Reading Drumlin: academic geography and a student geographical magazine

Abstract

Recent scholarship in the history of geographical inquiry has stressed the many and varied sites in which geographical knowledges have been produced and consumed. The focus has tended to remain on the productions of academic geographers, as linked into broader intellectual, political and social trends, and rarely has attention been paid to the ‘bottom-up’ productions of those who are usually regarded simply as consumers of ‘top-down’ knowledges. There is perhaps warrant for taking more seriously than hitherto the efforts in this respect of student ‘geographers’, and for considering more carefully just how they receive, respond to, reformulate and perhaps reject the knowledges presented to them in lectures, textbooks and journals. Such ‘student’ geographers must therefore be regarded not just as consumers of geographical knowledge but as its producers as well. Through an in-depth reading of one particular student geographical magazine called Drumlin, based in the Geography Department at Glasgow, Scotland, this article explores the changing terrain of student geographical knowledge over the period 1955–96. This reading suggests that Drumlin can be interpreted as a ‘semi-academic space’, one entailing a hybridity of academic and student voices, and also as one opening a window on the tangled sociology of staff–student relationships which both contextualizes and conditions what can appear in the pages of such a student geographical magazine. While not holding great surprises in what student (and academic) contributions to the magazine have entailed and covered, the impression is none the less of important nuances, presences and absences, and lines of acceptance and resistance which do promise the addition of something new to writings on geography's many histories.