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Patricia Daley and Ian Klinke, "Human Geography: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
I'm Caleb Zakrin, CEO and publisher of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Ian Klinka and Patricia Daly about their recently published book, Human A Very Short Introduction from Oxford University Press. This VSI introduces readers to the subject of human geography, the study of human life, and our interactions with our physical surroundings and geographical locations. As the book demonstrates, human geography is equipped to take on dozens of complex subjects. Despite our many attempts to escape our geographical limitations and physical surroundings, we are undeniably shaped by our world's environments and structures. If you're interested in this subject and want to learn more, check out the book and subscribe on your podcast app to New Books in Geography. Ian and Patricia, welcome to the New Books Network.
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A
Great to be here. Thank you.
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C
Thanks for having us.
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B
This is a really fun book to read, in part because I just love these VSIs. It's such a great series to learn basically anything it feels. And I feel like human geography is a really great subject for vsi, in part because as you explore in the book, you can really use human geography as a window into exploring everything from office life to city life to rural life to migration to borders. It's pretty incredible how you can use human geography as a tool. But before even jumping into the topic of the book, I was wondering if you could just each tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.
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A
My name is Patricia Daly. I am a professor of the Human Geography of Africa at the University of Oxford. I have an undergraduate degree and a PhD in geography and a master's degree in African studies. And my first interest in geography was actually in physical geography and geology. And that came about because of my love of the natural environment, you know, walking in mountains in particular. But when I read for my undergraduate degree in geography, I read a couple of texts that sort of converted me to human geography. One was by a historian called W.G. hoskins, and it was the Making of the English Landscape. And the other book was by the geographer Yaifu Tuan, Topophilia. And Hoskins book was published in 1955 and topophilia in 1974. And what was interesting to me is that Hoskins documented some of the political and social changes that produced that picturesque English landscape that is often lauded in public discourse. And some of those processes were quite violent, like displacement and enclosure and so on. Antoine was interested in the cultural and emotional connections that people had to place and the environment and how these connect, how these emotions vary from one person to another. So I started, as a consequence of those two books, I started to see the environment differently, the landscape differently. It became interesting, you know, how people relate, were connected to their environment and how all these social processes change the landscape. And then I. My research interests really are in Africa and really partly because of that master's in African study that I did. So over the years I've done research on African refugees, political violence, peace, development in Africa, humanitarian intervention and the politics of nature conservation. But recently I've been interested in the pedagogic shifts that are required to produce more decolonizing curricula in geography departments in Africa and the global North. And to that end I published with Amber Murray a book that came out in 2023 entitled Learning Disobedience, Decolonizing Development Studies.
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C
Yeah, I'm Ian Klinker. I'm a political geographer and Patricia's colleague. I work primarily on the history of geopolitical thought on the intellectual far right, but also on nuclear landscapes and deterrence. I'm currently writing a book on geopolitics in the current moment. The most persistent geopolitical tropes that haunt our world. One of which of course we've been experiencing quite directly in the last few weeks, the idea of a sphere of influence. But yeah, so geopolitics is also my way into geography as a, as a subject. So I was taught by a couple of human geographers during my undergraduate. Urban natures and imaginative geographies were the sort of topics that we were introduced to. But it was only really doing my master's and PhD that I realized that the most exciting debates that I wanted to engage in myself were actually in geography journals. And so when I finished my PhD, I turned down a, a three year politics job for a one year geography job and that was that. And then a couple of years later I found myself teaching side by side with Patricia at Jesus College, just down the road from where I sat. Now there's a few very happy years actually and I think the book is sort of the coming together, the product of that teaching collaboration.
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
Thank you both for giving that background. It's interesting to see how people find their way to geography because I feel like it's geography is, is one of those subjects that many people are familiar with. But I also feel like it's at least as far as I, I know, not offer, not offered as much in certain schools anymore. It's geography has, has kind of been shunted into other programs. Of course it seems to becoming more and More relevant every single day. With the Reno seeming resurgence of geopolitics, concerns over borders, not like any of that went away, but now it's. Now Americans are concerned about it again. So, you know, maybe it'll make a return in the American academy. I was wondering if you could just situate listeners and define human geography.
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A
Well, this geography tends to be divided into two main divisions. There's a physical one which is concerned with earth processes from the perspective of the natural sciences, and human geography focuses on the human aspects, particularly from a social science perspective. Human geography can be broken down into a number of subdisciplines and perhaps the most important economic, historical, political, social, cultural, and environmental. I would consider myself actually as a development geographer as well as a political geographer, and Ian can talk about how he would identify himself. But sometimes our disciplines or sub disciplines overlap. So geography can be seen by some people as being very broad. But most often or not, human geographers grapple with the big problems of our time, whether it's economic inequality, wars, forced migration, racial injustice, gender inequality, and of course, the climate crisis. Human geographers, of course, are not alone in tackling these issues, but they tend to distinguish themselves from others by employing a spatial lens. So we pose questions such as why, what is, where it is and how it came to be there. And to answer those questions require a curiosity about the things around us and a skilled look for what is interesting about them. So if we wish to understand contemporary political struggles over economic inequality, migration, refugees, all those injustices that social injustices that we see as well as global warming, we must grasp the ways in which these are fought over and through space, both physical and abstract. We must, in other words, come to terms with the imagined, the embodied, and often the violent cartographies of a wide range of spaces that define our world and the social relations and political struggles that unfold around them.
