To respond to John May's concerns, at least in part, with a longish message;
The loss of "applied and action research" in British human geography is a trend which some will say
is more percieved than real. It obviously cannot be judged adequately by citations, or numbers of
research grants issues under certain categories, or indeed other by quantitative measures - although I
am sure that the research councils - or indeed certain geographers - would see a testable hypothesis
in there somewhere!
Others, John May and I included, percieve the lack of engagement with 'real' issues (in the critical
realist sense) as worrying - whether the quantity and quality of work has risen or fallen over the last
few years is hardly the issue; there just isn't enough of it. His beef is homelessness - mine is
applied development work in the counties of the South, by geographers. On starting a teaching job in
the UK in '93 in a College of HE (now absorbed into Brunel), I discovered my heady expectations of
active involvement by geographers in issues of social relevance were largely unmet. But then, I'd
done my PhD at Clark (a US liberal arts University that actually has the words 'moral university' in its
current mission statement, and a radical heritage among the geography faculty and students to go
with it) and fieldwork in Burkina Faso, a country just emerging from a home-grown populist regime
under which real efforts had been made to tackle rural disparities and chronic poverty through
mass-mobilisation. These experiences coloured my views after 7 years away from the UK.
Enough nostalgia. I still read Society and Space and Antipode, hoping that, occasionally, socially
relevant/policy-relevant, action-oriented research gets an airing in these cutting-edge journals. I'm
usually (but not always) disappointed, and our students are as baffled as I am by the critical turns in
post-structural work. It's great what is being done, and all power to its authors - but it's 1000 miles
from my vision of what human geography could offer the world. This is particulary disappointing in
the case of Antipode, given the way it began at Clark with Dick Peet and his postgrads (sorry, Editor
of Antipode). Even Applied Geography, despite the title, can be a disappointment to an applied
geographer!
There is hope. I do find something to latch onto in Local Environment, Development in Practice,
Town & Country Planning (!), Human Organization, and sometimes in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, -
but these by and large are by non-geographers with something concrete to say based on their
practical experiences or critical interpretations of those experiences. My own work on African
poverty, and environmental campaigning, seems to fit in better in this company, and I do find the
commitment and activism of geographers like Tim O'Riordan, Gilbert White, Bob Colenutt, John
Whitelegg, Ben Wisner, Phil O'Keefe (& many others, not all male..) to be continually inspiring. The
work at UEA on development and environment issues, IDS-Sussex, and particularly IIED
[http://www.oneworld.org/iied/] on issues of the age (the latter look at urbanisation/social
marginalisation; drylands; green business; sustainable agriculture; participatory research techniques;
forest management; environmental planning; energy....) is a salutory reminder to us that others are
scaling the relevance mountains far quicker than us by organising networks of researchers, from
North and South, around policy relevant themes. IIED does have some human geographers on staff,
by the way!
No prescriptions from me on this (it wouldn't be in the spirit of the Critical List). Except one. The
Society for Applied Anthropology has a great series on meetings, workshops, and conferences on
health, poverty, development etc. They publish Anthropology in Action (check it out
- http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/Anthaction/memform.html). A fitting legacy of this List might be a similar
set-up for geographers, possibly outside the RGS-IBG corporate world. I agree with John there are
too many endless debates in progress, and I don't see your views as 'old fashioned'. You would feel
right at home in the Mezzanine, that space occupied by the postgrads at Clark, as I am sure they can
tell you if they are reading this!
At Brunel, by the way, we have tried, with a small group, to keep social and environmental research
of an applied nature on the agenda, in a range of funded, unfunded and unfundable projects. The
RAE slammed us, inevitably ( no papers in the Annals or the Transactions, etc.)., and goodness
knows we could do with more financial support - but Modules like the hands-off 'Applied
Geography in the Community' are appealing to our students, and one has to remain optimistic, always
- especially in this job!
Simon Batterbury
lecturer in human geography
Brunel University
www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/geo
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