Production Of Geographical Knowledge Research Articles

Intricate critical turn: changing geographical knowledge production in an authoritarian context

ABSTRACT This paper examines the critical shift in geographical knowledge production under the increasingly authoritarian political regime in Turkey, particularly in the aftermath of the unsuccessful 2016 coup attempt. In this context, semi-structured interviews were conducted with sixteen young geographers who experienced the authoritarian shift in the political regime during their graduate studies. The narratives of the interviewees indicate that the young geographers have undergone a critical transformation with two significant aspects: firstly, they reject the traditional style of geographical knowledge production and instead embrace approaches integrated with social theory, drawing from the extensive portfolio of contemporary geography. Secondly, they approach socio-spatial phenomena in a libertarian and critical manner, distinct from the lenses of the authoritarian system. However, due to their legitimate concerns, they often refrain from presenting such research on academic platforms. In this regard, under an authoritarian regime, the critical transformation consists of two dimensions: the arena where geographical products are shared, and the underground, where geographical ‘black boxes’ are held and kept hidden from public view.

Indian Time, Walking as Mapping, and Decolonial Methodologies in Mixteco Geographies

There has been an emerging shift by Indigenous geographers and non-Indigenous researchers to integrate decolonial methodologies into research protocols to challenge the Western Cartesian production of geographic knowledge across Native and Indigenous geographies. The commitment of geographic research with Indigenous communities must be to engage in a methodology guided by Indigenous temporality and Indigenous autonomous governance structures that allow the emergence of decolonial possibilities. This article extends the use of a decolonial research approach with Indigenous communities by applying it to Oaxaca, Mexico, in an Indigenous Mixteco municipality. I use a series of salient narratives from my field work in the summer of 2022 in a pueblo Mixteco to inform a decolonial method that engages with Indigenous normative governance structure (Altamirano-Jimenez 2020), “Indian time” (Blackwell 2023a) or Indigenous temporality (Curley and Smith 2024), and walking as map-making (Sletto et al. 2021) to suggest a decolonial Mixteco methodology with pueblos Mixtecos of Oaxaca, Mexico. I suggest that it is our responsibility as researchers, whether Indigenous or non-Indigenous, to uphold Indigenous governance across these differing temporalities and geographies, even once we leave the “field site” when dependent on Western academic timelines.

Situating knowledges, making kin and telling stories: Geographical encounters with Donna J Haraway

Donna Haraway has been a constant presence in geographical thought and practice over the past 30 years. From her early and very influential essay on Situated Knowledges, to her more recent engagements with the Anthropocene in Staying with the Trouble, her work has become a key reference point for questioning the production of geographical knowledge. In this commentary I trace the influence of Haraway's thought on geographical scholarship, exploring how it both shapes our disciplinary histories and provides a critical lens upon them. In particular I highlight how Haraway's work informs feminist and more-than-human geographies, resonates with Indigenous ontologies and challenges geographers to reflect critically on the implications of their positionality and provinciality for academic research.

Maps, Apps and Race: The Market as a Theoretical Machine

AbstractMy commentary situates Desiree Fields' lecture within a long‐standing movement that, paying attention to real estate data and techniques of property, turned the housing market into a theoretical machine. I understand her intervention as a fourth and pivotal conceptual moment in the study of housing markets and inequalities for the discipline of geography, for it brings racial capitalism and settler colonialism as theoretical starting points to analyse the political economy of housing in the era of digital property technologies. As such, her lecture opens up a welcome, ambitious, yet also uncertain terrain to advance global urban theory under platform capitalism and stimulate relational approaches in housing studies. Discussing the regularities through which race, technology and property shape housing and wealth inequalities across variegated sites of market‐making provides a conceptual horizontality that acknowledges the United States as a testing ground, rather than a ground truth, for the production of geographical knowledge.

