Practising difference across geography: A transdisciplinary and Deleuzian approach to intradisciplinary thinking

Abstract

The quality of intradisciplinary thinking during research design is crucial not only for alleviating multifaceted problems – such as global environmental change – but potentially to avoid worsening them. This article builds on the emphasis placed on research framing by human, physical and critical physical geographers by drawing from ideas on iterative framing in transdisciplinarity studies – as related to collaboration between geography’s internal subdisciplines – as well as from Gilles Deleuze, especially in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, 1994 (1968)). Here, research reframing is based on a critical engagement with the contrasts in subdisciplinary foci and research methodologies, which I argue is achieved through a consideration of contrasting axiologies and facilitated by subdisciplinary encounter. I explore this approach to intradisciplinary thinking using examples from the literature in geography and beyond. Given that collaboration across research methodologies is challenging, I demonstrate one example practical approach to such intradisciplinary thinking: mapping. Different map-making and map-using activities can reflect contrasting forms of data and understandings from the field, and can therefore act as a shared space of encounter for geographers of all kinds.