Encyclopedia of Geography

Critical Human Geography

Contributors: Barney Warf Print Pub. Date: 2010 Online Pub. Date: September 01, 2010 Print ISBN: 9781412956970 Online ISBN: 9781412939591 DOI: 10.4135/9781412939591 Print pages: 617-622 This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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10.4135/9781412939591 10.4135/9781412939591.n236 The term critical human geography arose in the mid 1990s in Anglophonic geography as a way of representing a broad coalition of progressive approaches to the discipline. Critical human geography can be seen as a diverse set of ideas and practices linked by a shared commitment to a broadly conceived emancipatory politics, progressive social change, and the use of a range of critical sociogeographic theories. Critical human geographers draw on theoretical approaches such as anarchism, anticolonialism, critical race theory, environmentalism, feminism, Marxism, nonrepresentational theory, post-Marxism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, situationism, and socialism. This entry describes the growth and development of critical human geography in primarily Anglophonic settings, and also in a number of other nonAnglophonic academic spaces (but ones that operate in, or articulate with, the wider hegemony of Anglophonic American geography). Much of the focus is on some of the key publications marking different eras in critical geography. From this perspective, the practice of critical human geography can be seen as a tentative move toward development of a historical geography of knowledge production in critical geographies. The discussions that follow are necessarily schematic rather than a full outline of the nuanced character of these approaches. Suffice it to say that there is a good deal of overlap and a much more complex (and contradictory) character to these historical geographies of knowledge production than it is possible to present here. In outlining these various forms of geography, it is clear that critical human geography cannot be defined in a singular way but instead must be understood as multiple, dynamic, and contested and that the term critical human geographies should be used in recognition of this fact; that is, we should call them critical human geographies. Critical human geographers are committed to transforming their worlds, and they are thusalmost by definitionengaged in significant contestation over how we should interpret existing spatial relations and how we might improve [p. 617 ] on them. At the same time, they recognize that coalitional politics may be one of the best ways to achieve their ends.

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Early Roots of Critical Geographies

