Between area and discipline

Abstract

This paper explores tensions that emerge from the injunction to make progress in geographical knowledge production in the globalizing landscape of higher education and research. The paper identifies gaps that emerge between disciplinary geographical knowledge production and area studies knowledge production, particularly connections to non-western areas on which many geographers work. It suggests these gaps are symptomatic and productive of the discipline’s problematically constituted community: the ‘we’ of Geography’s vanguard. The paper charts the precipitation of these tensions within Geography’s disciplinary dispositif before suggesting three alternative knowledge production tactics aimed at closing any such gaps and that in turn democratically reconstitute disciplinary Geography’s ‘we’.