PROGRAM FOR THE RENEWAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL GEOGRAPHICAL UNION COMMISSION ON THE HISTORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL THOUGHT (IGU COMMISSION C08.20)
Jacobo García-Álvarez
Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain
Madrid, June 2008
Renewal of Commission’s name
The Commission to which the present application is addressed has been called “The Commission on the History of Geographical Thought” since its inception in 1968. It is proposed that a new name -“The Commission on the History of Geography”- be adopted to replace the current name.
Commission’s precedents and aims
With this slightly different name, the Commission on the History of Geography intends to continue and reactivate and give continuity to the Commission on the History of Geographical Thought, which was created in the XXth IGU International Congress, held at New Delhi in 1968. The aims and objectives of the Commission through its long and fruitful life have been wide and diverse, as described in recent accounts (Buttimer, 1998; Berdoulay, 2003-2004). Through its 40-year existence, the Commission of History of Geographical Thought has made important contributions to our understanding of, among other subjects, the life and work of leading figures on the field, both national and international; the formation of the main “national schools” of geography; the professionalization and social institutionalisation processes of the discipline; the role of geography itself within the processes of nation building; and the exchange and circulation mechanisms of geographical ideas at different scales. In its last working period, the Commission has also considered the thematic and methodological challenges involved in the development of a world history of geography that might overcome the traditional, Western-orientated and internalist approaches to the discipline’s historiography.
The new Commission wilk seek to build on these achievements and will consider an even wider range of topics beyond the history of academic geography. It will seek in particular to encourage new research on the history of non-academic geographical practices and experiences and on the development of a “geographical imagination” associated with travel and exploration, within a wider public arena.
The Commission on the History of Geography expects to be a forum for exchanging ideas and outcomes on both the history of the field and, more widely, the history of geographical knowledges, experiences and practices, and their consequences and usefulness for understanding contemporary world. In this respect, the symposia and conferences planned within the present work program will consider socially relevant questions and outstanding issues in the light of the history of the field. These include topics like geography’s role and image within the public sphere; the relationsihip between geographical and environmental thought; the political role of geography and geographers; and the position of geography and lay geographical knowledge, experiences and practices in conceptualising world’s cultural diversity.
Steering Committee[1]
Jacobo GARCÍA-ÁLVAREZ, Chair
Departamento de Humanidades: Geografía, Historia Contemporánea y Arte
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
C/ Madrid 133, Edificio 17, despacho 17.2.14
28093 Getafe
Spain
Tel: +34 91 624 92 09; + 34 91 856 13 44
Fax: +34 91 624 85 62
E-mail:
Michael HEFFERNAN, Vice-Chair
School of Geography
University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham, NG7 2RD
United Kingdom
Tel: 0115 84 66144
Fax: 0115 95 15249
E-mail:
Jean-Yves PUYO, Secretary
Département de Géographie
Laboratoire Société, Environnement, Territoire
Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour
Domaine Universitaire
64000 Pau
France
Tel: (33) 5 59 40 72 77
Fax: (33) 5 59 40 72 55
E-mail:
Diana K. DAVIS
Department of History (as of 1 August 2008)
2216 Social Sciences & Humanities
University of California
Davis, CA 95616
United States of America
E-mail:
Joao Carlos garcia
Departamento de Geografía
Facultade de Letras
Universidade do Porto
Via Panorâmica s/n
4150-564 Porto
Portugal
Tel: 22 6077189
Fax: 22 6077194
E-mail:
Anne GODLEWSKA
Department of Geography
Queens University
Kingston, Ontario, K7L 3N6
Canada
Tel: +001 (613) 533-2903
Fax: 001 (613) 533-6122
E-mail:
Loan Thanh NGÔ
Département de Géographie
Université des Sciences Sociales et de l'Humanité (USSH)
10 - 12 Dinh Tien Hoang, Arrondissement 1
Ho Chi Minh Ville
Vietnam
E-mail:
Silvina QUINTERO
Departamento/Instituto de Geografía
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
Universidad de Buenos Aires.
Puán 470, 4to. Piso,
C.P.: 1406, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires
Argentina.