The radical roots of critical geographies lie in the 19th century, among writers such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, lise Reclus, and Peter Kropotkin. Marx and Engels are not considered geographers in the formal sense, but both contributed immensely to the critical understandings of capitalism that form the foundation for much subsequent radical geographic analyses of class relations. Moreover, some would argue that Engels's first book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (published originally in German in 1845 as Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, then translated and published in English in 1887), considered to be a classic account of the material conditions endured by the industrial working class, can also be read as an early critical geography of urban conditions and class relations. Engels focused his analysis in part on a comparison between material conditions in cities and the countryside, and he pointed out that members of the urban proletariat in Manchester were worse off than most peasants living in the countryside. Both Reclus and Kropotkin were anarchists who were also formally trained geographers and are understood by many to be the first radical geographers. Both are famous for writings on a wide spectrum of issues. Reclus is best known for his influential 32volume work, La nouvelle gographie universelle: La terre et les hommes, for which he was awarded the prestigious Gold Medal of the Paris Historical Society in 1892 (at which time he was exiled from France for his anarchist political activism). Reclus is believed to have coined the term social geography because of his interest in the social facts of class struggle. Kropotkin was also a prolific writer, producing works on various aspects of the geographies of Asia and on scientific expeditions in Siberia, numerous articles in The Geographical Journal, and upward of 90 articles on Russian geography for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He also published revolutionary pamphlets and numerous books, including two landmark treatises on anarchist praxis (Fields, Factories and Workshops and The Conquest of Bread). For critical geographers, however, Kropotkin is perhaps best remembered for his essay What Geography Ought to Be (first published in 1885). A broadly Marxist tradition was continued in early-20th-century Germany by Karl Wittfogel, the first explicitly critical German geographer, with the publication in 1929
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of Geopolitik, geographischer Materialismus und Marxismus (reprinted in Antipode in 1985 as Geopolitics, Geographical Materialism and Marxism). Wittfogel was a member of the Institute for Social Research (better known as the Frankfurt School), and like many of his colleagues, he was highly critical of the growing conservatism in Germany (and for Wittfogel specifically, in German geography). Wittfogel was an isolated critical voice in German geography; it was not until much laterin the mid 1990sthat critical geography began to rise again as an institutional force. However, as Ulrich Best points outand in spite of the institutional resistance to critical geography a number of student groups kept ideas for a critical German geography circulating with the production of three different, albeit short-lived, critical geography journals: Geografiker (19681972), Roter Globus (Red Globe, 19711973), and Geographie in Ausbildung und Planung (Geography in Teaching and Planning, 19731976). Marxist traditions were perhaps more marked in France than in Germany during the 20th century. Immediately after World War II, geographers and French Communist Party members such as Pierre George and Jean Tricart wrote a number of geographical articles for the Marxist journal La Pense. They had much more influence on French geography than Wittfogel did in Germany, and they began a movement that challenged the traditionalist Vidalian school. Marxist spatial analysis and geography were furthered with the development of journals such as Espaces et Socits (founded by Anatole Kopp and Henri Lefebvre in 1970) and Hrodote (founded by Yves Lacoste in 1976). Illustrating the ongoing relevance of anarchist and Marxist approaches in French geography, Hrodote has published two special issues on lyse Reclus, in 1981 and in 2005. Anarchism, Marxism, and socialist theory formed the foundation for the rise of what in the [p. 618 ] late 1960s and early 1970s came to be known as radical geography in American geographic circles. Two publications of that period are indelibly linked to Anglophonic radical geography: (1) Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography began publication from the geography department at Clark University in 1969 (first edited by Ben Wisner and then by Richard Peet from 1970 to 1985) and (2) David Harvey's acclaimed book, Social Justice and the City, was published in 1973. Antipode continues publication to date and is celebrating its 40th anniversary. Social Justice and the City remains an important text on the reading list of almost every graduate course on the history and philosophy of Anglophonic human geography. Much of the 1970s and
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1980s saw a significant output of publications and practical interventions in everyday life by radical geographers, most of which were dominated by anarchist, Marxist, and socialist theoretical approaches. Radical geographers were interested in using such theoretical views to expose and contest sociospatial power relations of inequity and oppression. They were also interested in better understanding the relationship between theory and practice, and they were therefore especially interested in theorizing the relationship between structure and agency. Unlike quantitative geographers, radical geographers saw human agency as important, but unlike humanistic geographers, they understood social, spatial, and economic structures to play a key role in constraining human agency. Marx's famous dictum that people make history, but not under the conditions of their own making became axiomatic among radical geographers of this period. There are other critical geographies that developed in other spaces in the 1970s and 1980s, sometimes in concert with, sometimes parallel to, and sometimes isolated from Anglo-American radical geography. Geographers in the Nordic countries began to meet in 1980 for the Nordic Symposium on Critical Geography (a tradition that continues today as a special theme in the Nordic Geographers Meetings). Mediterranean architects, geographers, and sociologists have been meeting in the Seminars of the Aegean for more than a quarter of a century to critically analyze sociospatial relations in the region. Latin American geographers, with Milton Santos (19262001) perhaps the most well-known among them, have also contributed significantly to international critical geographies. Finally, there is a long history of critical and radical geographies in white settler states in the Southern Hemisphere: Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and South Africa. Critical geographers from all these locales have strong links with Anglo-American radical geography and wider sets of critical geographies.

