History and philosophy of geography II: In search of ‘a properly geographical theorist’

I Anniversaries, anxieties, and theoretical impulses: Theory’s terrae ignotae

It has been 40 years since the first history and philosophy of geography (HPG) report, was published, ¹ though it was preceded by a number of stand-alone Methodology and Philosophy Progress reports, starting from volume 1 in 1977 up through volume 8 in 1984, when the series took on its current format. These ‘prehistoric’ reports reflect geographers’ efforts to make sense of the emerging variety of philosophical commitments in the late 1970s (Bird, 1977, 1978, 1979; Claval, 1980, 1981, 1982). The subsequent shift away from this strong interest in epistemology to a focus on historiographical issues is quite telling about the mirage of the seamless character that the label HPG conjures up. The disjointed nature of this two-headed subfield and the uneven trajectories of its composing parts are apparent to anyone reading in a genealogical fashion the reports from 1984 onwards (Puente-Lozano, 2023). ‘History’ and ‘Philosophy’ are ‘fraternal twins separated at birth’ as Doel (2024: 1) has put it. ‘Strange geographical bedfellows’ (ibid.) whose ‘and’ holds together as much as splits apart.

So just as the first 1984 HPG report claimed that ‘history of geography has come of age as an independent subdiscipline’ (Glick, 1984: 275), Claval (1981: 97) had previously pinpointed the mid-1960s as the moment in which theoretically inclined research boosted and thus, following Harvey’s twin interventions – Explanation in Geography (1969) and Social Justice and the City (1973) (cf. Cresswell, 2024; Harrison, 2024) – ‘epistemology became really fashionable’. ² History and philosophy of geography’s alternating wax and wane were closely connected, though, as the ‘explosion of philosophical interests’ (Claval, 1982: 449) was perceived then as too diverse and unruly to be navigated epistemologically. Hence, a historical approach on intellectual shifts and crisis at the time was claimed to be the only way to navigate such complexity (Claval, 1980: 374). In that first official HPG report, accordingly, Glick (1984: 275) established the major working assumption that would guide future HPG scholarship: ‘philosophical uncertainty’ in Geography required that a historical analysis of geographical ideas take the lead when confronting and exploring epistemological structures and institutionalisation processes in the field.

Happily, various anniversaries now offer the occasion to grasp how theory and history have been (dis)articulated over the past four decades and the fundamental role that alternatively or in parallel (but never quite crossing over) both historical and theoretical reflections on geographical issues have assumed as a ‘way forward’. 2021 marked the 40th anniversary of the foundation of the HPG Research Group (RGS/IBG), for example, which resulted in an interesting one-day symposium, now being transformed into a Journal of Historical Geography special issue, ‘Reflections on histories and philosophies of geography: biographies, philosophies, and impacts’. ³ And 2023 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City and the launch of David Harvey: a critical introduction to his thought by N. Castree, G. Charnock, and B. Christophers (Castree et al., 2023). The Scottish Geographical Journal organised a ‘David Harvey: double symposium’ in which the question of philosophies of explanation, theory, the ‘power of abstraction’ (Gray, 2023), and ‘the problem of status quo theory’ (Mitchell, 2023) loom large, as was also the case with ‘the detour of philosophy’ and the ‘power of critical theory’ in Castree et al. (2023: 33–58).

These different anniversaries are closely linked in that they account for how theory-making acquired a prescriptive nature that has remained central to ‘advancing the frontiers’ of new geographies (Claval, 1981: 97), no matter how variously theory has been construed: from initial methodology-based approach to more recent historiographical breakthroughs and increasing ‘ontologisation of geographical theory’, as pointed out by Bodden (2024). Even though discussion of ontology has been at the forefront over these 40 years, what Bodden tries to problematise is how the truth-status of metaphysical assertions about key spatial concepts is now being established in prevailing modes of theorising that tend to be ‘unreflective’ (p. 2) and have many normative blind spots.