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B
As far as the book is concerned, you could structure it in many different ways, but you take a look at a few different perspectives, a few different sort of archetypes that someone might use human geography for. You look at everything from the office to orders, and I was wondering if you just tell us a little about how you structured the book and why you chose to structure it that way.
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C
Yeah, absolutely. And of course, the fundamental challenge here is to do justice to an enormous field within 35,000 words without necessarily treading on any toes or leaving things out. Although actually, to leave things out is what you must do if you want to get it in a form that's kind of readable. And that makes a few arguments. And of course, when we had these discussions initially, I mean, were we going to structure it by self discipline? That seemed a bit dull. Key concepts, that's sort of been done before. Theories. I think that would have been a quite different book. Or we could have gone through world regions. But I think we settled in the end on these six archetypes. The colony, the pipeline, the high rise, the border, the workplace and the conservation area. And we add a little afterworth afterward on outer space. And the idea was really to kind of to have these cuts into the material and to thereby reveal certain segments of what's going on in slightly more high resolution than we would have done if we had tried to be entirely comprehensive. So that was what we settled on in the end. Six archetypes.
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B
Right. And we'll get to into the archetypes, but just to give listeners a sense of geography as a field. When did geography first develop? Obviously, people have been thinking about physical space and locations and even producing maps for a very long time. But geography as a field has a more recent history. So could one of you share a little bit about how it became an academic subject?
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C
Yeah, I mean, you can follow geography into the depths of recorded history if you'd like to. I mean, you can find the subject's origins, as it's often done in antiquity, Ptolemy or Strabo. There's medieval cartography. But the issue here is that all of this is also part of an invented tradition. I do think we decided that it's more fruitful to take as our starting point, really the birth, as you say, of the academic discipline in the 19th century. And it's really an attempt to produce a holistic form of knowledge that integrates, as Patricia was saying, human and physical geography at a time when academia was becoming specialized, more specialized.
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A
Right.
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C
The action at this time is not yet in the Anglosphere, it's in Germany. The first professorships that emerged there, predominantly human geography. It was then called anthropogeography. It's from a start, an imperial science. I mean, we'll talk more about that maybe in a second. But it's all about creating knowledge of distant places and peoples, not least to conquer and govern them, but also to make them somehow intelligible to the imperial mind. But human geography, as you say, they were competitors around. And it's interesting to see that the founders of anthropology and sociology, which are perhaps the most obvious competitors for human geography, they were in touch with each other. I mean, Emile Durkheim and Franz Ploas and the geographer is Friedrich Ratzer, who knew of each other and knew that they were articulating rival projects. And I think what made Ratzel's geography different was that there was a kind of deeply conservative tone to it, which was precisely to say that geography acted to constrain. It enabled, for sure, but it constrains. And the reason why there was no high civilization in Africa, and all of this in quotation marks, but he argued, was because the intellect is wilted in the tropics. And this was, of course, a dominant trope at that time. Social Darwinism was very big in the late 19th century century, early 20th century amongst geographers. But in anthropology in particular, you would have other, and I think more other stories, other narratives, stories about change. So that's the kind of history of emergence. But human geography has ended up being quite politically versatile. So it's sort of shaken off that earlier history. Already in the early in 1990, there was a number of leading Americans advising a liberal, Woodrow Wilson, in the runoff to the 1919 Paris Conference. Then in the 20s and 30s, you have European fascists being very interested in geography. And then the field becomes, in part, conscripted, really, to that political project. And then in the second half of the 20th century, human geography begins to turn to the left and it becomes sort of what it is today, a way of studying society through a spatial lens by examining that kind of interplay of space and power.
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B
Yeah, thank you for running through that. And I'm sure as we go through the different subjects, we'll continue to touch on the way in which people have practiced geography and how they practice it now. And the, you know, it's one of these fields, I think, much like anthropology, where the history of the field very much informs how people then practice it today. The book takes a look at six subjects, and it sort of demonstrates how a human geographer might approach these subjects, the different perspectives that people have taken. And I want to start with the very first one, because it also is very much connected to this history of it, which is how geographers approach the study of colonialism and the legacy of colonialism, and then the legacy of just geographical thinking about colonialism, how it's modified. So I'd love to start with that subject.
