Janice Monk and Evelyn Stokes

Abstract

Emeritus Professor Janice Monk argues for the importance of examining ‘the careers of women geographers’ (Monk 2004, 1), and so in this chapter we take the opportunity to turn our attention towards her own impressive career. We also turn our attention towards another woman geographer, the late Professor Dame Evelyn Stokes, who like Monk, over the course of many decades, made a rich contribution to the discipline of human geography. Both Monk and Stokes have been hugely influential in each of our own scholarly journeys and so for us bringing their contributions together here is an honour, even if a somewhat daunting task! In this chapter we adopt an approach that Monk (2004, 2) herself used when examining the careers of women geographers, that is to acknowledge ‘the existence of multiple histories’ and the importance ‘of recognizing differences among women as gender intersects an array of other distinctions, among them race and ethnicity, class, place, and time’. Monk and Stokes each have a different history despite both being born in Australasia (Monk in Australia and Stokes in Aotearoa New Zealand) within a few months of each other (Monk in March 1937 and Stokes in December 1936). Their lives unfolded differently, they inhabited different contexts. Monk spent her academic career not in her country of birth but in North America, while Stokes, although she travelled to North America to undertake her PhD, upon completion returned to spend her academic career in Aotearoa New Zealand. Despite Monk and Stokes having different histories and life stories, they also share common ground. Both were hugely influential in shaping critical geography – Monk in shaping gender geography and Stokes in shaping Māori geography. Also, both, however, throughout their careers looked beyond one single axes of difference to instead focus on mutually constitutive forms of social oppression. Both, in many ways, were ahead of their time, engaging an intersectionality approach, and played a major role in shaping much of the debate in contemporary critical geography and geographical education that came to follow. A number of publications document separately Monk’s and Stokes’ rich contribution to discipline of geography but none have brought these two influential women geographers together on the page. We think its value is not only in that it illustrates the importance of the different cultural, social, political and economic contexts in which knowledge is produced, but it also shows that shared values (such as a belief in the importance of fairness, equity, justice, learning and knowledge) can result in similar or shared academic experiences. Both Monk and Stokes have ‘changed places’ through their critical scholarship and through their embodied experiences of living Down Under (Stokes) and North America (Monk).