The Challenge to Marxist Radical Geographies

The civil rights movements of the late 1960s led to a host of new social movements in the 1970s, including movements advocating for greater recognition of rights (in practice, not just in law) for people of color, women, gay and lesbian people, Aboriginal
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people, people with disabilities, as well as those impoverished in their role as workers (or unemployed) in the capitalist mode of production. As a result of these new social movements, radical geography branched out from its Marxist and socialist roots relatively early, with feminist, antiracist, and anticolonial works appearing in the 1970s and 1980s. Feminist geography, for example, first appeared in Antipode in 1974, with an article by Alison Hayford titled The Geography of Women: An Historical Introduction. Feminist articles began to appear in other journals some years later, with Janice Monk and Susan Hanson's On Not Excluding Half the Human in Human Geography, for example, appearing in The Professional Geographer in 1982. Eventually, Marxist geographies could no longer provide a single epistemological space capable of accommodating all these different forms of identity politics. To give one example, while there were many important interventions in radical geography by feminist geographers, many feminists came to believe that they were not allowed full membership in the project of radical geography. Accordingly, Linda McDowell wrote of being both inside and outside the project.' The same can be said for members of other disaffected groups and their allies, including people of color, queer people, and disabled people. [p. 619 ] Writing as disability activists (and disabled women), for example, Ali Grant and Vera Chouinard wrote of being not even anywhere near the project. Many of these people found intellectual inspiration in postmodern critiques of overarching theoretical metanarratives (e.g., anarchism, Marxism, and socialism) that rarely spoke to their experiences. Moreover, they engaged with postmodernism to criticize their exclusion from the project. In an important paper published in 1988, Michael Dear referred to this trend as part of a wider postmodern challenge to human geography. Postmodernism was always highly contested in human geography, albeit more so in the United Kingdom and the United States, where the stakes for those maintaining the status quo were much higher. Postmodernism as a set of ideas was much more welcomed in ostensibly peripheral spaces such as Australia and New Zealand, since geographers in these places were always both inside and outside the hegemonic project of radical geography. Notwithstanding its relatively short and contested life in geographyits currency as a theoretical approach lasted from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, although a closely
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related set of theoretical approaches known as poststructuralism continues to be a powerful force in critical geography todaypostmodernism played an important role in a number of transformations of the discipline. One significant impact that postmodernism had on human geography was to precipitate a crisis of representation that in many respects continues to affect critical geographies to this day. Partly as a result of this crisis of representation and partly as a result of not personally identifying as Marxist (although all would identify as Left-progressives), very few geographers now use the label radical geography to define their work. Instead, most use the broader term critical geography.

The Critical Geography Forum and the International Critical Geography Group
The term critical geography had begun to be used by geographers in the 1980s and 1990s. The Nordic Symposium on Critical Geography, for example, was initiated in 1980. The Cincinnati Mini-Conference in Critical Geography started in 1994. Macmillan Publishers even began to market a book series under the name Critical Human Geography in 1982. However, critical geography became institutionalized in geography as a term generally accepted by a broad constituency of Anglophonic geographers only following a series of events arising from the merger of the Institute of British Geographers (the scholarly society for academic geographers) with the much larger Royal Geographical Society. The story is worth recounting here, as many of the concerns raised are emblematic of the way critical geographers tend to operate as intellectuals, as knowledge workers, and as citizens of the world. The merger formed what became the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) (RGS-IBG), and it confronted Left-oriented geographers with a series of political and ethical dilemmas arising from the sponsorship of the RGS-IBG by the multinational company Royal Dutch Shell. First, many geographers had concerns about the RGSIBG being sponsored by multinational capital, with its attendant exploitation of workers (through the appropriation of the surplus value of labor); they were also concerned with issues of indigenous rights, environmental justice, and environmental racism, and they

