Toward Engaged Pluralism in Geographical Debate

Toward engaged pluralism in geographical debate Environment and Planning A has built its reputation as a journal that welcomes a plurality of sociospatial ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies, and a laudable variety of approaches graces the pages of the journal.These appear side by side, in the Confucian spirit of letting a thousand flowers bloom, but attempts to engage across these different approaches are rare (excepting the occasional theme issue with this as its goal).This lack of engagement is all too characteristic of the discipline as a whole, and indeed of Anglophone social sciences more generally.There are a variety of reasons for this.First, the social sciences and humanities remain dominated by papers written by single authors, unlike the natural sciences where research projects and published papers are commonly collaborative (with more than 100 authors on occasion).(Of course, competition between such research groups remains intense, and there are frequently all kinds of differences, inequalities, and struggles within research groups.)This culture reinforces an ethos of competitive individualism.It has been said that physical geographers step on one another's shoulders, whereas human geographers step on one another's faces (Lynn Staehili, personal communication).This competitive culture, in which individuals make their names by forging new directions through critiques of the present, is reinforced by the neoliberalization of the academy, by the shortening of the training of postgraduate studentsöwho have no time to learn the history of their discipline, by the decreasing half-life of ideas, by the prescription that young scholars should specialize, and by the personal nature of the reputations that are thereby at stake.As for neoliberalism more generally, the theoretical notion that everyone has a chance on a level playing field is trumped by a reality in which existing academic inequalities and power structures remain surprisingly durable (Johnston, 2006;Sheppard, 2006).This seems particularly the case in economic geography (cf Barnes and Sheppard, 2007), the subarea of the spatial social sciences with which we are most intimately familiar.On the one hand, stark differences exist among geographers, which tendentially split along such lines as quantitative/qualitative, political economy/cultural, and Marxist/poststructural.On the other hand, geographers and economists, all claiming to be pursuing economic geography, seem to inhabit different planets (economists on Mars, geographers on Venus).On more than one occasion in the last fifteen years, our own attempts to offer critical assessments of mainstream geographical economists' core dictums, in their preferred language of mathematical modeling, have been met by incredulity and dismissal from our intended audience.It is desirable, in Environment and Planning A but also in many other venues, to replace the current culture of, at best, live and let live (you do your thing, I'll do mine) with that of engaged pluralism.By engaged, we mean an open-ended attempt to learn about and learn from other approaches.By pluralism, we mean rejecting monism: the taken-for-granted idea that such engagement must result in a consensus about the best approach to a particular problemöthat debates have to be resolved in favor of one position or another (or an agreed compromise).Engagement is necessary to overcome the problems of balkanization: good ideas that are dismissed because they come from outside a constructed intellectual community; wheels that are reinvented.While competition between intellectual niches will always benefit some (the perceived winners),

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