How Can Public Geography Reignite Geography and Reclaim the Generative Potential of a Geography Education?

Abstract

Geography has long been distinguished by its grounded approach to producing knowledge centred on understanding processes as they materialise in place. There has been an almost inherent publicness to its problem identification, research questions and field-based methodologies. This was reflected in close relationships between the discipline and post-war development states across the world, especially in countries like New Zealand with resource-based economies that required the particular interdisciplinary approaches at the core of geographical knowledge. However, this was all to change in the last fifteen years of the 20th century. Geography was forced to recognise and respond to the full extent of social diversity and the emergence through the cultural turn of the disruptive new knowledge approaches required to address difference in a rapidly changing social world. The pre-defined relevance afforded the discipline by its easy relationship with national and regional governments founded on development projects disappeared with the rise of the neoliberal state. New ways of practising geography, new knowledge, new audiences and new ways of reaching them were now required. These challenges materialised in new pressures on foundational divisions within the discipline and narratives of crisis, especially as the discipline became pulled apart by changes in the institutional structures of universities and new demands to demonstrate relevance in different ways. This thesis examines the concept of ‘Public Geography’, which has emerged in stuttering form over the last fifteen years as a response. The thesis the practices of New Zealand academic geographers are made the object of this thesis which seeks to identify a public geography from a practicebased reading of the discipline. It asks whether there is public geography in New Zealand and what this looks like. It aims to highlight the publicness of academic ii geography and to present this public geography as a platform for demonstrating the discipline’s generative potential and reigniting its values and self-confidence. At the core of the research lies an in-depth analysis of what academic geographers actually do, derived from in-depth interviews with roughly half of the country’s academic geographers, an interrogation of the CVs and institutional profiles of geographers, and a series of interviews with teachers, professional geographers and others working in the public spaces in which geographical knowledge is put to work. I found that geographers carry out a vast array of practices in a range of public spaces, but do not tend to aggregate these practices into a conception of public geography, even under the pressure of having to narrate the impact of their research brought on by performance assessment regimes. I also found that they do not attend as fully as they might to representing their work in these public spaces, either individually or collectively, as geography. Yet, I find that they remain confident in the value of their work, as do others with whom they engage. In short the thesis finds that there is a considerable untapped potential in the idea of building a project of public geography for a discipline damaged by institutional change and suffering from deep doubts about its collective identity. The findings suggest that simply being prepared to announce and label what they do as geography would be both a pragmatic and progressive first step towards providing the discipline with the security and recognition it deserves.