Intellectual Respectability and Disciplinary Transformation? Radical Geography and the Institutionalisation of Geography in the USA since 1945

Abstract

Radical geography is an established component of geography in the United States, yet a recent report whose production was promoted by the Association of American Geographers virtually ignores it in its presentation of current priorities for teaching and research in the discipline. The report is far from inclusive in its outline of the discipline, therefore, which is aimed at the country's scientific establishment, a very different strategy from that employed three decades earlier in a report produced with very similar goals before radical geography's genesis. The reports are compared, and their different strategies evaluated in the context of understandings of both how disciplines evolve and the role of science within contemporary US society.