Hearty agreement with Sarah Batterbury.
One weird contradiction arises.
Jenny Robinson gave a marvellous paper on postcolonial
geography and geography's current exclusions which I hope to see
in print for the whole community soonest. Friends in Mexico, India,
Ghana, Kenya, Bangladesh and elsewhere will be so excited to
see it: it gives very fine shape to an amorphous structure. Nothing
in it needs changing. It cheered me up enormously, expressing
brilliantly what I've been trying to communicate for years as we
have concentrated more and more on 20% of the world's peoples,
as if there were nothing to learn from anyone else.
But there is a strange practical contradiction in the implementation.
Perhaps the greatest success of quantitative geography was in the
indoctrination of many able people from poorer countries who are
now professors. In so many universities, this is still the only
legitimate geography. Research students who come to the UK
must include quantitative work in their theses to go home with a
credible doctorate, whether appropriate or not. OK, so we
encourage to consider qualitative work and cultural geography; I
send them to Mike Crang's lectures which they've all loved because
now they can see what we are talking about. Yes, we explore the
issues of continuing colonialism, and encourage them not just to
swallow the latest Anglo-American thing. But critical geography is
powerful: I do NOT require it, but no student working with me has
held out against it. Can Mike and I avoid being neocolonialist?
Janet Townsend
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Date sent: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 13:23:00 +0100
Send reply to: "Batterbury S (HaSS)" <[log in to unmask]>
From: "Batterbury S (HaSS)" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Beyond the Academy? Critical geographies in Action conference
To: [log in to unmask]
My thanks to Duncan Fuller and Rob Kitchin for their excellent
organisation of this conference.
Thanks also to all the presenters and participants for very thought
provoking and interesting papers and debate.
The conference led to very interesting debate about a number of key
themes:
"h the relevance of geography;
"h the role and purpose of academic geography (pro-active or
reactive); "h the issue of access to the policy sphere and influence
on policy decision process; "h the issue of scale of research and
action; "h the question of broadening the Academy to be post
colonial
and more inclusive of geographical research traditions from round
the
world; "h the time scale of feed though of academic knowledge into
policy; "h the notion of geographical knowledge as having
increased
value as a collective rather than an individualised output; "h the
importance of reflection about research ethics in all areas of
geographical research.
If you were not able to get to this conference then you really missed
something. I hope that the organisers will be able to find a way of
publishing the papers and a summary of the debates.
Sarah Batterbury
University of Glamorgan
Evaluation Studies
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