Critiquing ‘powerful knowledge’ in school geography through a decolonial lens

ABSTRACT The concept of ‘powerful knowledge’ has risen to prominence in the school curriculum in England, taking on a life both in educational policy and in the work of schools, teachers, teacher educators and students. This article conducts a decolonial critique of ‘powerful knowledge’ in school geography. We begin by reviewing research about ‘powerful knowledge’ in geography education before turning to its interpretation in education policy and curriculum framings. We then offer our decolonial critique. We argue that the concept adopts reductive binary frames and neglects the racialising politics of geographical knowledge production. In doing so, ‘powerful knowledge’ marginalises the everyday knowledge of people globally and glosses over their ‘hidden’ geographies and histories in ways that sustain racialised global inequalities. We conclude by explaining the reasons for the emergence of ‘powerful knowledge’ and arguing for its demise on account of lack of analytical rigour and inattentiveness to social justice.

Towards mindful geographies

This paper proposes a mindful geography, in which mindfulness is understood as a research praxis and an alternative way to inhabit academia. Mindful geographies offer a resistance to ways the neoliberal university (and the discipline of geography) impacts the minds and bodies of those marginalised by this system. Firstly, to provide context to my argument, I situate myself within the literature pertaining to mindfulness. Subsequently, this allows me to focus on the ways geographers have engaged with mindfulness through the geographies of transformation, critical geographical perspectives on mindfulness, and non-representational approaches to the practice. This review allows me to engage with critical and transformational approaches to mindfulness through the interdisciplinary literature offering alternative pathways for the practice. Towards the end of the paper, I offer a different inflection for the ways that mindfulness might be used in geography. Here, I provide an explanation of the ways we might bring mindfulness into our geographical research practices to contribute to collective and individual development and healing. This work is prompted by personal experiences in the academy and seeks to promote a more mindful approach to academic knowledge and practice, one that foregrounds (self)care and slowness in the production of geographical knowledge.

Editors, Journals, and the Relational Geographies of Geographic Knowledge Production

Important in the dissemination of knowledge are the networks of editors and their editorial board members. These are crucial gatekeepers in maintaining contacts with their professional fields as well as identifying others to evaluate manuscripts submitted for possible publication. We examine the countries of editorial board members of twenty-nine major Anglophone journals and the regional sources of manuscripts and reviewers. The data reveal some journals have large numbers of board members and many submissions and others have much smaller numbers of both. North America (United States and Canada), Western Europe, and China were the major sources of English-language manuscripts submitted from 2017 to 2021. These results are useful for junior and senior scholars who seek to publish in major geographic journals.

Political Economy and Knowledge Production in the Making of the Viceroyalty of New Granada

Objective/Context: During the eighteenth century, officials from different colonial powers attempted to turn the viceroyalty of the New Kingdom of Granada—present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama—into an economically viable territory. The Spanish Crown embraced its most radical jurisdictional reform in centuries to exercise effective state control, extract more revenue, and defend the colonies from foreign incursions. This article explores the particularities of New Granada’s economic governance and argues that colonial officials produced local discourses of political economy to turn unfamiliar spaces into familiar places for economic, political, and military ends. In doing so, producing knowledge about the land and its resources became a key bureaucratic practice that shaped the imagining of a paradoxical territoriality in Northern South America. First, I detail the impact of political economy frameworks on imperial governance and bureaucratic practices. I then showcase how administrative narratives, mapping projects, and fiscal networks reveal the workings of Bourbon economic governance and the search for regional integration. Methodology: This article is built from an analysis of archival documents consisting of a selection of evidence from chorographic texts about New Granada and its provinces produced between 1720 and 1808. Originality: Reflecting on the ways in which the pursuit of knowledge for wealth creation affected the creation of territorialities contributes to uncovering how the imperial political economy was never a top-down imposition. Local officials negotiated it vis-à-vis singular geographical realities and knowledge production practices. Conclusions: Chorographic texts were central devices of imperial reform. The search for wealth production and territorial integration occurred in colonial outposts, not in intellectual treatises in Europe. In forging New Granada as an integrated, potentially rich place, bureaucrats’ experience of moving across the territory and inscribing the landscape on paper shaped perceptions of cohesion and difference, economic dependence, and regional fragmentation.

