Social geography in the United States: everywhere and nowhere

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements We would like to thank Rob Kitchin for offering us the opportunity to write this report. We also thank John Paul Jones, III for his comments on an earlier version of this paper and Keith Woodward for engaging us in some of the nascent conversations that inform our thinking. This paper would not have been possible without the thoughtful comments from those scholars who took time to respond to our questions. These informal email conversations helped us think through some of the most significant issues covered here. We also benefited from discussions at the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, where J. Nicholas Entrikin, John Paul Jones III, and Lise Nelson contributed to a panel we organized titled 'Where is the social in social and cultural geography?' In the end, of course, this report is an incomplete representation of a very complicated historical process of intellectual and institutional developments of disciplinary geography in the United States over the last century. Notes 1 One might make the argument that physical geographers are also engaging with questions related to the representation of scale (Phillips 1999 Phillips, J.D. 1999. Methodology, scale, and the field of dreams. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 89(4): 754–760. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) as well as social theory more generally (Inkpen 2004 Inkpen, R. 2004. Science, Philosophy, and Physical Geography, London and New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]). 2 Smith (2000 Smith, N. 2000. Socializing culture, radicalizing the social. Social and Cultural Geography, 1(1): 25–28. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]: 26) argues that this may still be true: 'A backlash against progressive, critical and politically informed social science is already evident, perhaps more so in the USA than in the UK. National disciplinary associations have angled to the right and, in the case of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers and the American Anthropologist, have tried to marginalize social theory within their flagship journals'. Hannah (2006 Hannah, M. (2006) E-mail communication. [Google Scholar]) speculates as well that 'the neo-liberal and neo-conservative backlash since the early Reagan years, there has been a tendency in public discourse to associate the term 'social' with supposedly outdated concepts like 'social safety net', unionism, class, etc.' 3 Entrikin (1980 Entrikin, J.N. 1980. Robert Park's human ecology and human geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 70(1): 43–58. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) contends that while social and urban geographers from the 1950s to the 1980s traced their intellectual heritage to the Chicago School of Sociology's model of human ecology, Park himself was at pains to reject the contention that geography could be the science of human ecology due to its idiographic foundations. He argues further, that is was not until geography assumed a more nomothetic approach to the world, that it became more like sociology and ecology. 4 This is not completely surprising given Sauer's own ambivalence toward cultural geography as a subdiscipline. One may argue that 'cultural geography', as it was constituted in a US context, was more than what Sauer himself ever considered to be central to geography, which was 'biogeography, historical geography, Latin-American geography, or indeed a geography that defies definition' (Mikesell 1987: 145 as cited in Mitchell 2000 Mitchell, D. 2000. Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell. [Google Scholar]: 21). Also, Sauer's general disdain for 'urban' and 'modern' places meant that he would likely take issue with those geographers interested in social aspects of the city (Entrikin 1984 Entrikin, J.N. 1984. Carl Sauer, philosopher in spite of himself. Geographical Review, 74: 387–407. [Google Scholar]). 5 This is an interesting disciplinary moment that calls into question the efficacy of a 'country report'. Natalie Oswin, a geographer trained in Canada and now working in Singapore is engaging in a very US-based debate between queer geographers. Premised on territorial boundaries that are assumed to contain knowledges and knowledge production, the integrity of the country report—in the sense of its undivided or unbroken completeness—is at best questionable. 6 The social geographers we invited to converse with us were identified through departmental internet sites. We looked at the home pages of the top twenty PhD granting departments in the United States for the stated research interests of their faculty. All sixteen individuals who listed social geography as one of their research areas were contacted through an email message. Of the sixteen, ten joined our discussion. In addition, we contacted Matthew Hannah, who is part of the founding editorial board of the international journal Social Geography. He does not, however, self-identify as a social geographer. 7 There is an ongoing interest in the geographies of the census, migration, and immigration in US geography that parallels the work of Peach to a certain degree (Allen 2005 Allen, J.P. 2005. Ethnic geography dynamics: cluse from Los Angeles. Yearbook of the Pacific Coast Geographers, 67: 97–116. [Google Scholar]; Hardwick and Meacham 2005 Hardwick, S. and Meacham, J.E. 2005. Heterolocalism, networks of ethnicity, and refugee communities in the Pacific Northwest: the Portland Story. The Professional Geographer, 57(4): 539–557. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 8 We have to thank our colleague Keith Woodward for pointing this out to us. In his words, it might actually be possible to draw a distinction along the line of difference (social geography) and différance (cultural geography). We haven't fully digested this comment, so we stick here with 'cultural meanings' instead. 9 While not directly related to 1920s Chicago School Sociology, cartographic assessments of US demography, such as Allen and Turner (1988) and Brewer and Suchan (2001) are also important illustrations of an enduring interest in the social geography of the nation. 10 This is also suggested in the work of Peter Jackson (2003 Jackson, P. 2003. "Introduction: the social question". In Handbook of Cultural Geography, Edited by: Anderson, K., Domosh, M., Pile, S. and Thrift, N.J. 37–42. London: Sage. [Google Scholar]) and his recent analysis of social geography.

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