Critical geography


Critical geography is theoretically informed geographical scholarship that seeks for social justice, liberation, and leftist politics. Critical geography is also used as an umbrella term for Marxist, feminist, postmodern, poststructural, queer, left-wing, and activist geography.
Critical geography is one variant of critical social science and humanities that adopt Marx’s thesis to interpret and change the world. Fay defines contemporary critical science as the effort to understand the oppression in a society and use this understanding to promote societal change and liberation. Agger identifies a number of features of critical social theory practiced in fields like geography, which include: a rejection of positivism; an endorsement of the possibility of progress; a claim for the structural dynamics of domination; an argument that dominance derived from forms of false consciousness, ideology, and myth; a faith in the agency of everyday change and self-transformation and an attendant rejection of determinism; and a rejection of revolutionary expediency.

Origin

Critical geography in the Anglo-American world rooted in the radical geography that emerged in the early 1970s. Peet provides an overview of the evolution of radical and critical geography. In the early 1970s, radical geographers tried to transform the scope of the discipline of geography by responding to the great issues of the time - civil rights, environmental pollution, and war. From the mid- to late-1970s saw ascending critiques of the quantitative revolution and the adoption of Marxist approach. The 1980s is marked by fissures between humanistic, feminist and Marxist streams, and a reversal of structural excess. In the late 1980s, critical geography emerged and gradually became a self-identified field.
Although closely related, critical geography and radical geography are not interchangeable. Critical geography has two crucial departures from radical geography: a rejection of the structural excess of Marxism, in accordance with the post-modern turn; and an increasing interest in culture and representation, in contrast to radical geography’s focus on the economy. Peet notices a rapprochement between critical and radical geography after heated debate in the 1990s. Nevertheless, Castree posits that critical and radical geography entail different commitments. He contends that the eclipse of radical geography indicates the professionalization and academicization of Left geography, and therefore worries about the loss of the "radical" tradition.

Common themes

As a consequence of the post-modern turn, critical geography doesn’t have a unified commitment. Hubbard, Kitchin, Bartley, and Fuller asserts that critical geography has a diverse epistemology, ontology, and methodology, and does not have a distinctive theoretical identity. Nonetheless, Blomley identifies six common themes of critical geography, encompassing:
  1. A commitment to theory and a rejection of empiricism. Critical geographers consciously deploy theories of some form, but they draw from a variety of theoretical wells, such as political economy, governmentality, feminism, anti-racism, and anti-imperialism.
  2. A commitment to reveal the processes that produce inequalities. Critical geographers seek to unveil power, uncover inequality, expose resistance, and cultivate liberating politics and social changes.
  3. An emphasis on representation as a means of domination and resistance. A common focus of critical geography is to study how representations of space sustain power; or on the contrary, how representations of space can be used to challenge power.
  4. An optimistic faith in the power of critical scholarship. Critical geographers believe that scholarship can be used to resist the dominant representations, and scholar can undo power domination and free the oppressed. There exists an implicit confidence in the power of critical scholarship to reach the ignorant, and in the capacities of people to defeat alienation by means of reflexive self-education.
  5. A commitment to progressive practices. Critical geographers want to make a difference. They claim to be united with social movements and activists with commitments to social justice. The relationship between critical geography and activism has been much debated.
  6. An understanding of space as a critical tool. Critical geographers pay special attention to how spatial arrangements and representations can be used to produce oppression and inequality. Critical geographers identify to varying degrees how space can be used as both a veil and tool of power.

    Critiques

A few important questions remain unsolved in critical geography. The first one is that there has been relatively limited discussion over the shared commitments of critical geographers, with a few exceptions such as Harvey. The question such as "what are geographers critical of", and "to what end" needs to be answered. Barnes comments that critical geographers are better at providing explanatory diagnoses than offering anticipatory-utopian imaginations to reconfigure the world.
The second question concerns the institutionalization of critical geography. Even though critical geographers conceive themselves as rebels and outsiders, critical thinking has become prevalent in geography. Critical geography is now situated at the very heart of the discipline of geography. Some see institutionalization as a natural result of the analytical strength and insights of critical geography, while others fear that institutionalization has entailed cooptation. The question is whether critical geography still holds its commitment to political change.
Lastly, as critical geography is practiced across the world, the insights of critical geographers outside the Anglophone world should be better acknowledged. In this regard, Mizuoka et al. offered an overview of Japanese critical geography praxis since the 1920s. In addition, critical geography should also forge stronger linkage with critical scholars in other disciplines.