ABSTRACT
Being a rather unimaginative soul, I always ask applicants to the geography course where I teach the same question: ‘What would you say makes geography an interesting subject?’ Unsurprisingly I also nearly always get pretty much the same answers. One of the most common is that through geography one gets to hear about, see pictures of, and maybe even go to a lot of different places. Geographers travel, whether that be literally, through an emphasis on fieldwork and various sorts of exploration, or more virtually in the form of slide shows and reportage. Pushed as to why that is a good thing, these students tend to talk about the pleasures of getting to know particular, distinctive places. They also often argue for the importance of learning about areas of the world and people of which one would otherwise be largely ignorant. These responses cut straight to the heart of the discipline, I think. They home in on a triumvirate of ideas that have long fostered Human Geography’s understanding of itself as a distinctive intellectual endeavour. First, in the emphasis on the distinctive characters of particular places, they highlight the idea of the ‘local’. Second, bound up with a desire to broaden horizons and foster a greater ‘world awareness’ is the idea of the ‘global’. And third, central to this interest in both the local and global is an emphasis on ‘difference’ (between places and people). This chapter examines the relations between these three ideas: the local, the global and difference. It will, I hope, give a sense of how productive they have been, and can still be, for geographers. However, it also argues for critical reflection. Notions of the local, the global and difference are not as simple and obvious as they might at first seem. It is important to think carefully about each of these ideas, and perhaps even more so about how they relate to each other. If we do not, then we run the risk of simply reproducing conventional arguments about our world’s geographies, without even realizing that that is what we are doing. We may close off other possible ways of thinking and acting. We may end up learning rather less about places, their particularities and their differences than we should as thoughtful ‘travellers’.
