I second Filippo's remark. I can tell you for a fact that the AAG leadership invited Diamond, in counterpoint with Charles Mann, intentionally to stir things up. So don't take it up with the AAG. Take it up with Diamond, if what he has to say bothers you. That's what this event is for.
Doug
________________________________________
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Filippo Celata [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, March 30, 2013 3:15 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Why on earth is Jared Diamond welcomed unopposed at AAG 2013?
...wouldn't it be an option to listen to Diamond's talk and to "oppose" him with critical questions?
I attended to Krugman's talk at the AAG in 2010 and even if I think his "geographical" theories are limited and dangerous, I have been happy we had the chance to tell him and to listen to his replies.
2013/3/30 JP Catungal <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
He also gave a keynote talk at the San Francisco AAG (2007) where he talked partly about Papua New Guinea coming into modernity with the arrival of an airport. I was then an MA student and was utterly shocked and livid. It was my first AAG and I was really not sure what avenues there were to voice my displeasure and concern. It remains one of the ugliest moments of any AAG for me.
Why is he welcomed at the AAG? Probably in no small part because he is appointed to a department of geography and probably because he is well known and therefore "relevant". This reminds me of David Harvey's 1974 piece "What kind of geography for what kind of public policy?" in which he argues that we need to examine what kind of relevance we want geography to play, mentioning of course that Pinochet was a geographer.
I urge specialty group chairs, councillors and other officers of the AAG to bring up this concern at the AAG Council meeting. With all the commendable focus on geographies of racialization that the AAG has focused on recently (thanks in part to the work of Audrey Kobayashi as President and Past President), I sure hope we could be more reflexive re: why we feature environmental determinist and racist scholarship in marquee events such as AAG keynotes.
Quoting Jamison <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>:
While I am in the middle of designing the last section of my Intro to
Cultural Geography course at John Tyler Community College in Virginia, I am
jollily uploading Jim Blaut's 1999 article devouring Diamond, and the slew
of 2003 articles from the special edition of Antipode on the same lines.
I'm still figuring out how to explain how he is welcomed at the AAG to my
students.
Is anyone planning to oppose/heckle Diamond's talk on what we can learn
from freaking "traditional societies" at our AAG in LA?
-J
--
JOHN PAUL CATUNGAL
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Geography
University of Toronto
"Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover who we are, but to refuse who we are." (Michel Foucault)
----------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.
|