Boyle, Mark and Kobayashi, Audrey (2024) Geography’s relevance debates and new forms of scholar policy activism. Journal of Historical Geography, 85. pp. 74-85. ISSN 03057488

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Abstract

In the context of class and culture wars over the social purpose of the university, it is time to revisit a pivotal question: to whom is the discipline of geography accountable and for what? In the spirit of looking back to look forward, we wonder to what extent and in what ways historiographies of geography that critically interrogate geographers' statements on the discipline's social mission might help and guide us at this hour? Specifically, we work to extract added value from the so-called relevance debates which animated anglophone geography in the 1970s. Characterising the present historical conjuncture as a Gramscian moment of interregnum when the ‘old is dying and the new cannot be born’, we tender the provocation that it is the responsibility of geographers to advance the cause of a ‘progressive populism’. To prosecute this public mission, it will be necessary to recentre the discipline around the figure of the geographer as scholar policy activist, immersed in and a progenitor of a vigilant, contestatory democracy. We conclude that whilst the relevance debates failed to theorise, codify, professionalise and valorise such an academic identity, these debates did bequeath logics and legacies that can fast track this work now.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Gramsci; Relevance debates; Social purpose; Interregnum; Progressive populism; Scholar policy activism;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography
Item ID:	18912
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2024.06.010
Depositing User:	Mark Boyle
Date Deposited:	23 Sep 2024 10:34
Journal or Publication Title:	Journal of Historical Geography
Publisher:	Elsevier
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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