Institutions and disciplinary fortunes: two moments in the history of UK geography in the 1960s-II: human geography and the Social Science Research Council

Abstract

Geography grew rapidly within the British university system during the 1950s and 1960s. In the middle of the latter decade, however, the discipline was initially excluded from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). This essay looks at why such an ostensibly successful discipline was not incorporated in the initial plans and how a successful challenge led to its later acceptance in the SSRC. It shows that the acceptance was a consequence of individual initiative rather than representations from the discipline's learned societies, throwing further light (as discussed in the first paper in this pair) on their failure to promote the discipline during that key period.