In all three anniversaries, HPG trajectories can be read as the ongoing ‘enlivening’ of new objects/subjects of study insofar as they are perceived as under-theorised in Geography, as some of the scholarship reviewed in the next section shows. Theory’s terra ingnotae keep being ‘discovered’, ‘explored’, and ‘historised’, yet methodological operationalisation or normative articulation of said new horizons remain underaddressed.

If this genealogical reading of HPG as a subfield reveals how the history of geography has overtaken the philosophy of geography as the main way to consider the many normative and epistemic issues at stake (Davies, 2023; Ferretti, 2024), efforts to clarify and further elaborate the philosophy of geography (Brigstocke et al., 2023; Ernste, 2023; Tambassi and Tanca, 2021; Yeung, 2023) seem to be now back on track, notably outside the Anglophone communities. This is happening either by giving continuity to an existing tradition of sound intellectual engagement (Bruneau, 2023) and epistemological analysis (Campos et al., 2024; Clerc, 2021; Da Silva, 2023; Júnior, 2024), or by opening new spaces for reflexivity (Leite Alvarenga Botelho et al., 2024; Ripoll and Frouillou, 2022; Vergnaud and Péaud, 2023) and sceptical approaches (Rothfuß et al., 2024), or engaging more cogently with normative justification (Belina, 2024; Kuge et al., 2024; Saltiel and Strüver, 2024).

At the same time, recent reflections on how to better recast ties between Geography’s pasts and futures have included historical and philosophical takes alike (Rose-Redwood et al., 2024). In that sense, both terms ‘past’ and ‘future’ and their mutual link have been deeply unsettled, notably by inverting prevailing top-down perspectives on the past (Bruinsma, 2024; Ortega, 2023) and thus envisioning the past/future geographical praxis from below and the middle (Keighren, 2024), from the margins (Ferretti, 2023; Mansilla Quiñones, 2024; Mountz and Williams, 2023), from extreme conditions/troubling times (Speer, 2023; Squire, 2023) or from utterly transformed writing practices due to new ‘authorial personas’ (Brigstocke, 2023) or as a result of experimenting with generative AI (Vanolo, 2023), ‘metaversal thinking’ (Fraser, 2023), digital-mediation and ‘glitch epistemologies’ (Searle et al., 2023), and speculative thinking (Craig and Fraser, 2023).

Furthermore, ‘futurity’ has been radically recast in relation to geographical thought (Rose-Redwood et al., 2024), either as entailing a progressive sense of ‘thick time’ (Bose, 2023; Kitchin, 2023) or as translated into immanent spatial terms (as a ‘passage to the outside’ instead of as a promise that lies ahead of us: Savranky, 2023), and even articulated through compelling formulas such as ‘countergeographies’ (Anthias, 2023), ‘recursive histories’ (Davies, 2023), or ‘future pasts’ (Ferraz de Oliveira, 2023), which entail a better appreciation of past’s latent possibilities and opportunities that might gain traction in present struggles. Similarly, claims have been made for a radical reimagining of ‘the fields of fieldwork’ (Brunn and Guasco, 2023), multilingual and pluralistic dialogues (Ferretti and Barrera de la Torre, 2023), and more queered (Kinkaid, 2023), mixed and creative forms of geographical theory and praxis (Gomes, 2023), together with kinder scholar practices that compensate for the failures and violence of the neoliberal academy (Lizotte, 2023).

In all cases, unaddressed or under-articulated epistemological and normative concerns surface as very much in need of consideration and unavoidable at least if the claim to be critical can be properly grounded (Yeung, 2023). Anxieties about how to articulate theory-making and ‘theoretical impulses’ that arose some half a century ago in the field (Cresswell, 2024: 9) keep featuring prominently nowadays. Yet just as 40 years ago, epistemology was perceived useless or at least ill-fitted to deal with philosophical pluralism and various cognitive crises in Geography, over the last years theory-making has tended to take up the form of ontological assertions that are hoped that would ultimately result in a ‘definitive’ break with modern regimes of knowledge/power.