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A
Thank you. As Ian said, geography is sometimes described as a colonial science. It owes its origin, certainly in the Anglophone world, to exploration and colonization. In London, we have the Royal Geographical Society, which was founded in 1830, and it was very active, particularly in the colonization of Africa. It was developed as an academic discipline in Britain to train young people, particularly young men, for service, to participate and to be active in the colonial service. It was through the Royal Geographical Society that people learned about the world. And geographers, I felt, I think they felt in the, certainly in the latter part of the 19th century and the early 20th century, that if you wanted to be a geographer, you had to be an explorer, you had to go out and collect information. And we worked in the school of geography in Oxford, which was found which had the first academic post in geography. And the first person to hold that post was a professor called Halford Mackinder. And Mackinder felt he had to prove his masculinity. He had to climb Mount Kenya in order to become a geographer. And I mean, there's been some interesting research done by geographer called Jerry Kids Mackinder's trip to Mount Kenda, Kenya, and some of the really difficult issues that arose with regards to his treatment of the natives who were porters, who were supporting him. And so what geography then became about explorers. And explorers would return to London and recount their histories. And those histories were often recounted at the Royal Geographical Society. And I think for a long time people accepted those accounts of the colonial era, the people who were described both by geographers and anthropologists and of their environments. And it was not until the latter part of the 20th century when geographers really started to develop a critical lens and said, okay, let's return to those colonial archives to find out what really went on. Are there things that were missing or are they voices that were silent? And one of the first they. They found was that female explorers were silent. Female explorers like Mary Kingsley. And even though they traveled Mary Kingsley in West Africa, when she came back to London, she couldn't present her work. She had to sit there while a man would present her work at the Royal and her information about her travels at the Royal Geographical Society. Later on, postcolonial recall, post colonial geographers went back to the archives to look at the role that indigenous people played, right? Those people who directed Europeans to the places that they discovered. So they were finding this. There's a whole branch of geography that looked at. We took another look at the colonial archives and try to give a more inclusive account of colonial, of exploration. And then of course, you know, we, we have other areas of geometry's where that colonial legacy, these colonial legacies are addressed, for example, in political ecology. Some geographers are interested in how conservation policies that began in the colonial period have persisted and have shaped contemporary interventions, especially how they see local people and local people's relationship with wildlife that they want to protect. And so contemporary geographers are interested in the continuation of conservation policies such as forced displacement, livelihood restrictions, and the deliberate demonization or marginalization of indigenous knowledges. There's also the subfield of critical development geographies. And here geographers challenge how development is understood and promoted. They consider how colonial legacies shape how we see and interact with parts of the world that are considered developing, underdeveloped, or even the third World. What work they are, those concepts do, what do they elide, what do they permit? And geographers have drawn on the work of the literary critic Edward Said's concept of imaginative geographies to examine the spatial divides that we take as matter of fact, we see, we argue that they're political constructs. We know they don't make sense geographically, and yet they persist in public consciousness. And we have people saying, oh, this is like the Third World. Well, what is the third World? Very few people actually know the origin of the term and why, and actually. And how it's become popular in public discourse and why it's difficult to shift and why people have. Scholars, for example, have moved away from using that term and replace it with another, the global South. So critical development geographers then, that we should argue that we should stop seeing development as a post war altruistic phenomenon and that there should be greater acknowledgement of the interconnections between the colonial past and the president, as evident in this unequal trade relations, the persistence of particular forms of natural, natural resource extraction, and the role of race in defining how we connect with people in other parts of the world.
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B
Yeah, obviously there's so much there. I'm wondering just to kind of follow, follow up on that too, if there's any research that you've seen, you know, contemporary research that you've seen looking at the legacy of colonialism and you know, in human geography that you would recommend that someone might look at, as, you know, if they read this chapter and they find it really interesting, is there anything that they should follow up on?
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A
I think a good start, as I mentioned earlier, is reading, for example, one of the books by postcolonial geographers which are looking at these histories of exploration. I think that's a really good way to start because you can you learn about the colonial mind. You learned about what mattered then and why particular representations of those places were promoted. Why is it that some countries are described as backward or people violent or evil. So it can give you a sense of how we understand particular parts of the world today and how that is part of a sort of historical trajectory that. That we really need to unpack and also challenge. So that. I mean, I think my book with Amber Murray is also a very good start. I don't want to promote myself.
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B
Please do. But there's a reason they. There isn't that. There's a reason that Oxford had you write the vsi.
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A
So, I mean, learning, disobedience, decolonizing development studies is to look at. We also look at the colonial orig of, you know, development studies or development itself, and how it became almost like an ideology, you know, and it stuck to. Even though, you know, the projects, the policies have not resulted in improved standard of living or quality of life for many people in the global South. So, yeah, I think there are a number of texts and some of them we've mentioned throughout the book. I mean, I think they are not just in one section or in one chapter in the book. There are a number of texts that pick up on these themes, whether it's on the plantation in the Caribbean or north in the southern part of the US or on the persistence of certain forms of, for example, segregation or social differences within cities in the contemporary world. I don't know if Ian wants to add anything to that.
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B
The second subject that you take on is one that I find endlessly fascinating, which is just the importance, the centrality of petroleum and where you can find it to how people think about land and its value. Obviously, there's so much land that people didn't think much about. You know, they walked over it not knowing what was underneath until people figured out that by you could take petroleum, you could take oil, process it and use it for fuel. And that explains so much of the 20th century. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how human geographers have thought about petroleum and its impact on human lives and also just on how people think about land value.