The ‘deer‐men’ and the ‘bowhead‐men’: The colonial co‐optation of Arctic Indigenous knowledge within the ‘origins of the Inuit’ debates

AbstractDrawing on recent literatures that explore the complicated role of ‘Indigenous intermediaries’ within histories of geographical exploration, and bringing these into dialogue with research exposing the colonial nature of geographical knowledge, this article studies the ways in which information extracted from an Indigenous Arctic informant named Nocum was crucial in the formation of troubling geographical understandings regarding Inuit ‘origins’ and migration. The article analyses the extractive nature of the intellectual contributions offered by the American traveller and scholar William Healey Dall, and situates them amidst their troubling imperial and racialised context. The article concludes by arguing that geographers must continue to identify and reflect critically on the role of indigenous peoples within the historical (co)production of geographical knowledge, but that they must be equally attentive to the ways this knowledge was regularly used to inform and justify various forms of imperial intervention and colonial violence.

On Art and Experimentation as Geographical Practice

Through a series of three vignettes, each of us critically reflects on how the visual arts have come to inform our geographical questions and approaches, illustrating the possibilities for art and experimentation as geographical practice. We outline common threads that run through our individual work, including our approaches to process and experimentation; our orientations towards the use, making, and reimagining of tools; and how we make spaces and time for art practice. Individually, we offer vignettes that capture and document fragments of our own practices that connect critical making, visual arts, cartography, and geographic inquiry. Collectively, our vignettes offer a gallery of possibilities for art and experimentation in geographical scholarship and pedagogy. By sharing our practices collectively, we aim to generate conversation that simultaneously recognizes connectivity and difference among these practices, while situating art and experimentation as modes of geographical inquiry and knowledge production.

Social experiments and the praxis of geographical knowledge production: Emerging architectural practices in urban and regional China

While knowledge production in geography is adept at providing critical perspectives that unravel the deficiencies in existing social, economic, and political systems, it has been less forthcoming in considering the means of constructing alternative worlds. One way to address this shortfall is to draw insights from social innovations produced in real-world contexts by a plurality of actors. In this commentary, we draw on the theoretical points underlying the existing literature on experiments in urban and regional contexts to illustrate the importance of architectural experiments in China. We also reflect on how such a research focus can enrich the analytical framework of social experiments by highlighting plural knowledge producers, diverse rationalities underlying experiments, and socio-economic relations beyond the market.

An Image of Northwest Yorùbáland during World War II

Abstract West Africa became more strategically important during the Second World War owing to the air reinforcement route to Northeast Africa. The West African Air Reinforcement Route (WARR) went across the colony of Nigeria into the African interior. Geographical knowledge production was important for the smooth running of these air logistics operations. The United States, which came on the air supply route in support of the British war effort, was involved in map production for this purpose. Hence, this paper explores the United States military cartography of WARR, used during the Second World War. In particular, it examines the 1942 image of Northwest Yorùbáland. This paper contends that the reproduced African landscapes of the Geographical Section of the General Staff (GSGS) 2465 Series convey ideological meanings. As a social practice, cartography during this global conflict resulted in further territorial ordering and control over the ground and air space of this part of West Africa. These Allied military maps depicted specific geographies along the trans-African air route, with precise strategic purpose, but they also had ideological implications for wider cultural geographies.

Geography education professionals’ understanding of global citizenship: Insights for a more just geography curriculum

ABSTRACT This study aims to articulate how the language of the geography curriculum privileges modernist discourses of global citizenship at the expense of others. Drawing on the work of two critical scholars, empirical data from South Korea reveals how geography education professionals (GEPs) engaged closely with the (re)production of geographical knowledge that perpetuates totalizing and non-inclusive discourses about the world. To achieve a more just geography curriculum, this study suggests that GEPs engage with a contextualized, empirical understanding of students’ engagement with knowledge concerning global others and discuss the politics and ethics of curriculum knowledge, in addition to the responsibilities involved in “writing the world.”

Whose geography do we review?