Tel: (011) 4432-0606 (int. 116)
Fax: (011)4432-0606
E-mail:
Ali toumi
Département de Géographie
Faculté des Sciences Humaines et Sociales de Tunis
Bd. du 9 avril 1938
1007 Tunis
Tel: +216 1 567 551
Fax: +216 1 576 262
E-mail:
Jan Vandersmissen
National Comitee for Logic, History and Philosophy of the Sciences
Paleis der Academiën
Hertogsstraat 1
B-1000 Brussel
Belgium
Tel.: 0032 2 550 23 41
E-mail:
Work Plan 2009-2012
The Commission will organize its meetings to coincide with larger conferences of the IGU for the period from 2009 to 2012, although other meetings may also be organized beyond this framework. The following topics are suggested:
* 2009: February 5th to 8th 2009: Symposium of the CHG at Miraflores de la Sierra (Madrid, Spain), coinciding with the IVth Meeting on the History of Geographical Thought Work Group of Spanish Geographers Association (AGE)[2]. The first announcement of this IVth Meeting, addressed to AGE’s members, has already been made in April 2008 (http://age.ieg.csic.es/docs_externos/IV_Seminario_HPG.pdf). The Meeting is going to be held under the general title of “Languages and images of landscape and territory”, and it will deal with two main topics:
-Languages of landscape and territory: cartography, rhetoric, iconography.
-Connections between landscapes and territories, and the building of identities, places and memory.
* 2010, Summer, IGU Regional Meeting (Tel Aviv, Israel): “Geography, civilizations, and cultural identities in historical perspective”. This meeting would deal with the evaluation of geography’s contribution to the political process, with particular reference to cultural diversity, at different scales and in different times and places. It will consider topics such as: “spatial” issues of cultural differentiation general categories (nations, ethnic groups, races, civilizations, etc.); geography’s contribution to identitycreation at national and regional scales; the relationships between geography, colonialism, and imperialism within the cultural order (taking the colonial processes into account, not only in their aspects of domination and acculturation, but also within their positives aspects of encounter and transculturation); the role of geographers in the development and popularisation of the main global “metageographies” and world regional representations (such as the continental division schema); geography’s contribution to universalist, internationalist and cosmopolitan theory; and the relevance of geographical knowledge for large cultural and political debates about the “clash”/“alliance” of civilizations, multiculturalism, globalisation, etc.
* 2010, date still not decided. Possible Joint Symposium with the IGU Commission on the Cultural Approach in Geography on the topic of Heritage, at Laval University in Quebec City, Canada. First contacts for this possible joint meeting have been made with Professor Guy Mercier (Université Laval), who is currently full member of the IGU Commission on the Cultural Approach in Geography.
* 2011, CHG symposium (topic and venue still not decided). Two possible activities:
a) Joining the V Meeting of the History of Geographic Thought Group of Spanish Geographers Association (AGE), which will be held in 2011. A general topic for this joint meeting could be: “Geographic thought faced with landscape and nature transformations”. An international meeting would be held and it would specifically tackle the contribution of geographic thought to the conceptualisation of the great environmental problems, as well as the formulation of proposals for alleviate and correct them (for instance, by looking into the geographical precedents of the idea of sustainability).
b) A symposium of the Commission itself on the topic “Geography and territorial policies: past and current experiences, which would focus on the role played by the geographers in territorial politics, with particular reference to borders and and territorial divisions; geostrategy, defence, wars and other military engagements; colonization policies; regional policies, urbanism and territorial management; forestry policies, etc[3].
* 2012, IGU Congress (the venue and the general slogan of the Conference will be chosen at the next IGU Conference, taking place at Tunis on August 2008). One possibility would be a meeting on “The place of Geography and geographical knowledge in the public sphere”, which would tackle questions such as: the public image of geography; the social institutionalisation of geography at different contexts and times; the role of academic and non-academic geographies within the formation of the social image and public perception of geography (forms of “popular geographies”, the lay geographical imagination, “para-geographies”, etc.).
Relevance of anticipated results and Scholarly Importance:
The aims and the work schedule that are planned by the present program confront challenges of deep theoretical significance and outstanding social relevance. These are matters that relate directly to those given priority by the International Geographical Union (IGU) in recent times.