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C
Yeah. I mean, at a deeper level, I think geographers have been very interested in fossil fuels because it's sort of. They sort of connect the two halves of the. Of the discipline of geography, the geology on the one hand and the politics on the other hand. And there's definitely interesting ways to think back geologically about politics. But I think what matters more today is the way in which oil has been intertwined with larger political questions and struggles. So it's really interesting that we thought the issue of Corporate sponsored climate denial was kind of over. But what we get instead is a sort of age of deliberate climate ignorance.
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A
Right.
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C
And it's kind of linked to this new age of resource wars, which is precisely what you're saying is there all along, even if some of it seems a little bit performative, if we look at what's happened earlier this year. So unfortunately the entire issue has become very tied up with identity politics. Me and my car, me and my stake and so on. But in the book we look at the geopolitics of oil. So we trace that in particular in the world's largest economy and foremost military power, from the Carter Doctrine via the Iraq war. And I suppose one could extend it to what's most recently happened in Venezuela. I mean, it's very clear that there are these kind of larger connections.
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A
Which.
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C
A whole range of geographers, many of whom Marxists, most famously, of course, David Harvey, have, have investigated in the past. But in the chapter we also look at kind of past energy transitions. I mean, we talk more about that, but from renewables to coal, from coal to oil. And I suppose what human geographers find interesting about all of this is the kind of social relations surrounding particular sources of energy. No drop of oil or brick of coal has ever burned itself. Right. And that's a kind of opening for us to come in and to analyze. Yeah, the economy runs on oil. Without oil, no petrol, no kerosene, no plastic. We're rather intimately tied up with it. I mean, the book is, we had a number of audiences in mind, but we were definitely also thinking of 17 year olds who were thinking of picking up the book in order to figure out whether they want to study geography at university. Right. And for that generation, I mean, that's the defining issue. Right. Carbon, that and housing, I would say. So there had to be a chapter on oil. And then more specifically, to keep with our overarching theme of the archetype, we focus on pipelines. And I think pipelines are quite interesting, not least because they're mappable and so on, but, but they are a crucial bit of infrastructure, not the only one, but a crucial one that helps, that is needed in order to turn oil into a commodity. And they are ultimately fragile. You know what? For coal it was labor that was the choke point. Hence you have all of the strikes, the minor strikes who caused havoc for the industry. Now with oil, that isn't the case. You don't need this enormous labor force. But the pipelines are the kind of fragile point, this possibility of Sabotage, for instance. And of course, the land over which the pipeline or under which the pipeline passes belongs to someone. And these people have the ability and the power, and we give a couple of examples in the chapter, to resist this.
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A
Right.
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C
So I say.
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A
I should say.
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C
I mean, I don't myself work on petroleum, but I completely understand why human geographers are drawn to it as an issue.
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
It's a really fascinating topic, and I think in part because it makes certain regions or certain areas or certain choke points so important. You know, there can be one location, one place that feeds, you know, essentially powers millions and millions of people's homes. And without it, you know, as we've seen, you know, they could be locations for, you know, that. That people want to attack. It can be locations that people protest. It can be located there. There are so many different ways in which these certain areas in which you wouldn't think become these really important sites. And that's one of the things that I find so interesting about the book is, is that it's this sort of thing where it's like you find a particular site or location where there's something going on. There's either some. Maybe there's some ritual, some ritualistic fighting like at the, you know, the border with India and Pakistan, or there's some sort of protest that. That is being engaged in. And it's. And once you start to ask questions, well, why is this happening? You really start to explode. Explode the topic in a way that really is fascinating and. And to kind of connect with this, you know, discussion about the importance of fossil fuels. Obviously, right now, very rockily, as you kind of point out, in a very rocky way, there is an energy transition ongoing from fossil fuels to green energy. It's a key narrative of the 21st century. And I'm wondering how human geographers can think about how people shape this transition and the politics in places that are flush with oil. How being in a location that has a lot of oil or that doesn't have a lot of oil might impact how people think about this energy transition.
