Making Geography Matter

Noel Castree has worked at the universities of Manchester, Wollongong and Liverpool, and the University of Technology Sydney. He’s managing editor of the journals Progress in Human Geography and Environment & 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.

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