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were concerned with the neocolonial relationship that the RGS-IBG was implicated in because of its acceptance of money from Shell. Shell had for some years prior to the merger of the RGS-IBG been engaged in oil extraction activities in the Niger River Delta in Nigeria. The Ogoni people, who lived in the delta, had long criticized Shell's activities in the regioncomplaining in particular about its devastation of the environment and its lack of concern for local peoples and also about Shell's indirect support of the military junta that ruled Nigeria through oil revenues accruing to the state from Shell. On November 10, 1995, nine Ogoni people, including the famous writer and political activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, were executed by the military regime. According to a press release dated April 6, 2009, Shell was to stand trial in a federal court in New York State on charges that it was complicit in human rights abuses in Nigeria, including the execution of the nine Ogoni people, as well as in crimes against humanity, torture, arbitrary arrest, and detainment. [p. 620 ] As a number of contributors to a special issue of Ethics, Place and Environment noted, Shell's activities in the Niger Delta and its links to the Nigerian military regime posed significant problems for the RGS-IBG, given that Shell was a major sponsor of the organization. After the execution of Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues, a campaign was launched to convince the RGSIBG to end its relationship with Shell. Just prior to the execution, a number of critical geographers in the United Kingdom had already begun to explore options for developing an alternative geographical organization (of some sort) to the RGS-IBG, and some of these geographers created the Critical Geography Forum online (Joe Painter is the person credited with actually creating the list on the U.K.-based system in 1995). The Critical Geography Forum list came into its own as the space for discussions in support of the campaign to end Shell's sponsorship of the organization. Academic geographers voted overwhelmingly in support of a motion to end the sponsorship, but this was ignored by the RGSIBG Council. Eventually, the critical geographers were successful in getting a motion to end the sponsorship put to a membership vote at a special general meeting of the RGS-IBG in November 1995. That vote was dominated by former RGS members (nonacademics, as opposed to the academics who made up the former IBG), and the motion to end the sponsorship was overwhelmingly defeated.
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While the motion to end Shell's sponsorship of the IBG was defeated, the Critical Geography Forum became a venue for discussions that led to creation of an alternative geographic organization and for organizing alternative conferences. The inaugural International Conference of Critical Geographers (ICCG), which took place in 1997 in Vancouver, Canada, was organized by members of the Critical Geography Forum and gave rise to the International Critical Geography Group (http://econgeog.misc.hit-u.ac.jp/ icgg). Subsequently, the International Critical Geography Group organized four more International Conferences of Critical Geography (in Taegu, Korea, 2000; Bkscaba, Hungary, 2002; Mxico City, Mexico, 2005; and Mumbai, India, 2007).

Conclusion: Critical Geography as Human Geography

Critical geography is now institutionalized in much of Western academe. It is arguably hegemonic in places such as the United Kingdom, and it is certainly ascendant in places such as Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United States. Critical geographers often now hold senior positions in both their universities and the wider academy in many of these places. This positioning of critical geography as almost normative has transformed human geography, but it has also had transformative effects on critical geography itself. As part of a now mature approach in human geography, critical geographers are much less likely to be making programmatic statements about what geography ought to be. Instead, critical geographers are using a wide range of critical social theories to undertake substantive studies of people's geographies. At the same time, critical geographers are subjecting various forms of critical geography itself to interrogation for their contribution to classism, colonialism, inequality, injustice, racism, and sexism. Finally, many critical geographers (often under the rubric of nonrepresentational theory and/or theories of practice) are engaging in work that radically questions how we know our world and how we represent it, which might possibly bring us back again to an all-new kind of radical geography. Lawrence D.Berg 10.4135/9781412939591.n236
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See also Anarchism and Geography Antiglobalization Antisystemic Movements Bunge, William Critical Geopolitics Cultural Turn Disability, Geography of Environmental Justice Environmental Racism Feminist Geographies Gays and Lesbians, Geography and/of Gender and Geography Harvey, David Human Geography, History of Identity, Geography and Imperialism Justice, Geography of Marxism, Geography and Masculinities and Geography Massey, Doreen Mitchell, Don orientalism other/otherness Peet, Richard Political Ecology Political Economy Postcolonialism Postmodernism Poststructuralism Queer Theory Race and Racism Radical Geography Smith, Neil Social Geography
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Social Justice Walker, Richard Whiteness

Further Readings ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies: http://www.acme-journal.org Bauder, H., ed. , & Engel-Di Mauro, S. (Eds.). (2008). Critical geographies: A collection of readings. Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada: Praxis (e) Press. Retrieved January 19, 2010, from http://www.praxis-epress.org/availablebooks/introcriticalgeog.html Berg, L. (2004). Scaling knowledge: Towards a critical geography of critical geographies. Geoforum vol. 35 no. (5) pp. 553558. Gilbert, D. (1999). Sponsorship, academic independence and critical engagement: A forum on Shell, the Ogoni dispute and the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). Ethics, Place and Environment vol. 2 no. (2) pp. 219228. Harvey, D. (1984). On the history and present condition of geography: An historical materialist manifesto. Professional Geographer vol. 36 pp. 111. Jacobs, J. (1996). Edge of empire: Postcolonialism and the city. London: Routledge. Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and geography: The limits to geographical knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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