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C
Yeah, places that consume a lot of oil. I mean, there's a huge question mark on over the green energy transition right now. There are multiple narratives competing, right. You have the techno optimists who think everything can be resolved for carbon capture. You have the energy corporations. You have people who think energy corporations can be tamed and who think others who argue for adaptation. I mean, all of this kind of relates quite directly to the burning of fossil fuels. I think human geographers come probably politically out on the side of those who say they need to remain under the ground. But the whole process of this question playing out on a geopolitical scale is certainly something that's worth understanding better. I mean, most obviously the Americans and the Russians are currently undermining the process. The Europeans seem to be dithering, but the Chinese plowing on. And the headline a few months ago was that renewables are overtaken coal as the world's top source of electricity. I mean, if we look at past energy transitions as we do in the book, I think it's quite unclear whether these need to be understood as sort of revolutions where one thing is being replaced by another or more of an overlayering as actually happened with coal and with oil. To come back to your question. Right. I suppose what we're, as human geographers interested in is always, I mean, that's a sort of hard economic interests that lie behind such energy transitions and the relationships between capital and labor. No drop of oil has ever turned itself, has never burned itself. The transition from renewable energy to coal a few hundred years ago happened not because England ran out of water mills, but because it was in the interest of capital to draw on a fairly limitless urban labor force that could be disciplined and exploited. I mean, Andreas Meyer, human geographer from Lund, and a few others have traced this. So I think today too we have to look at the relationship between capital and labor when it comes to decarbonization. The European economy, led by, to some extent by Germany, which doesn't really have its own oil resources, is organized around this hyper competitive market which makes profit margins quite small. But in China there's a very different model at work. And from the outside it seems more successful perhaps. So that kind of states and corporate interests influencing our current relationship to oil and below that, there are these kind of social movements and struggles, but they work with a very different set of capabilities and resources from the former two. But yeah, it's one of the key issues of our time, without a doubt.
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B
Right. And alongside this is, you know, oil is used from everything from, you know, powering vehicles to heating homes to basically any, any energy need. And of course this is, as you know, as you point out, there is a transition, you know, that is underway. There's, you know, the, the production of solar panels in China, last I saw, is, is essentially, you know, flooding, they're flooding the market with, with new solar panels. So it's becoming much more engage with renewables, which is heartening to see so much of the Story of electricity and power is also undergirded by the rise of cities and urban areas and how that has reshaped how people interact with their local surroundings, moving from a more rural environment where the vast majority of people lived for years, to more urban environments where people are moving for work, for. For all sorts of. Of reasons, for culture. How do human geographers think about this transformation of our physical environment, one that is, you know, more situated in nature to one that is in an urban space or in an urban environment?
- [35:42]
A
Yes, I think human geographers have been studying cities for a while because they are spaces in which you have huge concentrations of people. And cities have been growing very rapidly, particularly in areas in the Global south, in more recent years. And so, of course, what geographers are interested in, what are the processes driving the growth of cities? Why is it that, for example, we use the archetype of high rise? Why is it that high rises are popular in cities? Is it just about capital? And geographers have looked at the way in which high rises facilitate accumulation of capital. But we're also interested in the way in cities, in the way in which skyscrapers, particularly competition for the highest skyscraper, represents either is it national pride or often, sometimes they're seen in feeling, phallocentric ways. But is this competition, masculine in type, competition that goes on between people who have the resources to build them? So, yeah, there's a long history of looking at also social and urban sort of social and urban. Geographers have been interested in processes driving segregation, whether it's along class or racial lines, and more recently in gentrification. You know, what's driving gentrification and how that those processes in particular have led to the growth in homelessness in cities, which is homelessness is a big phenomena in our cities across the globe. So, yeah, I suppose geographers have become interested in homelessness and how they let in market, for example, Airbnb and so on, have affected people's. The access of urban residents to affordable housing. And they've long looked at things like segregation, whether it's by class or race, but also more importantly now in terms of gentrification and how gentrification can actually change the social makeup of an area of a city. But we have feminist geographers who for many years have looked at who has access to the city, who has the right to the city, who. How is it that particular planning and the infrastructure of a city restrict the movement of certain social groups. So women, for example, there have been campaigns by women's Movements for access to the city in terms of being able to move within the city after dark. And so cities have also become battlegrounds. You know, we know during warfare because of the concentration of people, you know, wars have been fought in cities. We've had. In the book we talk about the bombing of Hiroshima. We know that Sarajevo, even Berlin was in a city work were sites of intense warfare. And so you can link the warfare to, and the warfare that takes place in cities. We have Gaza at the moment to contemporary geopolitics. You know, there's a reason why cities are often the main targets in warfare. But we're also, I think nowadays a lot of geographers are interested in how digital technology and artificial intelligence are being used in so called smart cities. And everyone's talking about smart cities now. Governments, some academics, even the public, they're attracted to this idea of smart cities as sort of as part of an urban technical technological future. But in fact that is also problematic. Geographers have looked at the ways in which, you know, security cameras on our streets, whether it's on our front doors, facial recognition drones, driverless cars, intelligent buildings and so on, have, have grown across our city and the implications of those for personal security and how they obscure the sort of power relations that are behind them, how they monitor and control the urban population. So they might at one level see benign. They might be benign, but they also can be used to reveal areas that were perhaps obscure where people could have carried on, that people might be, let's say, for example, homeless communities might have lived. Nowadays it's really difficult because new technology to hide those areas within the city. And I think there are some examples in countries such as India and Latin America where these new technologies have, such as drones and so on, have contributed to the mapping of cities. So at one level, geographers might be critical of the application of these new technologies. But another level, geographers through geographical information systems have been involved in the development and of these applications.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I do feel, you know, living in a city there is this, this sense that being surveilled to some extent is completely inevitable or unavoidable. The trade off being that, you know, you get services, you know, I don't have to own a car. I live in New York City, I don't have to own a car, which is nice. But also this intent too. I assume that, you know, there are cameras probably taking my image and has. There's some, somewhere in a database there's some information on, on, on maybe not, not me exactly. But on, on how the people in my community are moving through, through the city. You know, if you live in a rural environment, maybe you're not being observed or watched in the same, to the same extent, but you don't have access to the same services that you might have in a city. Which is a sort of interesting trade off. One thing I was thinking a lot about in relation to the skyscrapers recently was recently the American climber Alex Honnold scaled the tallest building in Taiwan, which to me felt very much like a really interesting subject that a human geographer could take on. You have this American climber who's climbing a skyscraper in Taiwan, one of the most, you know, contested borders in a way. And you know, I think it was a, it was good timing in a way. I was thinking about it a lot in those, in those contexts of, of the book. So it's really interesting to think about cities as a sort of a site and, and I want to pick up on that sort of this idea of borders. You know, when people think of geography, they often immediately think of border borders. They think of maps. I think that this is when you just say geography to a 12 year old, they think about borders, naming all the countries. Historically, many borders were not very well defended. They, they weren't really even recognized or even known by people. With people migrating, roaming across borders in more recent times, borders have been clearly demarcated. They're, they're much more policed. How has the border as a site of study become so important for understanding culture and politics?
