite directions – to the atmospheric, biological and earth sciences, or to the humanities and social sciences – rather than to each other.

Openness to other disciplines is widely accepted as indispensable for intellectual vitality, but there has also been a persistent anxiety that arrangements and practices like these make a mockery of claims that Geography studies the relations between the human and physical worlds, and at the limit threaten Geography’s institutional survival when ecological awareness and demands for SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT are being articulated by other disciplines and emerging interdisciplinary fields (cf. Turner, 2002). To be sure, human geographers have long had important things to say about NATURE – it was only on the isotropic planes of spatial science that the bio-physical environment was erased – and a host of studies in CULTURAL ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY, HAZARDS research and POLITICAL ECOLOGY testify to the power of their contributions. Similarly, physical geographers have long been interested in the intersection of human and physical systems (cf. Bennett and Chorley, 1978). In geomorphology, many consultative, geo-technical projects – perhaps most obviously on flooding, soil erosion, slope stability and the like – reveal the continuing vitality of this stream of work, and the atmospheric sciences have placed considerable emphasis on their practical relevance. In the future a revitalized BIOGEOGRAPHY (as a sort of ‘living earth science’) may well make some of the most direct connections to Human Geography and, indeed, to green politics, while pressing issues of global environmental change and GLOBAL WARMING require a transdisciplinary approach that speaks across the sciences, social sciences and humanities (see also Turner et al, 1990).

But to have important things to say – and vital questions to address – does not mean that human and physical geographers speak the same language, and translation has its own problems (Bracken and Oughton, 2006). Many commentators, inside and outside Geography, have insisted on a fundamental distinction between the methods of the natural sciences (that probe an ‘object-world’) and those of the humanities and social sciences (that probe a ‘subject-world’). Unlike pebbles rolling along the bed of a river or grains of sand cascading over the crest of a dune, human beings are suspended in webs of meaning: those meanings make a difference to conduct in ways that have no parallel in the domain of the natural sciences, and their elucidation requires radically different interpretative procedures. Proponents of HUMANISTIC GEOGRAPHY were among those most likely to advance these arguments in the 1970s and 80s, but the rise of POSTMODERNISM and the correlative CULTURAL TURN across the humanities and social sciences in the 1990s – and in particular the so-called ‘science wars’ epitomised by the Sokal affair (in which physicist Alan Sokal successfully submitted a spoof ‘cultural studies’ article to the journal Social text) (cf. Ross, 1996) –must have convinced many physical geographers that their commitment to Science put them at a considerable distance from many if not most human geographers.

There have been three major responses to such polarising views. The first has been to appeal to SCIENCE STUDIES to argue that Physical Geography, like science more generally, is a social practice too; it has its own, highly formalized rules, but it constantly traffics in meanings and interpretations. Seen thus, physical geographers are caught in the HERMENEUTIC circle, and as invested in textualization, rhetoric and the like as human geographers (Harrison, 2001; Phillips, 1999; Speddy, 1997; Sugden, 1996). These commonalities extend beyond the notebook or the printed page, however, and include, crucially, the performance of FIELD WORK (Powell, 2002). The second response has been to return to PHILOSOPHY and explore post-positivist philosophies of science that provide more nuanced explanations of both social and bio-physical systems and allow for a more sophisticated understanding of contingency than the objectivist canon. REALISM has played a pivotal role here, not least through its qualified NATURALISM, and following its early consideration by human geographers (Sayer, 1984, 1992) it has been explored by a growing number of physical geographers (Richards, Brookes, Clifford, Harris and Lane, 1998; Raper and Livingstone, 2001). The third response, stimulated by attempts to theorize the PRODUCTION OF NATURE (Smith, 1984), has been to call into question the very distinction between the ‘social’ and ‘bio-physical’ (Braun and Castree 1998; Castree and Braun, 2001) and to recognize the vital importance of ‘hybrid geographies’ (Whatmore, 2005). A host of new approaches has confounded the deceptively commonsensical partitions between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, including ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY, AGENT-BASED MODELLING, COMPLEXITY THEORY, and NON-REPRESENTATIONAL THEORY. With one or two exceptions, it seems that human geographers are more drawn to some of these possibilities and physical geographers to others, and they do not in themselves constitute a common intellectual language. But what C.P. Snow famously castigated as ‘the two cultures’ in the late 1950s, one literary-social and the other physical-scientific, has come to be recognized as an artifice, and there have been a number of attempts to conduct what the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers called ‘conversations across the divide’ (Harrison, Massey, Richards, Magilligan, Thrift and Bender, 2004).

Not all observers of interventions like these are sanguine about the prospects for a plenary Geography (cf. Johnston, 2005; Viles, 2005), and at the end of the day it may not matter very much. Most physical and human geographers are probably too involved in their own teaching and research to bother very much about such meta-issues. If they are interested in (say) residential segregation in cities or the dynamics of gravel-bed rivers, most scholars pursue whatever avenues of inquiry seem most promising and do not draw back at disciplinary borders or worry about disciplinary integrity. It is hard to say – or see – why they should. To be sure, some work is by its very nature hybrid, hence the rise of ENVIRONMENTAL GEOGRAPHY, but it is a mistake to identify institutional politics with intellectual substance. Funding for teaching and research has become a crucial issue for all disciplines, and its impact should not be minimized. Advertising the capacity of Geography to bring together the sciences, social sciences and humanities may bring its institutional rewards, but the intellectual realization of an interdisciplinary project through disciplinary privilege is surely a contradiction in terms. Disciplines are contingent institutional arrangements, and while each has a canon of sorts, activated through courses and text-books, students and professors, societies and journals, and while there have often been attempts to police the frontiers (or to extend them through disciplinary imperialism), the fact remains that intellectual work of any significance has never been confined by administrative boundaries. Most scholars travel in interdisciplinary space, and while Geography may have been unusually promiscuous in its encounters, it is by no means alone: as Gregson (2005: 7) astutely remarks, ‘ours is increasingly a post-disciplinary world in which the geographical is critical but not ours to possess.’

