The Dictionary of Human Geography

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legislative authority in human geography, par-

ticularly the philosophy ofscience, and stand-

ard textbooks have commonly distinguished

different philosophical traditions and mapped

them more or less directly on to human geog-

raphy (Johnston, 1986b [1983]; Cloke, Philo

and Sadler, 1991; Peet, 1998) (seephenom-

enology;positivism;realism;structural-

ism). But as human geographers were drawn

away fromfoundational philosophies like

these and, coincidentally, into considerations

of political and moral philosophy, so they be-

came less impressed by exclusively scientific

credentials and the power of Philosophy-

with-a-capital-P to provide them (seeher-

meneutics; pragmatism; post-structural-

ism). Many of the philosophical writings that

have attracted human geographers in recent

years have engaged most directly with (and

transformed) the core concerns of the human-

ities and the human sciences – see, for ex-

ample, deconstruction, discourse and

performativity– and in doing so they have

opened up wholly new areas of geographical

reflection:affect,desire,memoryand the

like. This has produced a complex terrain in

which different philosophical concerns have

been brought into relation and juxtaposition

with one another, and where philosophy has

come to be treated more as a resource and less

as a tribunal. Similarly, it was once possible to

map human geography as a series of positions

on an intellectual landscape that was, in effect,

an absolute space: theoretical coordinates es-

tablished the singularity of different systems of

concepts. But here too there has been a sea-

change, and most human geographers now

accept that no one theoretical system can ask

all the important questions, still less provide

all the cogent answers. They thus find them-

selves working in (and producing) the tense

space between contending and colliding sys-

tems of concepts. The result of these philo-

sophical and theoretical innovations has been

to shake the very foundations of enquiry in

human geography, as they have in the other

humanities and social sciences, and the oppo-

sitions that once skewered the field (such as

‘agency’ and ‘structure’, but the list is now

much longer) have been called into radical

question (Cloke and Johnston, 2005). A sec-

ond response, then, might be that critics such

as Martin and Harvey lament these tectonic

shifts and yearn for solid ground (though they

undoubtedly stand in different places on it).

Whatever one makes of this, however, their

point remains a sharp one. It is not difficult to

see why the demands of navigating this new

terrain should have prompted some human

geographers to become so preoccupied with

philosophical and theoretical issues that these

become not so much moments in as substi-

tutes for substantive inquiry: a refuge from the

capriciousness and, indeed, riskiness of the

empirical. On this reading, it is symptomatic

that of the 26 ‘key texts in human geography’

identified by Hubbard, Kitchin and Valentine

(2008), barely a handful focus on the results of

empirical analysis. But there are many other

key texts, and many writers have reactivated

and reformulated sites that have long been

focal to human geography –borders,cities,

industries, regions and territory, for

example – and opened up new ones, such as

thebody, thehome, the shopping mall, the

prisonand thezoo. They have reworked trad-

itional themes in both the past and the pre-

sent, includingcolonialism,development,

imperialism,industrialization,moderniza-

tion,urbanizationandwar,andexplored

newones such asfilm,law,money,music,

performance, sexuality, terrorism and

tourism. And there has been a continuing

stream of principled work on different places

and their interconnections that collectively

gives the lie to the monstrous assertion that

‘the world is flat’ (cf. Smith, 2005a: seeglob-

alization). It would take a brave or foolhardy

person to issue a programmatic statement in

the face of such diversity, but this has not

prevented attempts to chart the future of

human geography. The spirited reactions to

Harvey’s (1984) ‘historical materialist mani-

festo’, or Amin and Thrift’s (2005a: cf. Thrift,

2002) revisionist prospectus twenty-odd years

later, testify not only to the diversity of human

geography, but also to a continued vitality that

depends on an irreplaceable intimacy between

theory and practice. dg

Suggested reading

Cloke and Johnston (2005); Gregory (1994, chs

1 and 2); Massey, Allen and Sarre (1999).

human rights Arightis an entitlement that

is usually encoded in a legal context (seelaw).

One can distinguish between human rights

and citizenship rights.citizenshiprights are

guaranteed by governments for nationals of a

particularterritory, whereas human rights

are thought to be geographically and politic-

ally universal. Hannah Arendt (1973) warned

that human rights are the least desirable rights

because they imply the absence of protection

by anation-state; the rights of citizens are

superior to human rights because they are

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_H Final Proof page 354 1.4.2009 3:18pm

HUMAN RIGHTS