Geographical imaginaries: Articulating the values of geography PDF

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JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 1 SESS: 11 OUTPUT: Tue Mar 4 10:28:00 2014 /Xpp84/wiley_journal/NZG/nzg_v0_i0/nzg_12051 Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited bs_bs_query Journal Code: NZG Proofreader: Emily Article No: NZG12051 Delivery date: 04 Mar 2014 Page Extent: 9 Copyeditor: New Zealand Geographer (2014...

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JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 1 SESS: 11 OUTPUT: Tue Mar 4 10:28:00 2014 /Xpp84/wiley_journal/NZG/nzg_v0_i0/nzg_12051 Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited bs_bs_query

Journal Code: NZG Article No: NZG12051 Page Extent: 9 New Zealand Geographer (2014) ••, ••–••

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doi: 10.1111/nzg.12051

Geo-Ed Contribution

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Proofreader: Emily Delivery date: 04 Mar 2014 Copyeditor:

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Geographical imaginaries: Articulating the values of geography

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Bill Howie and Nick Lewis School of Environment, The University of Auckland, Private Bag ••, Auckland, New Zealand

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Abstract: This paper explores the concept of ‘geographical imaginaries’ in New Zealand geography. It reflects on the genealogy of the concept and on the work it might perform in the world. At a time when the purpose and contribution of geography in schools is under question and the discipline is under severe strain at universities, we ask whether the idea of ‘geographical imaginaries’ offers a conceptual platform for demonstrating the potential for geography to offer meaning in the complex world of 21st-century New Zealand and whether it will help teachers to foster geographic thought in classrooms. In short, we argue for the merits of working with the idea of geographical imaginaries in classrooms and for utilising it to interrogate accounts of the geographical gaze and its values. This, we argue, offers opportunities to catalyse geographical thought, highlight the potential of thinking geographically, and open up a thinking space in which geography teachers can examine their pedagogy and enhance the purpose of their work. This would provide a platform for building a more imaginative and more politically and culturally relevant geography at school.

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Key words: discipline, geographical imaginary, geographical imagination, knowledge.

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Bill Howie has been teaching geography for 10 years. He has been struck by how positively his students at St Peter’s College in Auckland have responded to Kenneth Cumberland’s documentary series Landmarks. The series, which attracted the largest viewing audience ever achieved by a local documentary series in New Zealand (Boyd-Bell 1985) and made Cumberland a household name, engaged students across year levels and sparked their geographical imaginations. This experience took Bill back to debates about the nature of geography and gave him a rare glimpse into the potential work of the discipline in public spheres. It also sparked his enthusiasm for re-engaging with geography in the university and for fostering what Mitchell (2008) describes as ‘a living subject that reflects natural and cultural pro-

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cesses rapid and slow, local to global, complex and chaotic, current and future orientated’. The reflection has led us both to ask not just what was engaging the students, but what work geography might perform today in public spheres from classrooms to television documentaries and what it would take to achieve this potential. Like Morgan (2013), we have come to ask about the purpose of a geographical education. While Bill’s PhD research (see Howie 2013) explores the public geographies at work in Landmarks (see Pawson 2007 for a review), here we use these prompts to explore the value of the concept of ‘geographical imaginaries’ and the work that it might perform in geography classrooms. Our premise is that revitalising the purpose of geography requires new conceptual

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Note about authors: Bill Howie is •• at the School of Environment, The University of Auckland; Nick Lewis is •• at the School of Environment, The University of Auckland. E-mail: [email protected] © 2014 New Zealand Geographical Society

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B. Howie and N. Lewis

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armoury, such as the ‘geographical imaginary’. The paper begins with a brief statement of our understanding of the idea of ‘geographical imaginaries’. We go on to develop a genealogy of the term and to ask how it might be deployed to help us and our students to think geographically and to recognise and develop the potential of thinking geographically. We develop an argument that the term opens up a thinking space in which geography teachers can address deeper questions that in turn allow them to examine their pedagogy and realise the full extent of their work, and that it offers a pedagogical platform on which the strengths of the discipline can be developed to foster more imaginative teaching and to make geography classes more politically and culturally relevant.

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Geographical imaginaries: A starting point

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The term ‘geographical imaginary’ has only recently entered the mainstream disciplinary lexicon (Gregory et al. 2009), but builds on long-standing interest in ‘geographical imaginations’ (Douglas et al. 1996). The idea of a ‘geographical imagination’ has been used to focus attention on geography’s own understandings of physical and social worlds (geography’s disciplinary gaze) and to convey a sense of scholarly wonder centred on geographical inquiry. In its plural form and building on insights from the cultural turn, it is a much more open concept that invites the possibility of diverse understandings and examination of how these might conjure up diverse worlds (Gregory 1994). The idea of geographical ‘imaginaries’ is an attempt to capture not only that there are multiple geographical imaginations at large in the world, but that they do work in framing understandings of the world and in turn making our different worlds, and that particular imaginaries are wilfully put to work with political affect and effect (Hanson Thiem 2009).

