The Politics of Geography and Political Geography

要旨

This paper explores ‘the politics of geography,’ or the nature and problematic aspects of daily activities of geographers by examining cases in Anglophone political geography. Particular attention is paid to the four ‘incidents’ that became controversial among (political) geographers and can be considered informative for such an exploration. These incidents do not only concern conflicts and debates in academic journals over scholarly activities but also created various ‘sociological’ reactions from even outside of geography. Subject matters in political geography tend to be controversial because they often reflect the authors’ own political preferences and positionality. Whereas overt expressions of such preferences in / through academic journals may conflict with the journals’ ‘neutrality’ or ‘fairness,’ the journals themselves may direct their publication policy toward particular ‘political’ purposes. Most of the incidents became accidentally known to the author through John O’Loughlin, who has been an editor of the journal Political Geography since its foundation. Drawing on the experiences of O’Loughlin and Political Geography and without concluding that ‘everything is political,’ this paper attempts to reveal where and how ‘the political’ played out in those incidents and to provide a clue to a self-reflection on the socio-political implications of our daily academic activities.

主題