ABSTRACT
The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography offers a tool kit of critical, reflexive, and speculative approaches for studying resources and the socioecological systems with which they are co-constitutively entangled. This chapter introduces two fundamental ideas about critical resource geography that emerge from the Handbook's contents: first, that the critical analysis of resource systems and their historical and contemporary geographies is integral for understanding the state of the world; second, that doing critical resource geography involves ongoing reflection on how, why, and for whom academic knowledge production about resources matters. To advance these propositions, this chapter situates the descriptor “critical” in critical resource geography and outlines key trajectories of intellectual-political analysis within this body of scholarship, organized around two thematic areas: “(Un)knowing the World of Resources” and “Unbounding the World of Resources.” Together, these sections outline a heuristic device “resource-making/world-making” that builds from and further develops relational forms of thinking central to resource geography. Then, the chapter provides an overview of the objectives and contents of the Handbook's four main sections. Finally, the concluding section elaborates on the motivations that prompted this volume and invites readers to engage with the world of critical resource geography and the possibilities it presents.
