Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the early 1970s, critical theorists in geography and other social sciences have worked to build what Steinmetz (2005) Steinmetz, G. 2005. The politics of method in the human sciences, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] calls a “pluralistic postpositivist counterworld.” Postpositivist intellectual currents emerged in the shadow of, and in opposition to, mainstream science at a time when positivist epistemology, quantitative methodology, and conservative political ideology seemed always to go hand in hand. This neat alignment was contingent and contextual, but every postpositivist movement committed to progressive or radical politics has portrayed the nexus as essential and immutable. Over time this caricature has been reinforced and reproduced, as strident postpositivists and defensive spatial scientists pursue ever more sophisticated, challenging specializations that make it harder to bridge the binaries of our field. In this article, I suggest that the presumed linkages between epistemology, methodology, and politics were never fundamental or immutable—and that recent years have brought significant realignments. Right-wing political operatives have coopted many of the epistemologies and methods traditionally associated with the postpositivist academic left. A new generation of progressive, critical geographers is doing first-rate work—like that appearing in this Focus Section—that is revitalizing the scientific rigor, policy relevance, and political power of the left. I analyze how this movement of strategic positivism is an integral (but single) element of a pluralist geography that mobilizes trust and deference to synthesize individual specialization and collective goals to build emancipatory geographies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".