Past-president’s address: is geography
(the discipline) sustainable without geography
(the subject)?
CHRIS SHARPE
Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada A1B 3X9 (e-mail: [email protected])
We commonly define geography as the ‘integrative’
discipline, but there is more rhetoric than reality in
the notion that our discipline has a coherent view of
the world. Academic geography is dominated by
increasingly esoteric topical specialties, and too often
practiced as if it didn’t exist outside the universities.
By ignoring the popular conception of what
geography is, we foster a dangerous opposition
between geography as a popular subject and
geography as a discipline. I argue that the survival of
the discipline requires a collective rediscovery of a
common core, which could be built around ‘regional’
geography—not the outmoded capes, bays and main
export regional geography of the past, but one
informed by modern theory, and attending to causal
structures rooted in current realities. Our
introductory courses are the best place to
demonstrate a renewed commitment to a holistic
geography grounded in an understanding of the
world. Eclectic, curiosity-driven research is also
essential to the survival of the discipline, but
disciplinary diversity is a strength only if it is
grounded in an identifiable core. Excessive pluralism
Les discours du président sortant: la géographie (la
discipline) est-elle viable à long terme sans la
géographie (le sujet)?
Il faut reconnaı̂tre en effet que la géographie est une
discipline intégrative , mais l’idée que notre
discipline porte un regard cohérent sur le monde tient
plus de la rhétorique que de la réalité. La géographie
universitaire aborde de plus en plus des domaines
d’études ésotériques et la profession s’exerce
généralement à l’écart du monde non universitaire en
faisant fi de la conception populaire de la géographie.
Le danger est que nous contribuions à mettre en
opposition le sujet populaire et la discipline de la
géographie. Il est soutenu que la pérennité de la
discipline passe par une redécouverte collégiale d’une
base commune qui pourrait se fonder sur la
géographie régionale .Celle-ci ne se pencherait
pas sur les sujets dépassés tels que les caps, les baies
ou les exportations principales, mais plutôt sur la
théorie moderne en s’attelant aux structures de
causalité qui correspondent aux réalités
contemporaines. Les cours de base que nous
proposons sont l’endroit par excellence pour
manifester notre engagement renouvelé envers une
géographie holistique fondée sur une compréhension
du monde. Des travaux de
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C / Canadian Association of Geographers / L’Association canadienne des géographes
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Chris Sharpe
and intellectual arrogance may lead to
‘disciplinocide’.
Key words: academic geography, popular geography,
disciplinary core, regional geography, disciplinocide
recherche éclectiques et dictés par la curiosité sont
garants de la pérennité de la discipline, mais la
diversité de celle-ci constitue un atout seulement si
elle est fondée sur un noyau bien établi. Un
pluralisme abusif et une prétention intellectuelle
pourraient conduire à un disciplinocide .
Mots clés: géographie universitaire, géographie
populaire, noyau disciplinaire, géographie régionale,
disciplinocide
Introduction
In this cri de coeur, I argue that our preoccupation with ‘the chauvinistic self-indulgence of
our contemporary absorption with the minutiae
of our own affluent and urbanized society’ (Stoddart 1987, p. 334), has allowed our enthusiasm
for the discipline of Geography to pre-empt our
respect for the subject of geography, thereby
putting our disciplinary future in jeopardy. We
use the word ‘geography’ to mean both discipline and subject, but we don’t differentiate between them. In fact, most of us don’t usually
appreciate the fact that there is a difference. A
recent article, which does make the distinction,
uses the awkward neologism ‘G/geography’. The
capital letter refers to the discipline and the
lower-case letter to ‘the two central concerns of
human geography’, space and place (McKittrick
and Peake 2005, p. 39). The authors’ unwitting
support of my argument is appreciated, even
though it is difficult to see how their new term
could be used in everyday conversation.
If we were asked to define geography, many
of us would probably say something like: ‘geography is an integrative discipline that brings
together the physical and human dimensions of
the world in the study of people, places and environments’ (National Geographic Society 1994).
But we know that most of us don’t practice
that kind of geography in our normal teaching
and research duties. We claim to be the integrative discipline but ‘there’s a lot of vapour
here’ (Golledge 2004a, p. 177) and in practice,
segregated topical specialities dominate a discipline characterized by hyphenated geography
(Bunge 1983; Limbird 1986), increasing tribalism
and self-indulgence (Knight 1987, p. 38). Things
are probably not as bad as Bill Bunge painted
The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 53, no 2 (2009)
them when he said ‘we have gone from cosmology, where we were to know everything about
everything, to the extreme embarrassment of
knowing everything about nothing’ (Bunge 1973,
p. 331). But the aphorism ‘knowing more-andmore about less-and-less’ has unfortunately become an all-too-apt description of ‘the privileged
path to what is conceived of as academic excellence’ (Meredith 1994, p. 301). The gap between
rhetoric and reality may explain why M.E. Elliot
Hurst was moved to say that geography has ‘neither existence nor future’ (Elliot Hurst 1989). Did
he mean geography the subject, or geography the
discipline? I think the latter, but the lack of clarification illustrates my point.
The Difference between Subject
and Discipline
According to Ron Abler, ‘geography enjoys
no ready-made constituency in society’ (1993,
p. 226). Perhaps I misunderstand his point, but
I don’t think he is correct. In fact, I am quite
sure that he is wrong, if by geography he means
the subject, and not the discipline. I believe that
our prospective constituency consists of everybody who is innately curious about places, people and the interactions among them, because
this is the concern of the subject of geography.
Our challenge is to mobilize this latent support
and we cannot do that on the basis of the introspective, highly specialized research that consumes so much of what passes for academic
geography.
Unfortunately, academic geography is too often
conducted as if geography didn’t exist outside
the university. Many of us might be uncomfortable with the notion that geography belongs to
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the people in the same way that history does,
but there is a great deal of public knowledge embodied in each of these subjects with deep roots
in the popular imagination.
Geography will always be a popular subject. It
may be disappearing from school curricula as a
result of government infatuation with instrumentalist education and the teaching of ‘basic skills’,
which don’t include a knowledge of the world.
But geography continues to fascinate millions of
people. Witness the enormous circulation of National Geographic and Canadian Geographic, and
the popularity of the National Geographic Society’s books, television channel and videos. Geography is the basis for our understanding of life
on earth.
On the opening page of Modern Geographical Thought, Richard Peet (1998) asserts that
‘geography has a permanent identity crisis because what geographers do is complex’. This selfflattering idea may be applicable to the discipline
as defined by its professional practitioners, but
not the subject, as defined and understood by
everybody else.
It is easy and fashionable to dismiss ‘popular’
geography as trivial—but it is this ‘trivial’ definition that drives the policy makers and the money
givers. And was it not this ‘trivial’ conception
that got us all interested in geography in the
first place? I think it must also have been this
kind of geography that Bush the elder was thinking of in April 1991, when he announced that
geography would henceforth be one of five core
subjects in a reformed programme of public education (Hill 1992, p. 233). It is unfortunate that
no Canadian Prime Minister has ever made a similar statement.
Within the academy, the survival of geography as a subject is threatened because of the
changing environment within which universities
are forced to operate (King 1988). The commodification of academia and the pervasive influence
of market-oriented, neoliberal norms has created
inescapable pressures to maximize ‘output’ and
revenues, with rewards guided by market forces
(Sheppard 2004, p. 745). The widely accepted
view that universities should be centres of entrepreneurial activity locks researchers into patterns of behaviour that reflect the priorities of
corporate and government institutions (Bonnett
2003, p. 61). There is little sympathy in this con-
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ception for a popularized geography which attempts to help people explain the big patterns
they see around them in the world.
What is a discipline? There is no single, best
way to answer this question. It can be defined
as the collective activity of its practitioners (an
academic definition), by the objects of study
(a vernacular definition), by the methodology or
techniques commonly used and by the sorts of
questions that are asked and the ways in which
the answers are framed. It can be thought of
as a political project that aims to maintain its
separate identity, or an intellectual project based
on academic coherence (Johnston 2005, p. 10). In
administrative terms, a discipline might be defined as a group of scholars that has received
official approbation and an allowance of space
within a university. On a conceptual level, the
discipline of geography might be defined by its
preoccupation with the standard triumvirate of
space, place and environment to which should
probably be added ‘spatial relations’. Sociologically, a discipline is defined by the process
through which it is perpetuated, in particular by
the overt and covert decisions made about where
and what to publish, and with whom to collaborate (Bauder 2006). However one defines it, the
difference between popular conception and disciplinary reality arises from the fact that the agendas and reward structures of academicians are
targeted at specialized research deeply buried in
paradigms that are obscure to decision makers
and the public (Cutter et al. 2002, p. 305). So
what we end up with is a diametrical opposition between geography as a popular subject—
understood by most people—and geography as
a discipline—insular, ‘academic’ and thus, irrelevant (Golledge 1982). Consider one of Chris Hamnett’s (2003, p. 1) Geoforum editorials:
the rise of “post-modern” human geography, with
its stress on textuality and texts, deconstruction, critique, “reading” and interpretation, has led
human geography into a theoretical playground
where its practitioners stimulate or entertain themselves and a handful of readers, but have in the
process become increasingly detached from contemporary social issues and concerns. There seems
to be more attention paid to the representation
and deconstruction of phenomena than to the phenomena themselves. . . . Disciplines (must) evolve
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where their practitioners wish to take them . . .
but this commitment to complete freedom of intellectual enquiry does not rule out the desirability of practitioners asking one another whether
what they are doing is useful, fruitful or productive, even though the social or intellectual values
attached to these terms vary substantially.
Would geography be sustainable in the absence
of formal Departments? Would it have a higher
public profile in the United States if the departments at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Michigan,
Pennsylvania and Chicago had survived (Cutter
2004)? Would it have a higher profile in Canada
if Windsor still had a department of geography?
Or the University of Alberta? I don’t know. But
Ken Hare didn’t think we need the formality of
a discipline with its institutional and philosophical trappings to support the subject. In a widely
quoted paper he stated:
I believe that human affairs are moving toward a
crisis . . . in which the intellectual refinements in
which we delight will seem utterly remote. . . . If
this is your world-view, as it is mine, the niceties
of academic debate lose their savour. It no longer
matters whether sequent occupance is a useful
concept, or whether factor analysis is a better geographical tool than principal components analysis. It no longer matters whether Germans, and
not Frenchmen, created our discipline. It does not
even matter whether geography survives another
decade. All that matters is that we bend our wits
to help put things right, even if we feel in our
bones that it is hopeless (Hare 1970, p. 452; see
also Zelinsky 1975, p. 124).
Could we keep geography alive in the schools in
the absence of a formal disciplinary structure?
School and university geography are already so
disconnected in most parts of this country that
the absence of geography at universities might
not matter. Most university geography faculty
have no interest in promoting geography in the
schools because it is widely, and correctly, considered as an unproductive activity that would
contribute nothing towards the gaining of tenure
or promotion. This is both unfortunate and dangerous. We have had plenty of warnings that the
estrangement of university and school geography
may be the most significant challenge we ‘professional’ geographers face. When he was President
The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 53, no 2 (2009)
of the Geographical Association, Sir Ronald Cook
warned his colleagues that ‘the political project
to defend geography in the universities involves
defending its presence in the schools. Without
such a defence, the discipline may wither in the
universities’ (Cook 2002). His argument was repeated at the 2005 annual meeting of this association in one of the ‘Projecting Geography in the
Public Domain’ sessions (Mansfield 2005; North
2005) and more recently by Castree et al. (2007,
p. 131).
I believe that we need to promote the existence
of every surviving department of geography
in Canada. This we can do, in part, by maintaining the strength of the discipline through
our curiosity-driven as well as our fund-driven
research, and our involvement in the formation
and critique of public policy. But we also have
to do a better job of promoting the subject because that is what attracts the students whose
presence in classroom seats is what drives the
budget process at most of our institutions.
Slaymaker Revisited
Some of you will have recognized that I stole the
idea for the title of this address from my distinguished predecessor, Olav Slaymaker, whose
Presidential Address (1994) asked: ‘Is geography
sustainable without geomorphology?’ I want to
revisit some of the important things he said,
as well as some of the responses from those
who were invited to comment on his address because both his address and the responses are
very relevant to the point I’m trying to make.
Olav lamented that too much contemporary geographical writing makes no explicit connection with the land and that only geomorphology
takes seriously the understanding of land and
the constraints it provides for human utilization.
While admitting that geomorphology generally investigates land for its own sake, he stressed
that there are aspects of geomorphological research, notably biogeochemical cycling, terrain
analysis, slope, channel and watershed hazards
assessment and urban geomophology—that provide essential linking themes. He believes that
we have betrayed our disciplinary birthright by
abandoning both of the etymological roots of the
name (geo and graphos) and the major traditions
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developed over the two millennia of geography’s
existence.
Tom Meredith agreed whole-heartedly with
Olav’s main point that geography understands
‘the earth, society, and the reflexive relationships between them’ (Meredith 1994, p. 302). Further, he said, Olav’s question ‘forces the broader
question of what the centripetal forces of
reductionism and specialization imply for the future of geography. There are at least two important facets to this question: first, is the discipline
viable without its component subspecialties; second, is each of the subspecialities viable and vigorous without the links to the whole?’ (Meredith
1994, p. 301). He wasn’t able to answer the question.
André Roy, who at this point hadn’t yet had
to write his own Past President’s address, wrote
that Olav was following a noble tradition set by
Kirk Bryan (1950) and Tony Orme (1985), but
that, realistically, the kind of geography we practice rarely requires a bridging of the gap.
il faut convenir cepandant qu’une grand portion de
la géographie n’a pas besoin de la géomorphologie
et que, par ailleurs, toutes les connaissances
géomorphologiques ne trouvent pas leur sens dans
la géographie. . . Une connaissance approfondie du
terrain est essentielle dans un nombre limité de
problèmes de la géographie humaine (Roy 1994,
p. 307).
André is not alone in thinking that making real
connections across the divide would be difficult.
As another geomorphologist put it: ‘the physical geographer interested in the movement of
sand grains on a beach has little in common
with the human geographer interested in racial
inequality in inner cities. Such disparate interests severely tax our capacity to discern common
ground’ (Rhoads 1999, p. 767).
Slaymaker admitted that one of the costs of
trying to reduce the tradition of academic separation was a ‘massively increased reading load’
for which there would be no reward under the
current system. Roy agreed that the practical
problems involved in trying to maintain a holistic
view of the subject are daunting:
On peut toujours dire que le géographie n’a pas
besoin de connaissances approfondies dans chacun des aspects de la discipline pour réussir
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une carrière, il n’en demeure pas moins que la
crédibilité des géographes exige que l’on dépasse
la superficialité. . . . Il est évident qu’une approche
holistique offrirait des avantages certains, mais
aussi des pièges flagrants. . . . Je connais très peu
de géographes qui peuvent réussir dans cette approche holistique et c’est notre drame. Jouer cette
carte auprès des représentants des autres displiples est un risque énorme pour la crédibilité de
notre champ. Par contre, en ne la jouant pas,
n’abondonnons-nous pas ce qui devrait caractériser
notre discipline (Roy 1994, p. 308)?
He concluded on the hopeful note that
‘l’incompréhension mutuelle dont fait état
Slaymaker est à mon avis beaucoup plus attribuable aux exigences du curriculum qu’à la
philosophie . . . Il est possible qu’il existe une
distance philosophique entre géographie humaine
et géographie physicien mais, à mon avis, elle est
plus mince que ce que Slaymaker avance’ (Roy
1994, p. 308).
Ron Johnston’s reactions to Olav’s arguments
were, he said, ‘almost entirely negative’. He
criticized Olav for failing to clarify whether he
considered geography a research enterprise, a
teaching discipline or both. Johnston argued
that most geography departments consist of two
groups, one physical and the other human, ‘neither of which needs the research methods and
foundational knowledge of the other’ (Johnston
1994, p. 311). He concluded that although most
degree programs rarely integrate the physical
and the human—that students are offered a
few foundation modules in the different parts
of the discipline followed by a smorgasbord of
independent parts, this is still a useful menu
even if the parts do not make an organic whole.
But he laments that this is not enough for
Olav who wants teaching programs designed as
organic wholes—something that Johnston argues
has rarely, if ever, happened.
Johnston’s views on the state of the discipline,
and his approval of chaos and anarchy (Johnston 1997), or diversity and divergence (Johnston
2005) have long aroused opposing reactions, and
this occasion was no different. Brian McCann argued (1994, p. 315) that the fragile discipline of
geography is more likely to be sustained if we
maintain our broad traditional approaches than
if we follow the ‘fission’ route accepted by Johnston (1986).
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At the 2006 annual general meeting of the
CAG, Olav had a chance to revisit his theme during the President’s Special Session entitled ‘The
Big Lie: Geography as the Holistic Discipline’. He
said that he had ‘found the lack of enthusiasm
for taking “land” as a central theme of geography
dispiriting and unnecessarily negative.’ And so,
he said ‘I have come back, unrepentant, twelve
years later, with the view that Geography remains, in principle, an integrating discipline and
that we are in extreme danger of giving up our
birthright . . . the context of my remarks is that of
the recurring need to restore faith in our common heritage as geographers’ (Slaymaker 2006). I
could not agree more.