To balance sweeping theoretical impulses and wide historiographical reconfigurations, a more substantive and purposeful philosophical reflection is required - a philosophy of geography that goes beyond the programmatic, prescriptive, and hectic styles of mutually contested camps and entrenched theoretical silos which the endless turns and twists in the field have brought about.

II From speculative geographies to abyssal geographies, and back to analytic clarification: explanation strikes back!

While phenomenology continues to inspire very good geographic scholarship (Carvalho, 2023; Dörfler and Rothfuß, 2023a, 2023b; Hepach and Hartz, 2023; Strohmayer, 2023), the publication of collection of David Seamon’s writings is particularly timely (Formigari and Masolti, 2024; Seamon, 2023) given ongoing efforts to better define the core claims of post-phenomenology (Kinkaid, 2022; Pearce, 2023). Going over Seamon’s forays into phenomenology one realises that the so-called ‘conventional’ phenomenological perspective can still accommodate many of the topics and issues under discussion in more recent ‘post’-forms of thinking.

Otherwise, the willingness to theorise geographical concerns, objects, and processes seems to remain as firm and bold as ever in many quarters. This ranges from an interest in social movements spatialities (Magdahl, 2022) and wide-ranging approaches to space (Merriman, 2022) and territory (Gonin, 2024; Montes and Furlan, 2023) as developed in different academic contexts, to concerns with geographical modelling (Fotheringham and Li, 2023). Even ‘unfashionable places’ such as Stoke-on-Trent are revealed as sources of alternative modes of theorising susceptible to strategically capture ‘ontological alterity’ (Pile, 2023)!

This last example illustrates very well the diagnosis made by Bodden (2024) about prevailing ontological modes of theorising in critical geography. As he has put it: ‘you won’t get far in geographical theory today without bumping into the one ontology or another’ (p. 1). The dominance of ontological registers in theoretical argumentation can be easily detected in a wide variety of topics (both historical and contemporary in nature) to which ongoing non-representational, assemblage, relational and posthuman or post-foundational approaches continue to be applied (Edensor, 2023; Landau-Donnelly and Polh, 2023; Lorimer, 2023; Slatter, 2023). As varied as this scholarship is, speculative modes of thinking increasingly gain traction as a way to complicate modes of thought and to pluralise and problematize modern forms of knowledge-making in Geography or, more broadly, in Earth-thinking (Williams and Keating, 2022a; 2022b). Drawing upon recent stances of speculative materialism and empiricism (e.g. thinkers such as de Landa, Debaise, and Stengers), abstractions appear as something very different from modern transcendental reasonings detached from empirical grounds and particular contexts. Instead, this notion of speculation recast the empirical in a way non-reducible or translatable to modern regimes of knowledge, that is, ‘not as something that simply appears to us through perception, but as an experiential event that necessarily exceeds and modifies the frameworks in which it gets placed’ (Williams and Keating, 2022a: 4).

Expanding on sustained efforts of exploration of radical contingency, negativity and void (Dekeyser et al., 2022; Kingsbury and Secor, 2021; Secor, 2023) running against more predominant affirmational forms geographic theory and critique, speculative geographies engender new forms of understanding by enacting the multiple space-times of experience, thus widening the already expanding domains of the pre-cognitive, pre-individual, elemental, atmospheric, inorganic, unsayable, spectral, intangible, infra-sensible, and unattainable: dimensions of the world that exceed human recognition and call for forms of radical empiricism and non-human ontologies and ecologies (Turnbull et al., 2022; Yusoff, 2024). Crucially, the very idea of ‘world’ and ‘worlding’ (a key category in much geographic scholarship, phenomenological or otherwise) is utterly transformed therein (Dekeyser, 2024). Hence, ‘unavailable geographies’ (Pugh, 2023) and ensuing abyssal explorations (Pugh and Chandler, 2023) emerge as an (un)transitable path to cope with existing epistemic limitations of ongoing relational, non-representational, vitalist, and materialist turns.

