Awkward geographies? An historical and cultural geography of the journal Contemporary Issues in Geography and Education (CIGE) (1983-1991)

This thesis concerns itself with the excavation of the historical and cultural geographies of the production, circulation, and reception of a grassroots-initiated geography education journal, and of the lives of the people and movement that contributed to its existence. Contemporary Issues in Geography and Education (CIGE) was the journal of the Association of Curriculum Development in Geography (ACDG): a pan-institutional collective of school geography teachers, authors, artists, activists and academics who desired a vision of school geography informed from the political Left, to enable the voices of those excluded from power to be explored and heard, and to offer up an alternative version of disciplinary geographical knowledge-making. Between the publication of its launch issue in 1983 and 1991 when it ceased publishing CIGE produced eight theme issues covering universally significant and highly contentious themes (racism, multinational trade, apartheid capitalism, war and peace, gender, ecological crisis and anarchism) from a humanist and critical perspective, offering critical analyses of the geographies therein and educational resources to utilise in educational training across schools, universities and staff education resource centres. CIGE questioned the spaces though which geographical education perpetuating social inequalities might be encountered (children’s TV through to national press criticism, publishers, subject associations, examination boards and academia). Well enough known during its publishing life and subscribed to nationally and internationally across a range of organisations, many of its contributors subsequently forged significant careers as human geographers within the Anglo-American academy, yet limited reference has been made to the journal post-1991. Recovering the stories of the journal and the people whose lives made the series, brings forth controversies and in turn awkward geographies in recovering how and why the journal series ceased publishing and why there appears to be such omission in historiographic accounts. Employing conceptual ideas pertaining to themes of archival activism, activist archives, navigating the recent past, disciplinary identity-making and geobiography, the thesis illustrates the strengths of ‘slow methodologies’ and the adoption of longitudinal research methods to enable the recovery and corroboration of primary sources, while signposting how mechanisms of contemporary academia (giving seminar workshop and conference papers on national and international scales, writing papers and co-authoring book chapters) through can reactivate engagement with the recovered archives and agitate for further materials to be revealed

Feminist historical geographies: doing and being

As part of GPC’s 25-year anniversary celebrations, this article explores possibilities and prospects for feminist historical geographies and geographers. Here I define feminist historical geography as scholarship which asks geographical questions of historical material and is informed by feminist theories, approaches and methodologies. Its empirical subject matter is necessarily expansive and diverse, but often has a particular focus on the lives of women and other marginalized groups, and on the ways gender and space were co-constituted. This essay interrogates recent developments within this broad terrain, specifically articles and books published in the period from around 2000 onwards and either appearing in geography journals or written by those self-identifying as geographers. The main exception is work by historians and archaeologists interested in gender, space and place, which is cited here in an attempt to open up new research directions for feminist historical geographers. In what follows, we shuttle across spaces and between scales, roaming from the sites of empire to the intimate geographies of the home, from landscapes and buildings to personal possessions like clothes and letters. Doing so is a deliberate act intended both to demonstrate the liveliness of feminist historical geographies broadly conceived and to counter hierarchical readings of space, society and history with their inherent danger of privileging the public over the private, and the exceptional over the everyday and mundane