AbstractIn the context of discipline‐wide efforts to produce more inclusive, just, and equitable norms of geographical knowledge production, section editors for Geography Compass identify five concrete practices by which to address systemic inequities, injustices, and exclusions through their editorial work.

Mapping Pasturelands: The Production of Geographical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Qing Mongolia

Mapping Pasturelands: The Production of Geographical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Qing Mongolia

The Production of Geographical Knowledge in Medieval China

The Production of Geographical Knowledge in Medieval China

Ideas on technoscience and digital experimentation in geography

This paper carries out an analysis and reflection on how technoscience reaches Geography through Geographic Information Technologies, how it impacts the production of geographic knowledge and how it derives in the possibility of digital experimentation in the discipline in an environment called geo-digital reality. It is shown that advances in GIT have allowed overcoming old limitations, enriching more and more the observations made by Geography, and it is also highlighted the promising future of digital experimentation in Geography through all the possibilities offered by current technological developments.

How should we do the history of geographies during the period of state socialism? Historical period, space and expert knowledge in the post-war Czechoslovakia

Abstract A critical reflection on the current state of research into the history of the production of geographical knowledge during the period of state socialism is presented in this report. Using the example of the Czechoslovak administrative reform from 1949, several questionable aspects of current interpretations are identified. In particular, the problematic use of three crucial concepts in the study of the history of geography: time (a politics of memory); space (spatial imaginations); and geographical knowledge. Examples of approaches to each concept are presented, which can overcome the insufficiencies and contribute to a better understanding of the mutual relations between state socialism and the production of geographical knowledge. Research into the history of geography during the period of state socialism is important both to understand the current state of ‘post-socialist’ national geographies, and to add to the production of an inclusive history of global geography. One necessary condition is, however, to leave the current descriptive and encyclopaedic styles, which are marked with ahistoricism and presentism. In contrast, it is essential that the history of geography during the period of the state socialism become a serious issue, which is analysed through critical and reflexive approaches.

Globalizing geography before Anglophone hegemony: (buried) theories, (non-)traveling concepts, and “cosmopolitan geographers” in San Miguel de Tucumán (Argentina)

Abstract. The relationship between “national” geographical schools and an increasingly globalized geographical theory-building under the logics of Anglophone hegemony has generated critical debate within geography. This paper aims to contribute to current discussions on the development of differential, language-based “schools of thought” in geography and how these are mobilized and de- and recontextualized when they travel beyond their origins. However, it does not focus on the period of Anglophone hegemony but intends to shed a new, historically informed light on the politics of geographical knowledge production. Against this backdrop, we study why, how and with what consequences German geographical knowledge traveled to Argentina in the 1940s – the end of the “German hegemony” – following the employment by the National University of Tucumán (UNT) of the four German geography professors Wilhelm Rohmeder, Gustav Fochler-Hauke, Fritz Machatschek and Willi Czajka, all of whom had been institutionally and ideologically entwined with National Socialism. Firstly, we show that the epistemic differences between “national” schools of geographical thought – skillfully juggled by the geographers we analyze here – can provide an opportunity for the successful de- and recontextualization of theory. Secondly, we argue that boundary spanning and the traveling of theory beyond their geographical origins – largely (implicitly) viewed as progressive – should always be put in context(s) and assessed more cautiously from a normative point of view.

Decolonising spaces of geographical knowledge production: ‘Thinking geographically’ with undergraduate geographers in the RGS‐IBG at Kensington Gore

AbstractThis commentary is a response to the Area commentary by Mark Griffiths and Kate Baker, which draws focus on the problematic prominence of colonial material histories at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)'s Lowther Lodge site. We outline an undergraduate field trip – run collaboratively by University College London (UCL) and the RGS‐IBG since 2018 – for first‐year UCL geography students that aims to make them both aware of geography's problematic colonial histories, and party to the ways the discipline is changing and critically engaging with its past. Positioned at the intersections of teaching and research, we highlight this field trip because we believe it stands as an example of precisely the kind of decolonial engagement with the RGS‐IBG for which Griffiths and Baker call.