Dictionaries, disciplines and the future of geography

Abstract

This essay contributes to the discussions initiated by Setten [ Setten, 2008. Encyclopaedic vision: speculating on The Dictionary of Human Geography. Geoforum 39 (3), 1097–1104], about The Dictionary of Human Geography. Rather than focusing on the identity and relative exclusiveness of the contributors, I emphasize how successive editions of the Dictionary have helped reshape the discipline in two ways. First, the proliferation of texts, like the Dictionary, aimed squarely at a student market has gone hand in hand with a variety of changes to the political economy of publishing in geography. Second, human geography has increasingly come to be defined in terms of its concepts and theories. The paper ends by considering the implications of these changes for disciplinary unity and the future of geography given the increasing prominence of both of integrated environmental science and of GIS.