Geographers going through the abyss (Gfollner and Pugh, 2023) are taking a step forward beyond previous deconstructive gestures in order to articulate more radical forms of critique by holding everything in suspension, including ontology/epistemology in its modern or postmodern forms. In a new twist of the prevailing ontologisation that Bodden has diagnosed, ‘para-ontology’, according to Pugh and Chandler (2023: 202), problematises the very ontological terms of the debate. Articulating ‘abyssal positionalities’ is claimed to expose the inherent violence of modern categories (of any attempt at categorising, classifying, ordering altogether). Expanding on critical Black Studies and drawing figuratively upon Caribbean practices of resistance and survival (e. g., ‘Middle Passage’ and ‘plantation’), abyssal modes of critical thought aim at keeping life open and unretrievable, rejecting and disrupting any ‘abyssal cut’ that necessarily projects ‘subjects’ as ontological entities upon ‘the world’ (carved as separated ‘object’ in what is the very foundational violence that an abyssal critique seeks to avoid in the first place).

Against this backdrop of even more radical and self-deconstructed forms of (para)ontological critique that hope for alternative critical geographies, the publication of Henry Wai-chung Yeung book Theory and Explanation in Geography is particularly timely and relevant. His analysis of the recent history of geographic thought offers a firm ground to bring analytic clarity into contemporary ontological quarrels.

Yeung’s (2023: 1) invocation of Harvey’s famous closing phrase in his Explanation in Geography, ‘By our theories you shall know us’, offers a compelling path for those concerned with the current state of HPG, for he offers a brilliant example of how to navigate the history and philosophy of geography simultaneously. Yeung thoroughly revises four decades of critical geographic scholarship by focussing specifically on the role that theory-making has taken in Geography’s various turns and trends. He does so in order to assess the explanatory purchase of these different forms of theory development while capturing core concerns, thematic foci and epistemic structures of these bodies of geographic theory (Yeung, 2023: 36–94). For him, the genuine critical value of any geographic theory lies in explanation. More specifically, Young claims that theory development in critical geography should aim at explaining context-specific social phenomena by unveiling the causal structures that make them to produce particular geographical outcomes. Attention to mechanisms (specified from wider general processes they help to articulate) and contexts (which allow to capture empirical contingency) lies at the core of his plea for analytical geographies. Among the analytical specifications that he brings in, three stand out: the distinction between ‘process’ and ‘mechanism’; a reworked and more concrete notion of power based upon the idea of its proper double contingency (dependence on a structure, that is articulated upon discrete objects in its turn); and a more discrete notion of relationality centred in agents, which may allow to talk more cogently about ‘effects’ and ‘causes’.

Yeung’s attempts at ‘theorising back’ (Jazeel, 2011) in a way attuned to ongoing efforts to decolonise and pluralise geographic thinking beyond ‘academic esotericism’ that cannot account normatively for its inherent limits (Yeung, 2023: 261) is all-the-more important amidst the prevailing forms of geographic theory that have eschewed any form of causality or realism in their quest for theorising difference, contingency, processes, relations, and connections. Yeung’s book operates a crucial manoeuvre of gnoseological translation as he recasts some of the most pervasive and difficult ontological concerns of recent critical ‘post’-geographic theories in epistemological terms.

On the one hand, he offers an epistemologically robust unified frame (attentive to Marxist bitter complains against disintegration of knowledge and social struggle by ever-fragmented identity politics), and on the other, he meets many of the context-sensitivity requirements of relational theories prevailing in Geography. He does so, though, in a way that clearly shows the many lock-ins that hegemonic forms of constructivism in ‘post’-critical geographic theory have generated. That these are serious problems potentially leading Geography to either practical irrelevance or epistemic suicide becomes evident through the book.

