Introduction

The primary objective of this book is to extend our understanding of the development of critical geographies (plural) across a wide range of academic settings. In doing so, we also see this volume as contesting what we term the hegemonic history of critical geography in contemporary geographical scholarship. This hegemonic history is part of a wider Anglo-American hegemony in geography (see, e.g., Berg and Kearns, 1998; Gregson et al., 2003; Paasi, 2005; Timar, 2004). It is thus no surprise that the hegemonic history of critical geography reduces the multiple and complex histories of critical geographies around the world to a singular story that reinforces Anglo-American hegemony, where critical geography is understood to have originated in the United Kingdom and the United States and ‘diffused’ outward to the peripheries of academic knowledge production. These hegemonic stories tend to reproduce liberal epistemologies that construct all differences as the same kind of difference whilst at the same time reducing space to a simple, flat plane free of politics. The ironies of a critical geography that fails to critically interrogate its own stories should not be lost on us (Berg, 2004).