ABSTRACT
Without social movements and wider struggles for progressive social change, the field of Geography would lack much of its contemporary relevance and vibrancy. Moreover, these struggles and the geographical scholarship that engages with them have changed the philosophical underpinnings of the discipline and have inflected the quest for geographical knowledge with a sense not only of urgency but also hope. This reader, intended for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate courses in Geographic Thought, is at once an analysis of Geography’s theoretical and practical concerns and an encounter with grounded political struggles.
This reader offers a fresh approach to learning about Geographic Thought by showing, through concrete examples and detailed editorial essays, how the discipline has been forever altered by the rise of progressive social struggles. Structured to aid student understanding, the anthology presents substantive main and part introductory essays and features more than two dozen unabridged published works by leading scholars that emphatically articulate geographic thought to progressive social change. Each section is introduced with an explanation of how the following pieces fit into the broader context of geographic work amidst the socially progressive struggles that have altered social relations in various parts of the world over the last half-century or so. Doubly, it places this work in the context of the larger goals of social struggles to frame or reframe rights, justice, and ethics. Geographic Thought provides readers with insights into the encounters between scholarship and practice and aims to prompt debates over how social and geographical knowledges arise from the context of social struggles and how these knowledges might be redirected at those contexts in constructive, evaluative ways.
The reader is unique not only in knowing Geographic Thought through its progressive political attachments, instead of through a series of abstract "isms", but in gathering together salient works by geographers as well as scholars in cognate fields, such as Nancy Fraser, Chantal Mouffe, Iris Marion Young, and Jack Kloppenberg, whose own engagements have proved lasting and influential. For researchers and students interested in the connections between theoretically informed work and the possibilities for bettering people’s everyday lives, this book provides an innovative and compelling argument for why Geographic Thought is valuable and necessary.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|45 pages
The Politics of Geographic Thought
part 2|140 pages
Staking Claims
part 1|39 pages
Characterizing Oppressions and Recognizing Injustice
chapter 5|18 pages
Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics
part 2|32 pages
Making Justice Spatial
part 3|64 pages
Practicing Politicized Geographic Thought
chapter 11|14 pages
Situated Knowledge Through Exploration
part 3|184 pages
Goals and Arenas of Struggle: What is to be Gained and How?
part 4|73 pages
Rights-Based Goals
chapter 13|16 pages
Human Rights and Development in Africa
chapter 14|17 pages
New World Warriors
chapter 15|18 pages
Social Theory and the De/Reconstruction of Agricultural Science
part 5|57 pages
Justice-Based Goals
chapter 17|14 pages
Environmental Justice and American Indian Tribal Sovereignty
part 6|46 pages
Ethics-Based Goals