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Early imaginaries of geographical imaginings

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In a 1947 article, ‘Terra Incognita: The Place of the Imaginary in Geography’, Wright suggested that if we could ‘subject a few representative

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© 2014 New Zealand Geographical Society

colleagues to a geographical psychoanalysis . . . it would disclose the geographical libido as consisting fully as much in aesthetic sensitivity to the impression of mountains, deserts or city as in an intellectual desire to solve objectively the problems such environments present’. He was arguing for a set of essential qualities defining the disciplinary gaze. Nonetheless, he recognised a ‘geosophy’ that invited a study of ‘geographical ideas, both true and false, of all manner of people – not only geographers, but farmers and fishermen, business executives and poets and painters, Bedouins and Hottentots’. Geographical imaginaries were at large in the world. His contribution was thus, firstly, to embrace an openness to aesthetics ahead of its time in geographical inquiry and thus dismiss with a scholarly inclusivity one of the many unhelpful boundary lines that have plagued the discipline (the material and the imagined) and, secondly, to recognise that we all have geographical imaginaries. However, he understandably falls short of embracing the plurality and primacy of geographical imaginations as understood after the cultural turn and their productive potential in cultural constructions of place. He wrote at a time of intense disciplinary debates about ‘what scientific geography ought to be’ (Wright 1947) and was unable to fully imagine geography as a pluriverse of different gazes that still so often manifest as damaging divisions in methodology, epistemology and research interest between geography as humanity or social science and geography as science, between prioritising culture and prioritising nature as the source of spatial change, and between quantitative and qualitative approaches to understanding social change. In his 1962 article ‘The Geographical Imagination’, Prince argued further for the co-construction of culture and nature in geographic thought and practice. He observed, ‘We cannot know a place until we discover its literature, its arts and its sciences; nor conversely can we understand literature or art or science without some knowledge of geography.’ Prince echoed Anderson’s (1954) observation that ‘no deadly accurate, purely technical description can bring vividly to life a mountain, a great river or even a climate or can make it our own to love and remember as an imaginative

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Geographical imaginaries

description by a great writer’. His intervention in the landscape versus nature debate of the time elaborated his concern with the threat posed to the ‘character’ of geography by the spatial-analytic turn. For Prince, a geographical imagination was central to both social knowledge and knowledge of nature–society relations. He reflected, ‘It is the providence of the intellect to observe the facts, to reduce them to order and to discover relationships among them, but it is the imagination which gives them meaning and purpose through the exercise of judgement and insight.’ The twenty years of scientisation of geography by spatial analytics in human geography, the adoption of new methodologies in physical geography, and the dominance of political economy in more radical disciplinary thought has painted landscape studies and notions of imaginary and imagination into the disciplinary background. In New Zealand, place and space had been broken in and corralled into measurable, knowable, and even regressable spatial forms and hierarchies by geographers. Analysis was performed to advance disciplinary analysis of the processes and patterns they contained or exemplified or for governments to manage. New Zealand became reducible to regional tables of natural and social characteristics and measures, contained for example in the New Zealand Yearbook (see Lewis et al. 2013). The cultural turn in social and geographic theory from the mid-1980s reawakened interest in ‘geographical imagination’, but as a plural and pivotal force in the social construction of nature and society. The turn reinvigorated interest in the cultural construction of landscape and nature presaged by geographers such as Wright. Studies of landscape took on a cultural studies form in which postmodern epistemologies and methodologies such as intertextuality took seriously geographical imaginations, their formation, and their affect and effects and introduced new vitality (see Cosgrove 1984; Duncan & Duncan 1988). Gregory’s seminal 1994 book Geographical Imaginations turned the cultural turn on geography and altered thinking about the discipline by emphasising plurality (hence ‘imaginations’), the work of representation, and the primacy of language, knowing and cultural practice.

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A turn to geographical imaginaries Gregory’s work and that of figures such as Cosgrove (1984), Massey (1984), Peet and Thrift (1989), Entrikin (1991), Barnes (2008) and many others began to open up a geographical gaze that saw the world as represented and enacted in geographical terms. Geographers began to see popular, institutional, political and technical representations of the world as structured by more or less fixed, distinctive and discernible framings of relations between people, place and territory.These framings may be intuited, discursive, textual or institutionalised, but they shape and frame how people understand their worlds and those of others (see Livingstone 1992). Such geographical imaginaries are constructions of the world, but are also ‘vitally implicated’ in the material and discursive making of the world (Gregory et al. 2009). Hanson Thiem (2009), an educational geographer, who is well attuned to both social theory and the materialities of subject formation in school classrooms, observes that geographical imaginaries elaborate upon and/or structure explanation of ‘who “we” are collectively and individually, who “others” are, and how the world works’. Literary studies 7scholar Edward Said (1978), who points to the implication of geography in making British imperialism and securing the colonisation of the mind by European rationalism, talks of the ‘geographical imaginary’ as ‘a geography that overlaps a more tangible geography and helps shape our attitude to people and places’. Dropping into the terms of ‘geographical perspective’ and ‘geographical language’ used by New Zealand geographers to build geographical literacy under the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) curriculum, this understanding of the implication of geographical imagination in the making of our worlds, the community, the neighbourhood, the nation and the region are all geographical imaginaries. So too are the Pacific, South Auckland, Asian students, the beach, the Coromandel and Brand New Zealand. Each is freighted with subtle and often place-specific meanings. Other geographical imaginaries are loaded with meaning but less obviously territorialised, such as development, inequality, © 2014 New Zealand Geographical Society

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