Dear
Colleagues:
Roepke
Lecture in Economic Geography at the AAG meeting this year will be
delivered by Professor Trevor
Barnes (UBC), with Professor Allen Scott (UCLA)
serving as a discussant.
"Notes from
the underground: Why the history of twentieth-century Anglo-American economic
geography matters"
Abstract:
The discipline of
Anglo-American economic geography seems to care little about its history.
Its practitioners tend towards the "just do it" school of scholarship in
which a concern with the present concrete economic geographical moment
subordinates all else. In contrast, I argue that knowing economic
geography's history is vital. Disciplinary historical knowledge enables us
to realise that we are frequently "slaves of some defunct" economic geographer;
that we cannot escape our geography and history, which seep into the very pores
of the ideas that we profess; that there is a yawning gap between how we
represent the work of earlier generations, and how it was conceived by them
during the raw heat of its production (likely a fate to befall our own work
too); and that the full connotations of economic geographical ideas are
sometimes purposively hidden, secret even, revealed only later by
investigative historical scholarship. My antidote: "notes from the
underground." This is a history of economic geography that delves below
the reported surface; it is often subversive, contradicting conventional
depictions; it seeks out deliberately hidden and buried economic geographical
practices; and it relies on sources now literally found underground, personal
papers and correspondence stored in one subterranean archive or another.
In making my case for examining notes from economic geography's
underground, I draw on historical research about the German geographer Walter
Christaller, the American geographer Edward A. Ackerman, and the American social
physicist John Q. Stewart.
Thursday, 4/14/11, from 2:40 PM - 4:20 PM in
Grand Ballroom A - Sheraton Hotel, Second Floor
Organizers:
Yuko Aoyama (Editor, Economic Geography) and Norma
Rantisi (EGSG Chair) Chair:
Julie Cidell
(University of Illinois)
Roepke
Lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of Geography at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Economic Geography, the journal, and the AAG
Economic Geography Specialty Group.