All of this can be enormously helpful not only to understand what the decisive stakes on critical theorisations are, but more importantly to bring about a more open, fully-fledged and explicit discussion on theory-making in Geography without the need to use the sometimes obscure and complex vocabularies of each competing trend. To theorise adequately, Yeung (2023: 252–266) claims, geographers should combine reflexive theorising with socially engaged and context-rich forms of inquiry that can be operationalised at the meso-level. Furthermore, he elaborates on the various requirements that any ‘good’ explanatory geographic theory should meet, that is, to be ‘epistemologically realistic’, ‘practically and socially adequate’, normatively well-articulated, and to offer high sensitivity to contexts (Yeung, 2023: 9–35; 95–128).

III Articulating philosophy of geography within HPG

Broadly speaking, these four decades of HPG have seen a move away from a rather epistemic-centric understanding of pluralism as the more or less (un)comfortable coexistence among competing schools of thought, towards its recent construal as marked by differential social, political, racial, gendered, or linguistic elements and their cross-fertilisation with contemporary concerns (decolonial endeavours, global injustices, ecological crises, emancipatory struggles, to name but few). This has allowed thinking with greater ‘multivalence’ (Ferraz de Oliveira, 2023: 4). Ongoing interest in indigenous geographies (Johnson et al., 2023; Reyes Novaes and Araújo Lamego, 2024; Sepúlveda et al., 2024; Smiles, 2023) and in decolonising (Courade, 2023; Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch, 2023; Zaragozin, 2023) and queering geographic thought and praxis (Gieseking, 2023; Tucker, 2023) exemplify both the long-standing persistence of epistemic concerns and their radical current recasting along the lines of alternative political ontologies (Dekeyser, 2024; Luque-Ayala et al., 2024).

Yet, anxieties about theory-making keep surfacing in current geographical scholarship with speculative and ontological styles as the source of endless expansion in directions opened by ever new calls for renewed critical thinking. Instead of approaching these long-standing structural concerns (Harrison, 2024) as either to be sidelined (yet later perceived as left unresolved), or to be eventually overcome, a sound articulation of history and philosophy of geography should be ripe for coping with epistemic and ontological difficulties as such, and hence to further philosophically elaborate on the stakes that critical geographic theorising brings with it. For one thing, the very pervasive and recursive character of some of these structural concerns bespeaks the intrinsic difficulty that emerge from the type of objects/subjects that Geography deals with, beyond the more concrete problems that may arise from how said difficulties are construed within various standpoints. Analytical styles may help to come to terms with such difficulties, yet utimately said issues just cannot be eliminated because they express genuine philosophical questions specific to Geography.

Therefore, I propose further reflection on (at least) the following insights as a way to engage differently with philosophy of geography. First, it is not coincidental that the worrying spread of the negative perception of the arcane, obfuscating, and jargon-ridden character of new-brand developments in geographical writing has been casted in terms of ‘philosophy envy’ (Yeung, 2023), as recent geographic theorising is increasingly perceived as too much dependent on ‘external’ sources. Hence, Yeung’s celebration of the seeming ‘Geography’s exceptionalism’, by which he means that no fully-fledged institutionalisation of ‘geographic theory’ (in the form of stand-alone theory journals, independent clear-cut subfield, etc.) has occurred ⁴ . Consequently, Yeung’s plea for analytic geographies is presented as something very different than another ‘philosophy of geography’ (Yeung, 2023: 9–15), which is made to signify another unflagging programmatic theorisation with philosophy being mobilised as critical ammunition to erect another (rather parochial) theoretical silo according to poor standards of epistemic justification. Accordingly, ‘recentering’ geographic theory is naturally perceived as much needed in Yeung’s book, yet somehow opposed to philosophical elaboration, which bespeaks the rather bad reputation (or undefinition) of philosophy of geography.

