Full Description
This book provides concise insights from a diverse range of leading scholars, reflecting on how they became geographers—representative of the field's diversity. It explores the trajectory of their academic career, their formative influences, interpretive frameworks and divisions within geography, and what it means to have a geographic sensibility. It asks how geographers came to acquire an interest and how they developed that interest. It interrogates the various influences and conditions that helped make them geographers; the interpretive frameworks that guided them; the role of the serendipitous; and how their ideas shifted. The various trajectories cover a period of dramatic change in the field, and this is registered in the stories told. Within that frame, and despite the particularity of each contribution, there are both similarities and contrasts.
In these ways, the book offers insightful contributions on how geographies and the history of the field get made, and for those considering embarking on a career in geography, just what to expect.
Contents
1. From the Back End of Nowhere 2. A Reluctant Convert 3. Landforms and Me: Shaping a Career in Geomorphology 4. A Geographer From, Off And Working On The Rustbelt 5. From Pacific Shores 6. Forging a Path Through Life and the Changing Landscape of Geography 7. The Moth And The Flame: A Journey Towards Self-Annihilation 8. A Transatlantic Adventure 9. A Quantitative Geographical Odyssey 10. Very Slowly and Then All at Once 11. Becoming A Geographer In The Shadow Of Geography's Quantitative Revolution 12. The Production of Geography (and a Geographer) 13. My Journey To and Through Marxist Geography 14. A Long Way Home: My Journey as a Geographer 15. Becoming a Critical "Climate Geographer": What Might That Mean, and What Can It Do? 16. Meanders of an Uneasy Geographer 17. Doing It the Hard Way 18. Landscapes, Luck and an Inquisitive 20. 'I became a geographer-in-the-making at the age of six' 21. A Pirate and a Scientist 22. The Geographer That Latin America Made Me 23. A Geographer at Heart 24. No Cursing, No Crying, No Cookies: The Interplay of History and Geomorphology 25. Becoming a Geographer 26. Becoming Undisciplined 27. Time and Contingency: A Journey Through Geography 28. From Essex to the 'Edgelands' of Geography 29. Reflections on Geography, the Long 1960s and the Trahison des clercs
