A piece about the revitalization of geography, "Maps and Chaps," in the
Village Voice
education supplement is out.
Week of August 1 - 7, 2001
The New Geography Reaches Critical Mass
Maps and Chaps
by Jeff Byles
go to
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0131/edbyles.php
"As a young lad in Gillingham, England, the critical geographer David Harvey
often tried to run away from home. His conscience always got the best of
him, though. "So I decided to run away in my imagination," he reminisced
last year, and took to roaming the perforated vistas of his stamp
collection, where countries were safely imprinted with the British monarch.
Growing older, Harvey dreamed of sailing on the naval destroyers he toured
with his father, a Chatham shipyard foreman. He limned maps of the empire
and, as teenage wanderlust set in, cycled the Kent countryside........'
[the only sane way to travel, of course - SB]
..........
"Because the last five years have seen a veritable counterrevolution sweep
the discipline, with critics such as Ross Clark complaining that whereas
history was supposed to be about chaps and geography about maps, now
geography was about chaps, too: "It is about homeless chaps, hard-up chaps,
and downtrodden chaps of all kinds," he wrote several years ago, adding that
the field had devolved into "a general depository for Marxist academics who
don't quite fit in any other university department." Then, three years ago,
the discipline weathered a "thinly veiled palace coup" at geography's two
major journals in a move some saw as a victory for hardcore positivism.
"Having been blown away by Marxists, feminists, and radical
poststructuralists, the more conservative part of the discipline is
regrouping," Smith says.
And there are the Ivy League closures, which many geographers attributed to
aging, dysfunctional faculties that were perhaps better off collecting their
pensions."
etc.... enjoy.