Second, and noting the intriguing spatial histories into which Cresswell has cast past intellectual trajectories, it might be worth further reflecting on the meaning of Robert Sack’s rejection of what he saw at the time as ‘the unnecessary kowtowing to social theorists by theoretically inclined geographers. … Sack wanted to be a properly geographical theorist’ (Cresswell, 2024: 8, emphasis added). Certainly, this testimony offers a valuable example of how the 40-years development of geographic thought can be interpreted as a post-positivist cycle structured by repeated gestures of acceptance/rejection of sources of thought that are variously coded as ‘external’, ‘alien’, or ‘ill-suited’(or their opposites), even amidst attempts to hold Geography as central to the emerging spatial theorising across the humanities and social sciences.

Efforts over these 40 years of key actors in the ‘gladiatorial combat’ between Geography's schools of thought (Cresswell, 2024: 8) to clarify what it means ‘to be a properly geographical theorist’ or to produce ‘distinctly geographical theory’ (ibid., p. 8: in Sack’s words) call for more (not less) institutional philosophy of geography within (and not without) HPG. Parradoxically, this goes against Doel’s (2024: 3) diagnosis about the ‘and’ of the HPG having ultimately effaced geographical thought, not least because the ‘and’ structurally predisposed the field towards ‘endless self-reference’. As he goes on to argue: ‘I wager that it will have been impossible to distinguish a “geographical thought” and a “geographical concept” worthy of the name. The usual suspects have already been found wanting: “space”, “place”, “location”, “distance”, “relation”, etcetera. And the newfangled ones are not faring any better. […] One will struggle in vain to think (or unthink) a specifically, peculiarly, exclusively, essentially, and properly “geographical” thought or “geographical” concept’ (Doel, 2024: 3). This situation very much begs the question of how to articulate theory-making in Geography and how geographic thought is to be defined and practiced in the midst of the tension between ‘unnecessary kowtowing’ and ‘endless self-reference’.

Third, and touching on what seems to be the philosophical core of the HPG literature published this year, it becomes increasingly evident that there is a growing need to rethink at great length the structuring legacy of the various cycles of post-positivist theoretical reconstruction of critical geography. It is a matter of necessity to reassess the actual critical purchase of social constructivism as engaged differently in several political epistemologies over the last decades, yet having resulted in increasingly sterile forms of tautological reasoning. As both past (and somehow failed) debates on critical realism (Cox, 2013; Pratt, 2013; Samers, 2013) and current diverging engagements with speculative realism/materialism (including Yeung himself) show, the ontological lock-ins in geographic thinking have become more and more pervasive. Going further, I would claim that this is so because the increasingly entrenched character of ontologisation as a privileged style of theory-making needs to be understood as a mid-to long-term result of the pervasive zero-degree assumption of social constructivism all across critical geography with virtually no alternative. As Cresswell (2024: 11) has argued: ‘the work of critical theory was to show how pretty much anything was socially constructed – particularly space and place. If something could be shown to be an artifact of society, the argument went, then it was possible for that thing to be otherwise. This had been gently modified by the circular arguments of the social spatial dialectic and the talk of spatiality’.

Between the quest for endogenous geographic theory that may match professional and academic core of Geography’s identity and the pressing concerns to link geographic scholarship to ever more rapidly changing abyssal forms of spatialised critique, practitioners of HPG should be able to open up and articulate wider reflexive space in which to rethink what is at stake in recent scholarship. The status of explanation in geographical theory-making, as raised by Yeung (2023), appears to me as good an entry point as any to deeper discussion on prevailing constructivist and ontological registers in geographic thinking. The 40-year stretch of theory development in Geography since the first HPG report was published has seen a constant redefinition of what is to be explained in/by Geography (the so-call explanandum) such that space has itself become the key explanatory element (i.e. the explanans) in critical analyses. This has resulted in a confusing reduplication that pervades spatial vocabularies and severely undermines their epistemic woth. Theory-making has proven integral to this move, yet as much as it may seem that ‘space’ (and other geographical categories) has come of age there remains much to be clarified and thought about how such concepts have been turned into critical categories.