- [43:44]
C
Yeah, absolutely. I mean the famous case of the person who wanders in the early 20th century between Moscow and Lisbon without sharing their passport. Right now it's funny because if we go back to our 17 year old potential reader, they of course were born into an age of re. Territorialization. But Patricia and I very much remember the kind of deterritorializing world of the 1990s. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the very kind of publicly visible fall of the Berlin Wall. Although new states were created and some borders shifted, especially for insiders and a new geography of insiders and outsiders emerged, of course in Europe, borders became much less important. And this all comes at the same time as we have this kind of supercharged economic globalization which is leading to kind of dominance of Western lifestyles. I mean all of this had been on the rise. Globalization doesn't emerge in the 1990s, but it's kind of supercharged. New forms of connectivity, the Internet, the mobile phone, even the 24 hours news cycle, they seem to all kind of erode the territorial state in one way or another. And this was kind of hailed at the time as the end of history, but also as the end of geography. The world was flat, as one liberal New York Times journalist famously commented. But the world was, that was, that was short lived. And by the mid 2010s we have elections and referenda over re territorialization. And it's not a coincidence that this happens in your aftermath. It's global financial crisis and the recession. Yes, you have the Syrian refugee crisis and the Afghan refugee crisis for sure, but the scene is already set in a sense, because many of the forces that we're now dealing with are already in place. You know, Viktor Orban is already in power in Hungary and he's able to erect his barbed wire fences to keep the refugees out of Hungary on their way through Europe. So within this kind of new kind of landscape, I think borders matter in two ways. One, as something that migrants have to deal with, and for those who don't migrate, there's a kind of figure of supposed certainty against this world, which is supposedly in flux, but also something that is an aim to. Which aims to fortify wealth and privilege.
- [46:17]
A
Right.
- [46:19]
C
I mean, I've done some work on bunkers and that was one of the archetypes we chose not to include in the book. And I think wisely so. But in a sense, I don't think it's a surprise that we have this rise of doomsday preppers, because it's the same logic, right, to create borders between yourself and the outside. And the second is the return of territorial sovereignty. And that too is supercharged at the moment, and after the demise of neoliberalism, if you like. And I think it's two things. It's a retreat into the sovereign state, Brexit and so on. And then there's irredentism and annexation from Ukraine to Palestine, and even the very strange episode earlier this year, absolutely bloodless so far over Greenland and maybe Canada. So was the return of the border inevitable? No, but I think it's worth thinking of the history of borders and the technology that's used. And we go through that in some detail, which initially doesn't actually emerge to police migration, but to make possible the territorial state. And I think that's what we need to keep in mind today.
- [47:35]
B
I find borderlands such interesting areas of study, in part because oftentimes in borderlands you will find indigenous groups that for millennia have crossed it. And it's interesting to see how, you know, you Know how people think about these borders and how essentially the artificiality of them. Oftentimes it's, it's. It's an incredibly interesting subject. And I feel like there have been so many interesting books written about the top. You know, just various borders and the politics of them. Not just where there's wars. Oftentimes we focus on, on those borderlands, but. But ones where, you know, there. There are people that more or less have. Have made a life. Like there are so many Great Stories of U.S. canadian Border, you know, people that essentially cross the border multiple times a day because their lives, you know, what, maybe their front door is in Canada and their back door is in. Is in America. It's always these, these interesting stories, part of the story of the city as well as the story of the workplace, the office space. The workplace for many has dramatically changed for the past 200 years. People went from working on farms to factories to office buildings, to now for many, they just work from home. How do human geographers analyze the workplace and its evolution?
