How geographic thought happens: The autobiography of a mutable mobile

Abstract

This article approaches the history of geographic thought through a partial autobiography that covers the last 40 years – a period that corresponds with the existence of the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). The paper is informed by both memory and a personal archive of material from the mid to late 1980s. The autobiographical material is linked to the places that the author passed through and the ways these places, and the assemblage of people in them, influenced the author's development of ideas around place, mobility and knowledge. In this sense, this is an account of how theory, scholarship and the scholars that produce them arise in networked ways through connections that are embedded in place but are often from elsewhere, traveling through.