I am not a physical geographer and my remarks must be interpreted keeping that in mind.
I’m writing as a human geographer, decrying
the widespread ignorance of the physical basis
of our discipline. Were I on the other side of
the house, this would be a different address.
But, as Larry Bourne (2007) reminded us in his
TCG Luminary Lecture, the importance of context, timing and place-specific events cannot be
under-estimated. So, I appreciate that my training, my career and my outlook are completely at
odds with the way things happen now. But I can’t
change that, and make no apology for it.
My training in the honours geography program
at Carleton University in the 1960s was typical of
the time, and provided me with an appreciation
of the relationships between physical and human
geography. I think that most of my professors
would have shared Stoddart’s view that ‘there is
no such thing as physical geography . . . divorced
from its human geography, and even more so
the other way around. A human geography divorced from the physical environment would
be . . . meaningless nonsense . . .’ (Stoddart 1987,
p. 333). Tony Orme was even more blunt: ‘geography without a physical base is sociology’ (Orme
1985, p. 259).
My undergraduate programme offered me very
few course options, and the requirement that I
study both physical and human geography meant
that the names such as Strahler, Leopold, Wolman and Miller, Flint, Chorley, Dury and King
were as well known to me as Hartshorne, Sauer,
Bowman, Clavel, Gould, Haggett, Gottman, Dickinson, Taylor, Carter or Berry. This was the way
geographers were trained then and of course I
The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 53, no 2 (2009)
came to believe, and still do, that it remains
the only way in which they should be trained.
It is the appreciation of the interactions between
human and physical worlds that sets geography
apart from other disciplines. My contemporaries
and I would not have known how to begin answering the question that appeared on a final examination paper at the University of Oxford in
1999: ‘physical geographers are from Mars; human geographers are from Venus. Discuss’ (Viles
2005, p. 26).
My broadly based geographical training gave
me the fabulous opportunity of working for
three successive summer field seasons in the
Arctic, one with the Arctic Institute of North
America and two with the Geological Survey of
Canada, before I went off to the University of
Toronto to study urban geography with Larry
Bourne and Jim Simmons. What made me different from my peers wasn’t so much the content
of my courses, but the choices that were available to me. I appreciate that my opportunities
were different from those available to many undergraduates today. My opportunities were also
different from those open to some of my contemporaries. I know that I probably could not
have done what I did then had I been a woman,
for example. But I took for granted that as a
geographer, this was the proper way to spend
one’s summer, and I pitied those who had to accept work as a lifeguard or a short-order cook
and dishwasher. I did all of those things too,
but at least I was able to exercise some other
options! Am I a better person for having spent
this time in the north, learning something about
indigenous cultures and physical environments
vastly different from those of the Ottawa Valley, and rubbing shoulders with the likes of
Walter Wood of the Arctic Institute of North
America? Of course I am. Am I a better geographer because I know the difference between a
medial moraine and a grilled cheese sandwich?
Of course not. Not better, but I think more tolerant and flexible.
Olav argued that disciplinocide would be the
inevitable consequence of a failure to deal
with five contemporary characteristics of the
discipline:
(1) The disappearance of the traditional requirement that all undergraduate majors be
Past-president’s address
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
required to take at least some courses in
both human and physical geography.
The perpetuation of the myth that human
and physical geography have their own integrity outside the context of a holistic geography.
Dissatisfaction with the basic distinguishing characteristic of geography—the recognition of the interconnectedness of society
and environment at a range of temporal
and spatial scales.
Intellectual arrogance in claims to the
uniqueness of the subject matter of geography.
The decline in mutual respect between
physical and human geographers.
He asked why so many us of were complicit in
the crime. Unfortunately, his question remains
rhetorical. I certainly have no adequate answer,
but I want to seize this opportunity to add
my voice to the distinguished chorus of my
predecessors.
Towards an Integrated Future
Most students arrive at university knowing very
little about the world, and leave it almost as ignorant. They lack a basic understanding of the
way the world works and, what is worse, don’t
care. But how can you evaluate the current debate about climate change in the absence of at
least a rudimentary knowledge of current climate
controls and past climates? You cannot. How can
you assess the current preoccupation with cornbased ethanol without some knowledge of the
geographies of world agricultural practices and
patterns of food consumption—which in turn
requires a basic understanding of the patterns
of agricultural production and trade, vegetation,
soils and climate and of the relationships between culture and economic development? You
cannot. Our training in the rudiments of physical
geography is one of the things that used to set
us apart from the rest of the humanities and social sciences (Abler, 1987 p. 514). But we cannot
count on the universality of this sort of training
any more.
The survival of geography as a discipline requires that we collectively rediscover a com-
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129
mon core because diversity in a discipline is a
strength only if it is grounded in an identifiable core (Cooke and Gardiner 2004). In Peter
Haggett’s words, we need to rediscover some of
the joy inherent in the subject, perhaps by focussing on the ‘central and cherished aspects of
geographical education: a love of landscape and
of field exploration, a fascination with place and
a wish to solve the spatial conundrums posed
by spatial configurations’ (Haggett 1996, p. 16).
We need to find ways of enhancing the status
of geography as a subject without erasing the
important diversity within the discipline (Kwan
2005, p. 759), and by accepting that there is
middle ground between constant revolution and
stagnant tradition (Chapman 2007, p. 368). This
is a plea that has been made so often that it no
longer registers with most people. Many would
even reject the central premise. Eric Sheppard,
for example, argues that ‘geography’s greatest
strength as a discipline is its lack of a canon’.
He says that factionalism undermines the coherence of geography, but a canon poses as many
barriers to effective geographical practice as factionalism because it undermines the diversity
which makes geography distinct (Sheppard 2004,
p. 744). Johnston (2005, p. 22) argues that the
common purpose needed to preserve the intellectual project should not be based on a belief
in a common core and adherence to a dominant
disciplinary project which would likely be more
constraining than enabling. Noel Castree says
‘there is no “essence” to geography, no timeless
set of things that are . . . taught’ (Castree 2005,
p. 300).
I disagree with all of these distinguished scholars. I think there is a geographical canon, but it
isn’t based on philosophy, methodology or epistemology. We have never achieved unanimity in
our assumptions about the nature of reality and
the way(s) in which can be studied (Palm 1986),
and we never will. Rather, the canon must be
based on a central core of common understanding, rooted in a knowledge of the world that we
purport to study. It would be naive to argue that
if geography is really a holistic discipline, all geographical teaching and research must always incorporate both human and physical aspects. This
would require either that all geographers practice a quite unimaginable amount of collegial interaction, or that we all have sufficient training
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in both sides of the disciplinary house to permit
us to be better than dabbling amateurs. The latter would seriously damage our disciplinary credibility (Jacobs and Woo 1994, p. 290). But if we
don’t try to reach an acceptable common ground
we could end up abandoning what I, and many
others, see as the central characteristic of our
discipline (Roy 1994, p. 309).
It is certainly true that in my attempts to unravel the tangled threads of the story behind the
development of a garden suburb on the outskirts
of St. John’s in the 1940s, I have no need of the
techniques or methodology employed by a contemporary process geomorphologist, or, indeed,
any particular appreciation of the processes by
which the valley in which it was created was
formed. All I need is to understand is that because it was built in a valley, the builders faced
significant challenges in terms of drainage, sewerage and water supply.
So, you say, Olav was wrong. I don’t need geomorphology to do what I’m trying to do. I might
as well be a historian. I disagree. I am a geographer, and I see the world differently from a
historian because of my training. I am not competent to teach modern geomorphology, or climatology or pedology. I may not fully comprehend
all the nuances of the processes by which the
coastal landforms of my adopted province are
forming. But the fact that I am aware of them,
and have a basic understanding of the fundamental principles is what sets me apart from the
historians and political scientists of this world.
And I wouldn’t have that understanding if I had
been exposed to the type of university geography
curriculum that I fear is all too common in this
country today.
It has been suggested that geographic information system (GIS) is the glue that can put geography back together again (Openshaw 1991,
p. 622). I do not buy this argument. GIS is a
wonderful tool, and like all tools, it requires
competence and understanding on the part of
those who would use it. But there are limits
to what a tool can do, no matter how sophisticated it might be. In a fit of ‘grandiose exuberance’ (Smith 1992, p. 258). Openshaw says
that ‘a geographer of the impending new order
may well be able to analyse river networks on
Mars on Monday, study cancer in Bristol on Tuesday, map the underclass of London on Wednes-
The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 53, no 2 (2009)
day, analyse groundwater flow in the Amazon
Basin on Thursday and end the week by modelling retail shoppers in Los Angeles on Friday’
(Openshaw 1991, p. 624). Well, if such a polymath exists, I’ve never met her. And I doubt that
there are any departments in this country who
could produce graduates with such a range of
competencies. We cannot base our disciplinary
identity on a methodology, especially one that
has been so rapidly adopted through all areas of
science (Rhoads 1999, p. 767).
There is no simple answer to the question
of what a common core might contain. But I
believe Castree’s assertion (2003, p. 166) that
‘the discipline of geography is still very much
about the study of the world’s variable character’. So with some trepidation, because I appreciate the ontological ambiguity of the concept of
a region, I suggest that such a core might be
built around a rediscovery of regional geography. The word regional is inside invisible quotation marks, because I am not advocating a
return to the primitive chorological or ‘mosaic’
approach that contributed to the isolation of geography from mainstream social science during
the middle part of the last century because of
the way it privileged form and was antithetical
to process (Rhoads 2005, p. 135). I think we
would all agree with the sentiment expressed by
William Morris Davis in his Presidential Address
to the AAG that ‘if geography were only the science of distribution, that is the regional aspects
of other disciplines, it would be hardly worthwhile to maintain the study of geography apart
from that of the subject whose regional aspect it
considers’ (Davis 1906, p. 72). I’m advocating a
restoration of the ‘new’ regional geography that
is rooted in an understanding of the need to
study the specific characteristics of places and
their integration into space (Johnston and Sidaway 2004, p. 237). A geography that rises to
the challenge of trying to explain an apparent
paradox: how places remain different at a time
when they are more interconnected and interdependent than ever before. I’m arguing that we
need to offer courses that preserve everything
that is wonderful about geography—its rich diversity, its varying perspectives on ways of knowing, and things to know and its grounding in the
real world. I’m talking about the type of course
that should be an integral and unremarkable part
Past-president’s address
of the curriculum at every university in the country (Murphy 2004; Wade 2006).
The way we think about the world, and the
categorical concepts we develop to organize our
thoughts, shape human inquiry (Rhoads 2005).
And that is why curriculum, the things that students study and the way they study them are
much more significant than pedagogy or governance structure in determining the character of
a department. But curriculum is the result of
choices and we too seldom ask ‘whose interests are being served by the geography that is
taught?’ Too often we consider teaching as an
unwanted chore, forgetting that it is primarily
through pedagogy that a discipline can play a
useful role in society (Castree 2005, p. 305).
Society’s view of geography and the way the
discipline is practised by people claiming to be
professional geographers are dangerously disconnected. Colleagues in other disciplines, and society at large, expect us to know about places,
regions, peoples and the interconnections between them (Hart 1982, p. 19; Clout 2005). We
lose face and sow confusion when we disappoint those expectations (Abler 1987, p. 513).