- [48:59]
A
Yes, thank you. I think geographers tend to ask two sets of questions. What places are designated as workplaces? Where are they located? And how have their locations changed over time? And a second set of questions is what are the social relations that go on in those places? Workplaces? Who are the workers? We sometimes call them labor in an abstract way. How are they differentiated by pay, for example, by social class, by gender and by race and other factors. So one of the things we do in the chapter is to look at wage differentials and how they were gendered and some of the social movements that campaigns for equal pay in factories where men and women were doing similar work but women were being paid less. And we were also interested in the way in which certain economic activities, obviously geographers have been interested in for some time, are concentrated in specific locality. What does it say about those activities, about the nature of capital that is being accumulated at that particular moment? And what does it say about the social relations, the people in those locations, that those industries draw on for their labor? So geographies have been interested in, for example, also why industry move from why, for example, the big issue now, particularly across the world, but in the global north, and particularly in the U.S. in Europe, is deindustrialization and the fact that places that had manufacturing industries no longer have manufactured industries. And geographers have linked those that shift that movement, that restructuring to crisis in the capitalist crisis or crisis within the economic system. And I've linked also to the development of technology. What We've seen during that period of globalization that Ian was talking about is the global shift of certain forms of manufacturing to other parts of the world. And we know, we look at why these manufacturers take a move. We've looked at some of the arguments for that, such as, again, to take advantage of cheap labor or cheaper labor. And also in particular, we focus on the role that gender plays in that. In particular, within the clothing industry, we refer to fast fashion and how the fact that we buy cheaper clothes is very much linked to an international division of labor where manufacturing is carried out in parts of the global south, such as Bangladesh, where women predominantly are the workers, they're also migrant workers, and where they are paid very low wages. But we also talk about the campaigns that local people movements in Bangladesh and other parts of the world, along with workers and consumers on this side, how they organize to promote better conditions, better working conditions and better wages. We're also interested, of course, one big area of interest now is how, as you say, workers change. So the gig economy has changed work, both in terms of the idea that you might have a job for life, but it has also changed the type of work people do. And in fact, if you link that to the discussion we had about cities, we can look at how people move around the city, how workers move around the city. So we now have a huge force of mobile workers. And I'm sure we're sitting here and along our streets, there were people delivering constantly, delivering lots of different, you know, some will be using private cars, some will be using vans and so on. And this is very new form of work. So we look at that. We also obviously look at the home space, you know, and traditionally, the home was not seen as a site of work, even though women were working there. So feminist scholars have been looking, and feminist geographers been looking at how reproduction, social reproduction, caring for the family and so on was not considered work. And so there has been the campaign for decades to recognize the value of domestic labor, but that has not yet happened. At the same time, what we've seen is the rise of a labor force that is involved in a caring labor force doing some of the work that other women of higher social classes probably would have done or would have been in the past. And that has led to an increase in migration, whether it's caring for the elderly or caring for young children and so on. We've seen the rise of work that is being done in a home like context, growing. And we know if we look at it from the perspective of gender during COVID 19. I think studies that were done in COVID 19, during COVID 19 argued that women in fact were still. Despite both men and women working at home, women were still carrying the burden in terms of the housework they were expected to do. So I think this is an area, really interesting area of research because I think what we consider work, where it's located, who is involved is going to change, is changing dramatically. But I think we ought to have be very much aware of the inequalities that underpins these new. You know, inequality hasn't gone away and it's actually likely to get worse because the capacity for mobilization, for unionization, for improved quality and wages are not going to be great and will need extra effort in terms of organizing.
- [56:08]
B
It's such a fascinating subject and it's so interesting to think about how work is changing. It's constantly changing, how it' swhat we think about what work is changes, how jobs are going to continue to change with the proliferation of artificial intelligence. It's such an interesting subject and I just find it endlessly fascinating. It's something I think about all the time. Human geography is obviously typically constrained to the study of things going on on the Earth. But how have geographers tried to tackle the subject of, of outer space? Obviously there's a component of geography where you need satellites, so low Earth orbit is, is, is maybe the domain. But, but what about, you know, what about outer space? How did geographers tackle that topic?