At the theoretical level, more explicit attention will be paid to the history of non-academic “geographic practices” (including the so-called “para-geographies”), as well as to the realm of geographic experience and that of the “lay geographies” (that is, the learning about space achieved by non-experts and individuals or non-scientific social groups). That could provide discoveries frequently forgotten or set aside within the hegemonic historiographic tradition of the field, which has been excessively academicist , internalist and Westerncentric.
Investigating these realms of knowledge about places, landscapes, regions and territories that are practised beyond the confines of academic geography will deepen our understanding of geography’s public image. one of the particular topics suggested for a symposium. It can also contribute to the understanding of mutual relations (transfers, convergences, differences and borrowings) between geography and other scientific knowledges with spatial concerns, between geography and creative arts and humanities, and between the discipline and non-academic territorial policies and social practices. This kind of research will reveal the multiple, and sometimes contradictory and contested character of the geographer’s task. Moreover, this will provide a forum for new work on the ethnogeographies or geographical practice, as well as helping to understand the construction of particular multidisciplinar concepts about space. All this will enhance the larger project to construct a genuinely worldwide history of the subject, which would reflect the richness of the very concept of geography across the different historical and spatial contexts. This would continue the approach highlighled by the last chairman of the Commission (Berdoulay, 2003-2004).
From the point of view of the significance and social relevance, the suggested programme intends to stress another one of the basic aims of the Commission last work period: identifying and examining the exploratory aspect of geography in the light of its history, and reflecting on geography’s past capacity to tackle socially relevant problems at different scales, especially at the international and global scale. The topics suggested for Commission symposia not only stress the social context within which geographic ideas and practices are created, but also emphasize how these ideas and practices have sought to shape social change.
Along the same line, the work plan being proposed aims to stimulate the reflection on the geographers’ role within the territorial policies over the past (which is the subject-matter of one of the suggested symposia). Furthermore, it intends to evaluate the historical contributions of geography to two of the great problems and challenges of contemporary world. These two topics would be also the object of inquiry of the other two suggested symposia: on the one hand, the challenge of negative consequences related to dramatic changes on nature and landscape, driven by humanity at the global scale. On the other hand, the challenge of cultural and identity tensions linked to globalisation and to the persistence and multiplication of ethnoterritorial and religious conflicts.
Paraphrasing the last Comission chairman’s words, the history of geographic thought, thus, can turn out to be a fruitful and useful instrument of reflection about the future, and, by the same token, a fertile source for the development of critical conscience.
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As a means of spread its activities and outcomes, the Commission will publish an annual bulletin written in three languages (English, French and Spanish), and will maintain its own web site based at Pau University, where the Commission’s web site through the period 1996-2004 was also lodged (http://web.univ-pau.fr/RECHERCHE/UGIHG/). The Comission will also disseminate the results of each congress and symposium through high-quality publications. In addition, the Commission will devote specific attention to the IGU archives, stored at the Home of Geography in Rome, in order to help out on bringing this valuable archival collection to the attention of geographers worldwide.
References quoted
BERDOULAY, Vincent (2003-2004): “L’Histoire de la Pensée Géographique. Enjeux cosmopolitiques”, Inforgeo, 18-19, pp. 21-36.
BUTTIMER, Anne (1998): «Geography’s contested histories: changing states-of-the-art”. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 89, pp. 90-99.
[1] All persons included in the following list have confirmed their participation in the candidature.
[2] If the present candidacy is approved at the Tunis IGU Meeting, we would seek to incorporate the Commission into this meeting, by means of a particular announcement both in English, French and Spanish. This announcement might be published after Tunis Meeting, that is, on August 2008. Furthermore, the current president of the History of Geographic Thought Group of Spanish Geographers Association (AGE), Professor Nicolás Ortega-Cantero has already agreed with the possibility of making this kind of joint meeting (AGE-IGU) at Miraflores.
[3] Although the dates of this symposium still have to be decided, the person put forward as Comission’s Secretary, Professor Jean-Yves Puyo, has agreed to host it at Pau (Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour) with the support of the laboratory SET (“Société, Environnement, Territoire”) and the “Comité National Français de Géographie” (Commision “Epistémologie, histoire et enseignement de la Geógraphie”).