We put ourselves in harm’s way when we forget
that academic disciplines do not continue to exist because their practitioners believe in their
validity. They survive because the societies of
which they are a part believe in their utility. For
most people, the understanding of what a discipline is depends on their practical experience of
it in the classroom. So, a primary purpose of all
professional geographers should be to teach the
subject—not just try to perpetuate the discipline
(Unwin 1992, p. 7).
As geographers, we know the fallacy of the
widespread belief that geography is dead because
the globalized world is placeless. We know that
place has refused to die and that the world’s
boundaries have become more impermeable than
ever. We know that both place and space are
concrete, grounded and real. We understand that
the local is not entirely passive, but has an important agency in moulding global forces to specific circumstances (Massey 2004). But because
we seem to have forgotten that in order to
change the world, one must first understand it
(Harvey 1974, p. 232), we are ill-equipped to
make the case. In the 1960s we successfully ran
away from area studies and regional geography.
The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 53, no 2 (2009)
131
Those chickens are now coming home to roost as
we find others doing what we traditionally did,
and should be doing still. Through neglect, we
sold our birthright to the economists, the political scientists, the environmentalists and sociologists (Abler 2004).
Regional geography never completely died. To
their everlasting credit, some geographers continued to make efforts to revive it in one form
or another, but they were largely unsuccessful
(Gregory 1978, p. 171). In concluding her plea
for a revived but restructured regional geography Massey (1984, p. 10) set the goal for the future of the discipline by arguing that we must
‘reassert the existence, the explicability and the
significance of the particular. We must take up
again the challenge of the old regional geography; reject the answers it gave while recognizing
the importance of the problem it set’.
Meeting this challenge requires that the regional geography of the twenty-first century
be informed by post-modern, post-structuralist,
post-colonial theory. It must also attend carefully
to causal structures rooted in gender relations,
political power and social structures (Abler 1993,
p. 222). It must recognize that social processes
operate in specific circumstances; that society
is constantly being recreated by human actions;
that human actions are influenced by the world’s
physical characteristics; and that the regions that
emerge are social constructions (Lee 1985). And,
finally, it will have to beware of the ‘economic
inequality and contrived variety’ that are the
paradoxical consequences of the trampling of
cultures and the resulting repression and destruction caused by modernism, and the rediscovery by corporate capitalism of the value of
diversity and the necessity of recreating it (Relph
2001, p. 158).
But, even with these characteristics, it would
still be a form of regional geography and, perhaps for that reason, we seem to have decided
that it is unimportant. So we turn out graduates
who live in an increasingly global world, but who
know less about it than most previous generations (Chapman 2007, p. 355).
The best place to demonstrate a renewed commitment to a grounded, holistic geography is in
our first-year courses. This is where we have the
greatest opportunity to show what we can do; to
demonstrate to hundreds of students, every year,
132
Chris Sharpe
that geography does matter, that geographers do
have useful things to say about the state of
the world. Here is our opportunity to capitalize on the fact that, as Carl Sauer reminded us,
‘most students come rather late into our professional care’ (Sauer 1956). This doesn’t necessarily mean that, having met disappointment in
their study of another subject, they decided that
the way to salvation was the study of geography. Most of them, especially in the first-year
courses, probably only exercised a passing fancy,
or thought that they could earn an easy grade
to help them get into the Faculty of Engineering. Or, as several Department Chairs pointed
out in a recent discussion of enrolment trends
on CAGList, they are there because other Schools
or Faculties permit or, in the best but rare
scenario, require a geography course. But too
often the list of preferred or required options excludes geography, so we lose many of the best
students to other disciplines through lack of exposure (Abler 1987, p. 519). But there will always
be a few who are there because they have a genuine fascination with places, and who were attracted by the potential of a subject that studies
both natural and human systems. Whatever the
reasons might have been that brought them to
our classes, the fact that they are there provides
us with the chance to transform their accidental presence into something more permanent. So,
when these students do come into our care, we
tend to feed them an over-specialized academic
menu designed more to achieve our own narrow
disciplinary or professional goals than to provide students with a working knowledge of the
world (Gober 2000). In our desire to have students emulate our own commitment to particular types of geographical analysis we forget that
for many students their first course in geography
will probably also be their last. We present to
them a curriculum that precludes the synthesis,
which we proclaim to be our hallmark, wasting
the chance to highlight and celebrate the things
we hold, or should hold, in common. And one
of those commonly held truths is the existence
of interconnections between human and biophysical systems. It is this that provides the basis
for unity in geography (Slaymaker and Spencer
1998).
In their Presidential addresses, Don Kerr
(1960), John Chapman (1966), Ralph Krueger
The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 53, no 2 (2009)
(1980), Brenton Barr (1986), Les King (1988)
Terry McGee (1991), Paul Villeneuve (1993) and
John Everitt (1998) all pleaded for a rediscovery
of the region as an integrating functional concept. Why do we continue to ignore their collective wisdom?
Krueger (1989, p. 345) explained that he was
not suggesting that all, or even a large proportion of geographers should be involved in regional studies. But he did assert that some scholars must keep working at regional synthesis, and
that students should continue to be given the opportunity of practising the art of regional synthesis ‘so that the discipline does not lose one of
its most important thrusts’. I’m not sure I would
agree with John Fraser Hart (1982) that regional
synthesis is the ‘highest form of the geographer’s
art’, but it is an important skill that needs to be
nurtured.
It has been argued that geographers created
the myth of disciplinary unity around the idea
of holism as a way of justifying geography’s
continued existence in the rapidly changing university environment of the late nineteenth century (Turner 2002, p. 54), and that the core
concept, which demonstrated this unit was the
region (Johnston 2005, p. 10). This was the
central message of James and Jones’ (1954) midcentury survey of the state of American geography. But, as we know, the idea of the region as
a core geographical concept has never recovered
from the vicious attacks to which it was subjected during the middle years of the last century. When the next survey of American geography appeared 40 years later (Gaile and Wilmott
1989) the editors couldn’t provide either a concise definition or a clear synoptic view of the
discipline.