- [57:02]
C
Yeah, I mean, we, we, we tend to think that human geography is about our planet. But one of the founders of the field, Alexander von Humboldt, didn't think so. I mean, he was quite interested in the kind of connections between the cosmos and our earthly habitat. And it's only really when you gaze at the stars that you get a true sense of the planet's place and meaning. And of course, we recognize today that earthly forces are cosmic ones. Now, there was, there's a lot that Humboldt didn't know. Of course, he probably didn't know how hostile outer space is to the human body, that we haven't really found ways to get very far away from our home planet. But I'm not sure he was contemplating that. But others were, especially in the late 19th century, thinking about humanity's place within the cosmos and the possibility of space travel and of evolution in other parts of the universe. Now, the question of the Earth in relation to outer space is key. I mean, think about the debates between Helio and geocentric worlds in the past, or perhaps more precisely, of flat Earth conspiracy theory, which kind of made a huge impact a few years ago and then luckily disappeared again. But it is ultimately a kind of human geography under different conditions, in a different sort of cosmos. Now, obviously, the book investigates human geography through a colonial lens. And I mean, outer space is a bit of an open goal when it comes to that, because neither of the big space barons hide their colonizing language, right? And that. That is the aim. And as my colleague Alina Otrata likes to remind me, I mean, SpaceX is a version of the British East India Company, right? I mean, if we look at things that are happening outer space that have been planned, asteroid mining and competition between states and companies, but also ideas about masculinity and so on, I think they also. And fears about the limits of the male colonizing subject. I mean, you mentioned AI. That's the sort of threat to a certain conception of the human. Of course, humans are unlikely to leave our part of the solar system anytime soon. Also very unlikely to meet life forms that could be colonized. And this is obviously often used as a defense of space colonization. You know, there's no one to. No one to colonize. But there's a lot of space colonialism that our final chapter kind of shows is actually back on Earth. You know, it's stolen land used for space infrastructure. You know, many rocket launch sites are close to the equator for reasons that have to do with the Earth's spin. Many former colonies have been quite displeased by the fact that some of the most desirable parts of outer space are already kind of dominated by the major colonial powers of the north. Geostationary orbit being one of them. And we also argue that it's not without consequence that for many indigenous communities, the heavens are a kind of sacred place where ancestors dwell. And that shouldn't really be disturbed in the way that that's happening. So the corporate space race is going to have an enormous impact on how we live our lives. And there's some great geographical work around that emerging at the moment. I'm thinking of people like Julie Klinger or Mia Bennett or Rory Rowan and others who are really shedding light on that matter.
- [61:06]
B
Yeah, it's a really interesting area of study, and I'm sure in the next few decades it will become even more interesting and relevant. My final question for both of you is if you could just share what you think of as some of the most exciting areas of study for human geographers today. Just to point anyone in directions. If they've gotten here, then they're probably Very interested in the topic. What are some additional resources or books or, or scholars they should check out?
- [61:40]
A
Yes, we have a reading list at the back of. Well, it's a big reference list, but we chose the references very carefully. Obviously we're drawing on the work of many Jaffas and so we chose the references carefully to reflect sort of diverse areas of the discipline and also some of the work of the philosophers who are non geographers that have influenced the geographical thought. I think obviously there are areas that I think we could, perhaps the book could have addressed in a bit more depth and I think are really interesting. But we do pick up on those. And for example, one of them is human nature relationships that with the climate crisis, with potential for ecological disaster. There are lots of geographers looking at those relationships about indigenous ways of being in the world, how we can live in a much more reciprocal way. You also mentioned the border. And I think for a long time now we've been led to believe that the border is an area of contestation. But as you said, if you look at border areas, borderlands, irrespective of which country, and I do my research in Africa, people live in convivial ways. They have moved across borders continuously. But what has happened in recent years with the securitization of borders is that it's becoming difficult for people to actually carry out their daily activities in that they waste in the ways that they used to. And I think to prevent this narrow nationalism that is emerging, one of the interesting things that geographers are doing and probably should promote is looking at those possibilities of conviviality along these border areas and also within states. How do people actually live on a day to day basis with social difference? So yeah, and I think, for example, there's a lot of interest by geographers in AI and the digital and how that is transforming our lives, how we relate to space. So there's potential there for some really interesting work. For me, I'm interested in geopolitics. I think geopolitics has come to the fore. Again, I'm a political geographer, but I'm interested in how the change in, you know, multipolarity, my impact on the, you know, on African countries. So that I think is, you know, will African countries become a site of warfare as you know, or will, you know, will we see new forms of oppression emerging on the continent?
- [64:57]
C
Yeah, if I can just add to that, I mean, I think there's some great popular geography out there. Although it should be said that it's not the most diverse bunch of authors who do these sorts of books, but in a kind of Mike Davis, David Harvey tradition of doing scholarship that's readable by broader audiences. I mean, a few recent things. I mean, our colleague Danny Dorling writes about two, three quite thought provoking books every year. I quite liked Gerard Toll's Oceans Rise, Empire's Fall on geopolitics and the Climate crisis. I mean, Derek Vojic's Atlas of Finance is really fun and informative. Recent book, if you haven't reviewed it yet. Now if you play through recent issues of key journals, I think there's some excellent work on war coming through. Urban geography and environmental geography are really vibrant subfields. But I reckon if you're subscribed to New Books Network, you'll kind of know what's happening.
- [66:02]
B
Yeah, thank you for giving those recommendations and situating people. I think obviously the amount of subjects kind of covered and run through this interview is, is pretty remarkable. And you know, you managed to do that all and more. There's a lot we didn't get to cover really in this very short introduction. So I really do recommend anyone who's interested in the subject, you know, especially for students. This is a great way to learn about human geography, learn about the issues that the field is tackling. So, yeah, it's really, it's quite, quite a great entry into, you know, one of my favorite series in all of scholarly publishing. So, Patricia and Ian, thank you so much for being guests on the New Books Network. It was really wonderful to get the chance to speak with you both.
- [66:50]
A
Thank you.
- [66:51]
C
Yeah, thanks a lot.