Making Geography Matter: The Past and Present of a Changing Discipline

What is the purpose of Geography? What do geographers study and why? How do they seek to shape the world they interrogate? This book addresses these questions by examining the lives and works of individual geographers, both past and present. Like all disciplines, Geography is no more nor less than the collective endeavours of researchers and teachers operating in specific contexts. The contexts both shape, and are shaped by, these individuals. This book’s biographical and autobiographical chapters transport readers to the times and places where geographers have sought to make Geography matter. The result is a more vivid, grounded understanding of the discipline than the many high-level surveys of geographic thought paradigms currently written for university students. This book’s accessible essays each conclude with a study task. Making Geography Matter is aimed at university students and their teachers who wish to understand the goals, history and evolving practice of Geography. It provides an alternative perspective – both concrete and engaging – to the many student-focussed texts that map out numerous ‘isms and ologies’.

Table of Contents:
1.Introduction Noel Castree, Trevor Barnes and Jenny Salmond Part 1 – Making Geography 2.Absolute beginner? Halford Mackinder and the popularization of geographical knowledge Emily Hayes 3.Geography as the science of environmental influences: Ellen Semple and the search for disciplinary relevance Innes M. Keighren 4.Keeping human and physical geography together: Richard Chorley and Peter Haggett’s scientific turn Trevor Barnes 5.Contemporary geography: Advocating for a heterodox subject Rita Gardner Part 2 Making geographical knowledge 6.Landscape and environmental change: Carl Sauer on land and life Kent Mathewson 7.From mapping to GIScience: A sixty-year project Michael F. Goodchild 8.Radicalizing geography: The case of David Harvey’s Marxism Eric Sheppard 9.Open horizons from here to there: Doreen Massey’s geographies Jamie Peck 10.Geographies of meaning and experience: Anne Buttimer’s lifeworld Federico Ferretti 11.Landscape as a way of seeing: Denis Cosgrove’s symbolic geographies Veronica della Dora 12.Boundaries and borders matter: Ron Johnston’s electoral geography Charles J. Pattie 13.Mobility matters: Movement, meaning and practice in the context of power Tim Cresswell 14.Scale matters: The case of workers and their geographies Andrew Herod 15.Proximity, distance, and difference: The global and the intimate Gerry Pratt 16.Which realities are we trying to understand? The workings of a physical geographer in the quest to respect river diversity Gary Brierley 17.Beyond science: Climate change in a ‘wicked world’ Mike Hulme 18.‘Other’ geographies: Engaging with different ways of knowing, valuing, and acting in post-colonial Australia Sue Jackson Part 3 Making geographical knowledge matter beyond Geography 19.Geographers and the national state: Dudley Stamp plans Britain’s towns and countryside Trevor Barnes 20.Geographically empowering the marginalized: Bill Bunge, expeditions and maps Luke Bergmann and Trevor Barnes 21.Making other economies possible: Geographies of ethical action Katherine Gibson 22.Speaking truth to power: Microplastics and the sewage scandal from the rivers of Manchester to Westminster Jamie Woodward 23.Talking geography in the public realm Danny Dorling

About the Author :
Noel Castree has worked at the universities of Manchester, Wollongong and Liverpool, and the University of Technology Sydney. He is managing editor of the journals Progress in Human Geography and Environment and Planning F. He is author of the books What Future For the Earth? (2025) and Making Sense of Nature (2013). Trevor Barnes is Professor and Distinguished University Scholar at the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where he has been since 1983. His research is in economic geography and on the post-war history of human geography. He is both a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy. Jennifer Salmond is Professor Physical Geography at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is a physical geographer whose research interests include urban meteorology, air pollution, climatology and critical physical geography.