Les King (1988) argued that it wouldn’t require
any radical philosophical transformation to offer
a reasonable selection of courses on the major
regions of the world, and that we could surely
move beyond mere description (Lewis 1985) making such courses interesting and challenging even
if our research is in very different fields. I certainly agree with the sentiment, but would count
myself among those who would be reluctant to
return entirely to the ‘regional’ courses of old.
What I try to bring into my teaching of our introductory course, and what I would advocate
as a more general solution to the problem I’m
Past-president’s address
addressing, is the notion of world regional
perspectives on the major issues of the
day.
I believe an essential characteristic of a geographer is possession of a mental map of the world
on which various kinds of patterns can be superimposed. I try to equip students with the tools
and perspectives that will allow them to be able
to visualize the geography of infant mortality, of
life expectancy, of female oppression, of ‘missing’ women; the geography of greenhouse gas
production, of projected sea level rise, of landmines; the geographies of religion and migration; the geographies of immiseration (Schwartz
2007) and of neo-liberal accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003). This isn’t world regional geography in the traditional sense, but it
certainly involves the study of regions of the
world. And it also requires at least a rudimentary
understanding of climate controls, landforms,
vegetation patterns, historical patterns of colonial exploitation and the geography of contemporary global economic change. What it recognizes,
and celebrates, is the fact that recognizing the
spatial variability in all sorts of phenomenon is
the basis of an intelligent understanding of the
world—and that the ability to explain the nature
of that variability is the academic challenge that
drives the discipline of geography (Cutter et al.
2002, p. 308). We need to remember that these
issues will be discussed—if not by us, then by
others (Castree et al. 2007, p. 131).
If we don’t pay collective attention to the fundamental question of what the core of concepts
and methods of geography are, and how they
can best be taught to our students, Elliot Hurst’s
bleak assessment might turn out to be true. I am
not arguing that we should accommodate an outdated public conception of what the discipline
is ‘about’. Nor should we succumb to the demands that we continually reshape our collective identity in a risky attempt to curry favour
with politicians and funding agencies. Half a century ago, Chorley and Haggett warned that ‘if a
discipline trims its sails to the vicissitudes of
every profitable wind of social and educational
demand that blows, it is likely to lose any sense
of distinctive intellectual purpose’ (1965, p. 375)
because, as Reg Golledge noted, ‘a discipline that
has no goals, no purpose and no order is, by definition, not a discipline. Rather it is replaced by
The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 53, no 2 (2009)
133
the undirected wanderings of individual minds’
(Golledge 1982, p.14).
Curiosity-driven, cutting-edge research advances
the
theoretical
underpinnings
of
geographic enquiry, and sub-disciplinary specialization is obviously necessary at the individual
level. Such research has always been, and must
remain an essential foundation of the university,
and every professional geographer must be free
to pursue avenues of inquiry that are close to
their heart, whether or not the funding agencies
consider it worthy of support. But the survival
of geography as a free-standing discipline requires that we collectively counterbalance our
highly specialized, often esoteric research by
appreciating, and teaching others to appreciate,
the values of a more practical, broadly based,
world-oriented geography, the kind that lies at
the heart of geography, the subject. Fragmentation has reduced the number of academics
who consider themselves geographers (Stannard
2003, p. 318) despite Golledge’s plea that we
should never be ashamed to call ourselves that
(Golledge 2004b), and we are vulnerable because
of it.
The changes that have occurred in geography
over the course of my professional life have enhanced the discipline in many ways. But it is
mistake to relegate everything from the past to
the dustbin and excise it from our collective
memory. In the 2007 James R. Anderson Distinguished Lecture in Applied Geography, William
L. Garrison reminded us that ‘flexibility is easy
to praise at the level of principle, but we must
allow that a bit of stability and resistance to
change does have merit here and there’ (Garrison
2007).
Conclusion
The editor of the Transactions of the Institute
of British Geographers recently argued that we
should stretch, rather than police the margins
of the discipline (Tickell 2002). This argument
is unnecessary, and diverts attention from the
basic problem we face. Our discipline’s problem
doesn’t lie at the margins, where all sorts of
exciting new research is being done. The problem lies at the core. By abandoning our belief that a common disciplinary core is not only
possible, but necessary, we have left ourselves
134
Chris Sharpe
vulnerable in the struggle to sustain geography
as both a distinctive field of study and university discipline. We’ve heard this before. More
than 20 years ago, Richard Morrill lamented
that geography was too often considered a parasitic profession with no core. He asked ‘can
geography really be what geographers feel like
doing?’ (Morrill 1983, p. 2; see also Goudie 1986,
p. 458; Taylor 1986, p. 448). We may understand
what it is that holds all our diversity together,
but those outside the academy do not, nor do
many of our students, the potential future geographers. We need to be able to communicate to
them just what the ‘commonality-producing glue’
consists of by articulating what Susan Hanson
has called ‘the geographic advantage’; the ability
to articulate the importance of spatial variability
that derives from relationships between people
and their environment, the integration of spatial
and temporal analysis and the recognition that
all processes operate at multiple and interlocking geographical scales (Hanson 2004, p. 720).
In the short term, scholarly safety may be
guaranteed by the overspecialization, narrowness and fragmentation that are a result of the
widespread embracing of adjectival geographies.
