writing, or mobilized in popular culture and
politics (e.g. Pred, 2000). Critical studies of
these geographical imaginations are not being
conducted in an annex to the central struc-
tures of geography. Not only are they informed
by contemporary politico-intellectual preoccu-
pations but they also contest the conventional
partitions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures
and imaginations. The circulation of dis-
courses in and out of academic institutions is
of vital importance to the elucidation of the
politics of geographical imaginations, but also
to their conduct: hence the interest inpublic
geographiesthat transcend a narrow, instru-
mental concern with policy formulation to ad-
dress political issues within a wider public
sphere. A number of these contributions have
been informed by post-colonialism, which has
inspired a belated recognition of thewhite-
nessof dominant geographical imaginations
and the importance of geographical imagin-
ations outside the globalnorth(seeanglo-
centrism; ethnocentrism;eurocentrism).
Third, there has beena renewed engagement
with ‘nature’. The impetus for this has come
from outside the discipline as much as from
within, through precisely the political engage-
ments and public, ‘popular’ geographies iden-
tified in the last paragraph. And yet in the
previous paragraphs ‘nature’ has effectively
been displaced from the central position it
was once accorded within most major tradi-
tions of geography and its place taken by
space. The price paid for the articulation of a
distinctively ‘human’ geography in the wake of
what many critics saw as a dehumanizing spa-
tial science was ‘a peculiar silence on the ques-
tion of nature’ (Fitzsimmons, 1989). This has
changed dramatically in recent years. These
newer formulations do not eschew the signifi-
cance of space – on the contrary, often
informed byactor-network theory, they
elaborate a topological ‘spatial imagin-
ation’ – but they do so in ways that produce
a much more sensuous, lively geographical
imagination. For they ‘alert us to a world of
commotion in which the sites, tracks and con-
tours of social life are constantly in the making
through networks of actants-in-relation that
are at once local and global, natural and cul-
tural, and always more than human’ (What-
more, 1999b, p. 33). Such an approach, as
Whatmore notes, ‘implicates geographical im-
aginations and practices both in thepurifying
logicwhich. .. fragments living fabrics of as-
sociation and designates the proper places of
‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘society’’, and in thepromise of
its refusal’(p. 34; emphases added). To fulfil
such a promise, critical enquiry will require
the production of radically ‘impure’, heteroge-
neous geographies. The philosopher A.N.
Whitehead once famously remarked, ‘Nature
doesn’t come as clean as you can think it.’ And
for the reasons spelled out in these paragraphs,
many would agree that geographical imagin-
ations are – at last – becoming much dirtier.
All that said, there are two further dimen-
sions of geographical imaginations that have
received rather less attention, and both return
us to the concerns originally voiced by Prince
and Harvey. On one side, there have been
attempts to experiment with forms of geo-
graphical expression – to realize the imagina-
tive capacities and creative potential of
geography in something like the sense that
Prince used the term, the sort of sensibility
that invites a reaction of surprise, even won-
der: ‘I’ve never thought of the world like that
before.’ Most of these have been confined
to linguistic play in the pages of academic
journals or monographs, however, though
some human geographers have been drawn
to the possibilities of art installations and dra-
matic performances as ways to reach wider
audiences in non-traditional, non-academic
forms. Without this outreach, which will al-
most certainly also involve the imaginative
use of new technologies ofcommunication,
the possibility of public geographies will
remain just that – a possibility. On the other
side, and closely connected to this concern,
there have been remarkably few attempts to
imagine other worlds in the sense that Harvey
(2000b) gave the term: ‘spaces of hope’. This
too is crucial; the transformations and exten-
sions of geographical imaginations described
above, and throughout thisDictionary, reveal
an extraordinary capacity within and beyond
the discipline for critique, for the pursuit and
even the privileging of what Benhabib (1986)
identified as the explanatory-diagnostic. But,
as she also shows, a genuinely critical enquiry
must also include the anticipatory–utopian
(seeutopia): without releasing and realizing
our geographical imaginations in this vital
sense, then, we will turn forever on the tread-
mills of somebody else’s present. dgSuggested reading
Gregory (1994, ch. 2); Harvey (1990); Rose
(1993, ch. 4).geographical societies Voluntary organiza-
tions, some of them professional, whose goal is
the promotion ofgeographyas a subject and/
or an academic discipline.Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_G Final Proof page 285 2.4.2009 6:30pmGEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETIES