ABSTRACT
The title of critical geography's oft-identified ‘journal of record’ – Antipode – means not only oppositional, but also it describes Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand and their location at the opposite end of the earth from the western hemisphere home of both Europe's colonial project and the dominant discourses of Anglo-American geography. These two meanings frame the narrative of critical geography we produce in this chapter, in which we suggest that in these Antipodes, critical geography emerged not so much as oppositional to a centre, but as a component of the mainstream. In geographical scholarship, in disciplinary societies like the New Zealand Geographical Society and the Institute of Australian Geographers, in university departments and across sub-disciplinary fields, the radical and engaged activist edges to geographical scholarship have never been far from the centre, nor simply oppositional. The argument of this chapter, then, is that critical geographies in the Antipodes are characterized by both marginalization and centralization, as they address the environmental, social and economic challenges presented in these distinctive places, and their distinctive relationships to material and discursive trends in other places.
