Between Radical Geography and Humanism: Anne Buttimer and the International Dialogue Project

This paper argues for a rediscovery and reassessment of the contributions that humanistic approaches can make to critical and radical geographies. Based on an exploration of the archives of Anne Buttimer (1938–2017) and drawing upon Paulo Freire's notion of conscientização (awareness of oppression accompanied by direct action for liberation), a concept that inspired the International Dialogue Project (1977–1988), I explore Buttimer's engagement with radical geographers and geographies. My main argument is that Buttimer's notions of “dialogue” and “catalysis”, which she put into practice through international and multilingual networking, should be viewed as theory‐praxes in a relational and Freirean sense. In extending and putting critically in communication literature on radical pedagogies, transnational feminism and the “limits to dialogue”, this paper discusses Buttimer's unpublished correspondence with geographers such as David Harvey, William Bunge, Myrna Breitbart, Milton Santos and others, and her engagement with radical geographical traditions like anarchism, repositioning “humanism” vis‐à‐vis the fields of critical and radical geography.     

A Geography of Consumption and a Geography of Services

Professor Kovalev, a specialist in rural settlement, proposes the development of two new branches of economic geography in the Soviet Union that would be concerned with the study of regional differences in consumption and services. The proposal reflects the increasing concern of the Soviet party and government for raising the living standards of the population. Kovalev discusses a number of methodological problems, such as the availability of data.     

Crime and the City Solution: Crime Fiction, Urban Knowledge, and Radical Geography

Radical urban geography has recently begun a critique of crime fiction, seeing its ideological shortcomings as politically instructive. This paper argues that this critique is theoretically naive and suggests that a concentration on the epistemological claims of both fiction and urban geography is more fruitful. The paper turns the critique back on radical geography and celebrates the critical possibilities of some forms of crime fiction. Specifically, the police procedurals of British author John Harvey are used to illustrate the genre's ability to articulate alternative epistemologies, ways of knowing the city that track the structure of everyday life and thus offer a critical, realistic, and reflexive approach to the city and itsproblems.     

On What's Right and Keeping Left: Or Why Geography Still Needs Marxian Political Economy

Recently the value of Marxian approaches to human geography has again been called into question in the pages of Antipode. In this paper I review the reasons as to why geographers re‐discovered Marx and then, from the late 1960s, began to engage with Marxian approaches. I then consider some of the reasons why Marxian approaches in their turn became the subject of critique in geography and some of the alternatives explored in the wake of this. The conclusion is that a pluri‐theoretical human geography is necessary but that Marxian approaches remain of central significance to radical and critically minded geographers.     

Careers for Geography Graduates

This article makes an argument for an economic geographical pedagogy that is post-disciplinary, emphasizing non-hierarchical, student-based knowledge, disciplinary interconnectedness, epistemological plurality, and material embodiedness and embeddedness. Key to this conception of economic geographical pedagogy are recent writings of Timothy Mitchell and especially Donna Haraway. The paper discusses several projects and exercises employed by the author in an economic geography course to exemplify, and to persuade students of the merits of, a post-disciplinary approach to the subject.     

Towards a molecular agenda for the Left

In his talk, communications scholar and cultural critic Alejandro Kaufman analyses some of the contradictions in which the Latin American progressive projects became entangled in a context dominated by the ‘happy totalitarianism’ of consumption and the spectacle as a seemingly irreducible contemporary order of being on a global scale. The great challenge for the Left, he suggests, is to move away from a representationalist paradigm of the struggle for power and towards a politics of molecular interventions on the level of lived experience.     

New Horizons for Regional Geography

Two prominent U.S. geographers outline the framework and mandate of an emerging new regional geography as a tool for understanding rapid and profound changes in the contemporary world. In so doing, they differentiate this new approach to the geographic study of regions from both (a) the traditional practice of regional geography prevailing in the discipline from the mid-19th century and (b) accounts of geography's role in contemporary affairs offered by non-specialists in the mass media (e.g., Kaplan's "revenge of geography"). The authors provide recommendations for, and note the benefits of, a strengthening of regional research and training in geography, while mapping out an expanded role for Eurasian Geography and Economics in disseminating new regional research whose scope extends beyond disciplinary boundaries to embrace current public and political debate. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O100, O180, P000, R110.60 references.     

Discursive Representation and Pearson's Quest for a Radical Centre

Noel Pearson is one of Australia's most prominent and influential Indigenous intellectuals. This article examines a major idea in Pearson's writing, the ‘quest for a radical centre’. It examines this idea from the perspective of both its usefulness in understanding the deficiencies in public conversation about Indigenous affairs, and its persuasiveness in legitimating the role that Pearson has played nationally as a champion of the Indigenous responsibility discourse. The article argues that conceptualising public debate as a quest for a radical centre resonates strongly with the theory of deliberative democracy. Similar to Dryzek and Niemeyer's work on ‘discursive representation’, the idea of the radical centre reveals the legitimacy possessed by unelected champions of discourses.

诺艾尔·皮尔森是澳大利亚最杰出的原住民知识分子。本文考察了皮尔森写作的一个主要思想,“探索激进的中心”。在作者看来,这思想有助于理解有关土著事务的公共对话的缺陷,它还让皮尔森在全国扮演的角色——土著人责任话语的捍卫者——富于说服力。将公共辩论理解为对激进中心的探索,这与商议民主的理论非常合拍。与德雷泽克和尼美耶论“话语代表性”的著作相类,激进中心的思想指出了未被选择的话语卫士的合理性。