Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Editorial: Joined‐up geographies

2005; Wiley; Volume: 30; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1475-5661.2005.00188.x

1475-5661

Susan J. Smith,

Geographic Information Systems Studies

Geography of late has been mercifully free of the definitional angst that periodically traumatizes its practitioners. Geographers have in fact been so relaxed about geography that there is nothing between ‘genetics’ and ‘geology’ in Dorling Kindersley's Children's Illustrated Encyclopedia (2000) and nothing to separate geography from environmental studies (or to link it with earth science) in the structure of Britain's 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. This does not seem to have prevented the second in line to the British throne securing a degree in the subject, or to have deterred a string of celebrities from gracing a wide range of Royal Geographical Society events. On the other hand, the subject seems so slippery that it has all but vanished round the edge of some key university restructurings, and more or less merged into the mix of a revamped division of intellectual labour. Geographers’ distaste for disciplinism, geography's own disciplinary diffidence, and the subject's place at the leading edge of a genuine transdisciplinary turn, have conspired to make the whole of geography seem less than the sum of its parts. Not necessarily because the subject is irrelevant or small; more plausibly it reflects the extent to which geography has exceeded itself. It is everything, rather than nothing. To the extent that geography lays any claim to distinction it is surprising how often – despite any number of protestations to the contrary – authors (in practice) define the geography in their work by tacit or explicit appeal to space, place or some similar indicator of, well, geography. There is a tendency, still, for geographers to identify themselves with reference to the common recognition they have – as experts in a wide range of otherwise-disparate subjects – for the extent to which space matters. There is, of course, much more to geographical writing than this, but even the briefest overview of key papers in core disciplinary journals resonates with spatial features, concepts, metaphors, policies or practices. And the literature is all the richer for it. In fact, this has proved to be such a critical way into (and out of) so many theoretical, political, ethical and empirical dilemmas that themes which once seemed distinctively and almost exclusively geographical in orientation (in that it was largely ‘geographers’ who pursued them) have become foundational for many areas of social and economic, as well as physical and biological, research. Geography, it seems, has become too important to leave to geographers. The challenge of doing a geography that is everything for a readership embracing everyone is taken up in this issue of Transactions, which contains a selection of ideas presented to the RGS/IBG plenary on Geography: Looking Forward at the IGU Congress in Glasgow in August 2004. The papers signal a shift of emphasis at the cutting edge of the discipline. They do, largely, buy into the idea of geography as a cluster of specialisms, glued in place by a common respect for (some idea of) space. But they add a vision for geography as a discipline that itself specializes in the art, and the science, of connectedness. These papers are, then, about geography as an enterprise of relatedness whose vitality is secured by forging connections and crossing intellectual horizons; by pulling the world apart, reassembling it, and adding to it, in a variety of intriguing, ethically charged, sometimes surprising, and frequently controversial ways. To a large extent the impulse for the various ‘conversations’ that set this connectivity in motion – at least in so far as the papers which follow are concerned – came from the dialogue across physical and human geography promoted in so many interesting and challenging ways by Doreen Massey, Keith Richards and Stephan Harrison both in their ‘conversations’ held at the RGS in London – informal and at annual conferences – and in their work at the Glasgow IGU. Doreen Massey in fact opened the plenary proceedings that inspired this issue with a thought-provoking reflection on the promise and difficulties of conversing in this way. She spoke engagingly about how thinking – and speaking – geographically can itself enrich the act of conversation. And she emphasised the hard work that this entails. Serious conversation demands patience: it is a considered exercise in careful listening; a long game. Keith Richards recognised this too, in his spoken commentary on the merits of a geographical ethics, whose environmental, spatial and locational dimensions conspire to protect a range of human rights. In different ways the conversational imperative is drawn into this issue of Transactions, first in David Livingstone's narrative on the geography of encounter with scientific texts, and then in Mike Summerfield's cautionary tale of a communicative rift that may be forging two geomorphologies. Building from this momentum the essays that follow tangle themselves intriguingly into a world where culture meets, and melds, with environment, genetics blurs into experience, humanity is wired to technology, and the psyche is situated and social. Geography forms a hub for these networks of relatedness in which lives are, as Sallie Marston and her colleagues put it, linked through the unfolding of intermeshed sites. These newly, or differently, ‘joined-up’ geographies may signal a break with tradition. They do express what geography is and has been about; but they also – indeed mainly – provide a glimpse of what the subject is becoming. They point to the actancy of geography, positioned awkwardly, but productively, as an interface for the social, natural and biological sciences, exploiting the creative tensions thrown up by the encounter of art with technology, culture with nature, ecologies with economies. In these readings and writings, by way of these politics and ethics, geography is both an interstitial subject and an impulse to interdisciplinarity. It fills the neglected spaces ‘in-between’ human, physical and medical sciences with potential; it is a creative practical exercise; a mode of inventive intelligence, through which the virtual becomes real as the world unfolds.