I had intended to post something to crit-geog about the pretensions of 
the list and its users, but this mail has pre-empted it. I mailed the 
mailbase secretariat yesyerday asking them to take all monolingual lists 
off their server. Somehow, I do not expect a positive reply.

My impression is that geographers as as conned by the global pretensions 
of internet as anyone else. However this does not date from Internet or 
telematica. I counted the editors and editorial board of Antipode recently, 
all but 4 of 28 (from memory, this) from English speaking universities in 
ex-British colonies. Everyone finds this pattern normal, no-one questions 
that all the articles are in English. No-one questions that some-one can 
get to be a Professor of Geography without ever having read a word in a 
language other than English.


Of course this is standard pattern in the natural scineces, but also in 
most of the humanities. Nevertheless it is clearly racist, in the usual 
sense. Strictly, it discriminates on the basis of ethno-linguistic 
groups. Discriminates by exclusion, obviously, but also by inequal 
access. Sitting opposite me at the moment is a woman who has come from 
Australia to do an environmental philosophy course at the University of 
Amsterdam. For the convenience of this white middle-class Australian, and 
similar students, the 
course is offered in English. The second languages in Amsterdam, after 
Dutch, are Moroccan Arabic, Berber, Turkish and Kurdish. Needless to say, 
the University of Amsterdam offers no environmental philosophy courses in 
these languages. Needless to say, despite EU funding, no courses for 
exchange students are offered ion any other EU language than Dutch or 
English. For everyone it is absolutely normal, that such a student may do 
her work in her own language, while a newly arrived Moroccan student has 
to learn a fourth language to academic level.

The academic dominance of English, which is now being reproduced in 
electronic form, benefits the national elites in English speaking 
countries: it combines race, class, income and territorial barriers. And 
despite the pretensions of journals like Antipode, it discriminates 
poltically too. The winner is the Anglo-American liberalo-communitarian 
tradtition. Probably, most students at British or USA universities by 
now think these are the only political alternatives in history. 
Certainly, many geographers also seem unable to step outside 
Anglo-American patterns of thought.
-

 On Tue, 25 Jun 1996 
[log in to unmask] wrote:

> I was interested in the debate about virtual and embodied conferences but I 
> think one of the key problems for CGF is that, because of language, it is 
> largely limited to people in the English speaking world. It has struck me since 
> working in Japan and travelling around the region that there are thousands of 
> academic and radical geographers in Japan, China, Korea and South East Asia who 
> would appreciate contact with us. What is the answer?
> Do we claim that English is the language of the Internet and that Asians should 
> learn it in order to communicate with us? This may be a new form of colonialism 
> but I doubt it; what is more likely to happen is that parallel worlds will 
> develop with little meaningful contact other than that between multi-national 
> executives and governments. (They can afford 'embodied' meetings with 
> interpreters, but academics can't. Recently some people here tried to organise a 
> Japan/UK Geography conference, but nobody from the UK wanted to come.) 
> I think CGF has made a good start, but is it possible for us to be 
> international given the barriers of language and money?
> 
> Martin Brennan,
> Oita University,
> Japan.
> 
> 


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