Cultural and Historical Geography

Histories of Geographical and Environmental Knowledge

Histories of Geographical and Environmental Knowledge addresses the cultural, political and intellectual history of geographical and environmental knowledge. The geographical is here both a field of knowledge for critical analysis, and an approach to such analysis. The history of geography has been extended via research by Mike Heffernan on the cultures of geographical exploration, and on the politics of disciplinary identity in France and, along with Sarah O’Hara, Britain. Stephen Daniels and Paul Elliott have examined the relationship between geography, educational theory and scientific culture in 18th century Britain. Research has shown the complex ways in which intellectual debate and political context interrelate, whether in Mike Heffernan’s studies of the politics of cartography or David Matless and Adam Swain’s research on British geographical studies of the eastern bloc. The group’s work explores new methodological possibilities in histories of knowledge, whether via new archival sources or the use of oral histories. Questions of history are set alongside those of memory, whether in terms of disciplinary or national identity, or the wider geographies of modernity in Britain, Europe and India. Mike Heffernan’s 2006 Hettner Lectures at the University of Heidelberg addressed the idea of Europe in terms of the spaces of hospitality and refuge. Research has explored the currency of particular scales – the local, the regional, the urban, the national – in shaping terms of debate, and shown the value of thinking through particular sites of knowledge - the map, the field, the experimental site. Research by Alex Vasudevan, Stephen Legg and David Matless outlines the spaces of experiment shaping wider forms of environmental knowledge, whether in the psychological, population and ecological sciences.