(6) The emphasis on process-based explanations is common to Human Geography, Physical Geography, and many of the interchanges between them. Contemporary geographical inquiry does not stop at mapping outcomes – a sort of global gazetteer – and the FRICTION OF DISTANCE is no longer viewed as an adequate surrogate for the operation of the processes that produce those outcomes. Hence the focus on PRACTICES and structures, micro-processes and SYSTEMS. In Human Geography, the argument was put with characteristic force by Soja (1989: 37-8), who identified a persistent disciplinary tendency to limit inquiry to the description and calibration of ‘outcomes deriving from processes whose deeper theorization was left to others’ in ‘an infinite regression of geographies upon geographies’. His solution, like an increasing number of his peers, was not to import theorizations of processes from SOCIAL THEORY, but (much more radically) to ‘spatialize’ social theory ab initio and to think about the PRODUCTION OF SPACE in ways that eventually troubled the dualism (even the DIALECTIC) of spatial form and social process. Others followed other routes to different destinations, but the common result was to underline the importance of ONTOLOGY to Human Geography. Some physical geographers had started to focus on process-based explanations in the 1950s, under the influence of American geologist and geomorphologist Arthur N. Strahler (1918-2002) and his graduate students, and by the time human geographers were recoiling from SPATIAL FETISHISM their physical colleagues were heavily invested in the measurement of atmospheric, biological and geomorphological processes. But here too there has been a concerted attempt to think about process in less mechanistic terms than those early projects allowed, and in consequence to recognize the practical importance of ‘philosophical speculation about the fundamental “stuff” or substance of reality’ for geomorphology and other fields of Physical Geography (Rhoads, 2006: 15; cf. Harvey, 1996).

This interest in PROCESS is, in one sense, a peculiarly modern fascination: in a world where, as Marx so famously put it, ‘all that is solid melts into air’, there is a particular premium on describing, monitoring and accounting for change. But there is also a vital interest in planning, predicting, and implementing change. This has had two crucial impacts on the development of contemporary Geography. The first is a renewed interest in political and ethical questions. Intervening in situations of politico-ecological catastrophe or war, where ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, human RIGHTS and even our very survival as a species may be at stake, requires more than a detached, analytical gaze. In its classical, Greek form Geography was closely associated with political and moral philosophy, and the luminous writings of the gentle anarchist geographer Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921) provided a rare, modern insistence on the importance of such questions. These were revived most effectively by David Harvey in the second half of the twentieth century, whose forensic dissection of late capitalism through a close reading and reformulation of Marx’s writings did much to alert human geographers to the ineluctable politics of their inquiries. This raised a series of questions about EPISTEMOLOGY and the limits of geographical knowledge that required a critique not only of Geography’s technical and conceptual armatures – including those derived from its newfound interest in Marxism – but of (for example) the MASCULINISM that was reproduced through its concepts and practices (Rose, 1993). The ongoing formation of a CRITICAL HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, including CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS and FEMINIST GEOGRAPHIES, reinforced and generalized these concerns (see also RADICAL GEOGRAPHY). Physical geographers were by no means indifferent to them, but they seem to have been more directly moved by the consideration of an explicitly environmental ETHICS. Indeed, moral philosophies more generally have assumed such prominence alongside philosophies of science in contemporary geographical inquiry that some observers have discerned a ‘moral turn’ across the discipline as a whole (Barnett and Land, 2007; cf. Smith, 2000; Lee and Smith, 2004).

The second consequence of orienting geographical inquiry towards change and the future has been a recognition that Geography’s responsibilities extend beyond a critical involvement in PUBLIC POLICY – important though that is – to a considered engagement in public debate (Murphy, 2006). This involves a more rigorous REFLEXIVITY: not only a careful and constructive critique of theories, methods and materials, but also an examination of the circumstances in which geographies are being produced and circulated and of the consequences in which they are implicated. This process might well begin ‘at home’, in the classroom and the lecture theatre, but it cannnot end there. The late modern corporate university, with its audit culture, its vested interest in the commodification of knowledge, and its incorporation of many of the modalities of NEOLIBERALISM, materially affects teaching and research. At the same time, however, precisely because geographical knowledges are produced at so many sites outside formal educational institutions, public responsibility also involves a willingness to learn from and engage with audiences far beyond the academy, many of whose lives have been ravaged by the unregulated intrusions of the supposedly ‘free’ market, by new rounds of accumulation by dispossession and by the forcible installation of radically new geographies (Harvey, 2003; Lawson, 2007). To analyze and challenge these impositions requires more than ‘earth-writing’ in its literal sense; geographers neglect the art of writing at their peril, but they also need to write in different (‘non-academic’) styles for different audiences, to explore new technologies and media, and to experiment with different modes of presentation. None of this is about experimentation for its own sake, because the new-found interest in PUBLIC GEOGRAPHIES is not only about producing counter-publics imbued with a critical GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION: it is also, crucially, about learning from and engaging them in open and respectful dialogue. This matters because Geography is not, as the old saw has it, ‘what geographers do’: it is, in an important sense, what we all do. Claims about ‘the end of geography’ have been made since at least the early twentieth century, but (then as now) they have also always been claims about the rise of new geographies and, less obviously perhaps, the grids of power that they forward (Smith, 2003). Geo-graphing, whether ‘professional’ or ‘popular’, thus never works on a blank surface: it always involves writing over (superimposition) and writing out (erasure and exclusion) (Sparke, 2005: xvi). Textbooks and dictionary entries are no exception.

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