CENTENN IAL FORUM Practicing Geography

O ne generalization can safely be made about the future of geography in the twenty-first century: We cannot now predict what will be in fashion one hundred or even fifteen years from now (if the discipline still exists). Like all complex, out-of-equilibrium, spatiotemporal systems, it is fruitless to predict or legislate geography’s trajectory of knowledge production. Geographers, like all agents, frustrate and escape attempts to discipline them. Indeed, most of geography’s acknowledged twentieth-century landmarks of ‘‘progress,’’ for good or ill, stem from exactly such breakouts. The best we can do is to reflect on and seek to improve how we practice geography. In suggesting ways to do this, I will focus on what I see as the principal internal and external challenges to practicing geography well that we currently face, factionalism and commodification, and indicate ways to combat them. Geography’s greatest strength as a discipline is its lack of a canon (i.e., an agreed best way to undertake geography). In contrast to economics, where consensus on the superior paradigm and method and the most influential economists and journals enforces a common worldview that even trained economists find borderline autistic (http://www.paecon.net), geographers struggle to find philosophical, theoretical, and methodological common ground. Within the discipline, this has been the cause of factionalism; we can all tell war stories grounded in our multiple internecine battles over what constitutes good geography. Our debates about which approach is best often regiment our students into choosing, for example, between positivism and poststructuralism, human and physical geography, or qualitative and quantitative methods. At the same time, we worry that internal struggles reinforce our principal external weakness: nongeographers remain far less cognizant than we would like of what geography is or why it matters (other than to compile data and data models about the earth). Factionalism undermines geography’s coherence. For example, the thematic subdivision of the Annals may create space for different kinds of geography, but it simultaneously forces authors to slot their research into one kind or another—as when an article submitted to the Annals, but allocated for reasons of exigency beyond the control of the authors to another section, was rejected from that section for not pursuing the appropriate epistemology. As Iris Marion Young (1990) points out, communities that validate difference also create, reinforce, and police barriers separating them. There is a strong temptation to overcome problems of factionalism by legislating a canon, and I imagine we have all been drawn to this siren song at one time or another. Yet a canon poses as many barriers to effective geographical practice as factionalism. A canon undermines geography’s diversity and, thereby, its distinctiveness. Furthermore, once we recognize, with philosophers of science, that there is no such thing as a foolproof methodology or epistemology (Curry 1985; Longino 2002), then the idea of a canon becomes nonsensical—particularly, in a discipline where humanists and earth scientists should practice side by side. It is possible, however, to avoid falling into the traps of factionalism or canonization, by practicing geography in a way that recognizes but facilitates communication across different ways of knowing. My inspiration for this vision has been Helen Longino. Longino (2002) offers a constructive alternative that all geographers would benefit from considering: envisioning a nonmonistic but nonrelativist approach to knowledge production. She argues that a ‘‘plurality of adequate and epistemically acceptable explanations or theories can be generated by a variety of different factors in any situation of inquiry’’ (184), each grounded in a set of methodological and substantive assumptions with respect to which that account is persuasive. She insists, and I would agree, that this plurality of explanations need not be reduced to a single, monistic truth about the world. Indeed, monistic accounts often gain influence by excluding competing explanations, or differently situated actors, from scholarly debate, rather than by attaining genuine consensus. She envisions a normative forum for scientific debate based on the four principles of venues, uptake, public standards, and tempered equality (Table 1).