But it comes at a high price. Geography’s ‘delightful intellectual chaos’ has become increasingly hazardous to its long-term health (Abler
1993, p. 223). Pluralism has gone beyond the creative liberty of variety—it has degenerated into
license that threatens our future (Berry 1980,
p. 449). In the struggle for respectability from
our cognate peers, we have lost our ability to
generalize (Longley 2000), to understand broad
processes (Bourne 1996, p. 5) and to create a
common groundwork for explanation by reaching across branches of knowledge (Gober, 2000,
p. 3). To repair the damage, if we want to,
we will need to reintegrate our mainstream and
eliminate artificial dichotomies (Gober 2004). Sine
qua non, the centre must hold (Meredith 1994,
p. 304).
John Eyles describes how David Smith, the professor at Queen Mary College, tried to convince
him that the relevance of geography was based
on a role that, to Eyles, then a junior faculty
member, seemed minor and disappointing—a descriptive role emphasizing the differences between places, albeit on a set of socially relevant
variables. But age does sometimes allow the de-
The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 53, no 2 (2009)
velopment of wisdom, and he later came to realize that this is an important role for geography—
not a tremendously glamorous or leading-edge
one, but one that could impart analytic and critical skills to students through the study of what
is familiar and often interesting—places and the
people in them. But he laments that we have become addicted to theory chasing, and lost our
collective sense of purpose. He wrote:
at the danger of sounding like the Berry of the
1990s, I must say the incredibly nuanced theoretical and philosophical debates, the frequent lack
of attention to methodological rigour and the liberal borrowings from other disciplines have left
me feeling that my discipline got smothered by
theory when I wasn’t looking, and as a result it
has become largely irrelevant (Eyles 2001, p. 61).
The lack of knowledge of the things that people, whether ‘ordinary’ citizens, or politicians, or
‘decision makers’ assume that we know is perhaps one of the reasons why so few of the
professional geographers in this country publish
anything in Canadian Geographic, or get actively
involved in Geography Awareness Week (GAW).
The CAG became involved in the promotion of
GAW for the first time in 2006, and we have
had some success in gathering together on our
web page information about some of the events
that took place across the country. But we didn’t
have a lot to show for all the effort expended.
Isn’t it strange that we, the professional geographers of this country, didn’t get galvanized about
this annual event until last year, 20 years after
US President Ronald Reagan proclaimed that the
third week in November would be GAW. In 1989
and 1990, Gilbert Grosvenor convinced Citibank
to place an insert publicizing GAW into the Visa
and Mastercard bills sent to 15 million Americans (Hill 1992, p. 233). Where is our national
champion for GAW and the discipline? One of
our problems, as a professional association, is
that there simply aren’t enough of us who are
able to speak to the people—and who are willing
to take the time to do so.
The absence of a widely shared loyalty to a
broadly based discipline may be one of the factors that underlie the obvious indifference that
many of our colleagues feel towards the CAG.
At the moment we have 852 members, down one
percent from the same time last year, but down
Past-president’s address
ten percent from two years ago. The shrinking of
university faculty complements across the country means that we will almost certainly never
again get close to the peak number of 1,448
members we had in 1991. But what is more
alarming than the decline in the overall number
of members is the fact that less than 30 percent
of those holding appointments in Canadian departments of geography, and only just over half
of the Heads/Chairs are members. I think this is
deplorable. The American Rediscovering Geography report warned that change in the public’s
attitudes towards geography cannot come from
within individual departments (Rediscovering Geography Committee 1997). It must come from
initiatives at the national level, and our faltering
membership bodes ill for the future.
I have now come to the end of an odyssey
that began four years ago when the head of one
of the country’s largest Departments wrote to
ask whether the CAG has an ‘official’ definition
of geography. It does not, of course, nor has it
ever had. But, as I said earlier this afternoon, if
there were to be one, it would have to be reflected in the curriculum we collectively present
to our students. Yet, I have found no evidence
of commonality in our curricula, a commonality
that should be based on the idea that as geographers we have an obligation to teach our students about global and regional patterns. If we
continue to stress the flexibility and adaptability
of geography, and base our future on an ability
to offer little more than pragmatic skill sets, we
risk sending a message that the discipline has no
real heart, with nothing in it worth learning (Walford 2001, p. 315). Geography will not flourish as
a discipline if it is simply a bundle of peacefully
co-existing interests, sheltering beneath a disciplinary flag of convenience (Wynn 2004, p. 8), or
an academic fashion parade in which individuals
simply strut the stuff they like while ignoring the
empirical, practical and structural determinants
of the world (Bonnett 2003, p. 61). If we fail to
find common ground on which to base a united
front, the whole will continue to be less than the
sum of its parts (Clifford 2002).
Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier predicted that
the twentieth century would belong to Canada,
but historian Michael Bliss argues that this didn’t
happen because the country dribbled away its
potential (Bliss 2006). In the same vein, Graeme
The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 53, no 2 (2009)
135
Wynn argues that the last century, especially the
latter part of it when environmental concerns
rose to prominence, should have belonged to geography. But it didn’t happen because ‘we abandoned the middle ground, and the vision of the
subject as the great integrative discipline straddling the arts, natural sciences, and all that lies
between’ (Wynn 2006).
Ron Martin (2001) has asked two simple questions: ‘What are we doing geography for? For
whom are we doing it?’ The answers are, I think,
that we ‘do’ geography, we practise the discipline, for ourselves. But we must profess the
subject for our students. If we cannot learn to
make this distinction, and find some joy in treating our students to an integrated view of the
world, we risk confirming Stoddart’s pessimistic
view (1987) that ‘people find no use for a geography which tells them nothing about the world
in which they live . . . Such a . . . geography simply reinforces public ignorance of the world. . . .
It is a path we cannot afford to take’.
Postscript
I began writing this article in 2005. Now,
after three years of further reading, and the opportunity of teaching my department’s fourthyear seminar course with the unfortunate and
rather ominous title ‘The Nature of Geography’,
I would write a different article. But I resisted
the temptation to re-write it, thinking that it
should be published much as I delivered it at the
2007 annual general meeting at the University of
Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.
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