Trevor J. Barnes’s research while affiliated with University of British Columbia and other places

Anglophone economic geography has played a central role in the evolution of human geography. That includes economic geography's various philosophical and theoretical shifts as it moved from an imperialist commercial geography, through to regional economic geography, spatial science and location theory, Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism. The discipline is now inordinately diverse, reflecting an enormous breadth of interests and approaches including the use of various quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Such diversity is a strength not a weakness given the disciplinary spirit of engaged pluralism. The field's unifying theme now is some form of geographical political economy – the idea that capitalism is an unstable, conflict‐ridden political economic system characterized by geographical uneven development, with its spatiotemporal evolution shaped by reciprocal relations between political–economic, cultural, and biophysical processes. Major current areas of research in anglophone economic geography include geographies of production and consumption, work and the body, high‐tech and the platform economy, governance and regulation, financialization, environment and economy, globalization and development, and diverse (more‐than‐capitalist) economies.

Our introduction to the Exchanges section unpacks the two terms, writing economies and economies of writing, as well as previewing the subsequent nine papers included within the section. We contend first, that the economy cannot exist until it is first written about – ‘writing economies’. Here a variety of dates have been suggested as to its first written representation, from roughly 2500 hundred years ago to a mere hundred years. Second, we argue that the pressures on academics to write – ‘economies of writing’ – have never been more acute than now and bound up with the neoliberalization of the university.

This paper examines the relation between abrupt, often violent political change producing dictatorships and the effect on universities, including the organization and content of academic disciplines. Those disciplines, we contend, can be radically altered, reshaped to conform to the state's new political imperatives. Our case study is the effect of the 1980 military coup d’état in Turkey on that country's tradition of academic geography. The coup was to quell Turkey's social unrest and political-economic instability of much of the 1970s. During the 1980-83 military junta that followed, political dissent was squashed, civil liberties removed, a Nationalistic-Islamic discourse (the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis) enacted, and higher-education centralized and brought under strict state control. The response of Turkish geographers was to turn inward, to practice an earlier regional descriptive tradition underlain by environmental determinism, which, seemingly neutral, bolstered the coup's political nationalism, diverting critical analysis. As a result, Turkish geography became ever-more intellectually distant from Anglo-American geography that during the 1970s increasingly repudiated its own earlier regionalism. Rather than moving forward, in order to survive Turkish geography returned to its past. It pursued a strategy of La Jetée after the 1962 French new wave film of the same name. It summoned the past in order to come to the aid of the present.

Of the many hats David Lowenthal wore during his long life perhaps the most important was as a geographer. All his permanent academic positions were within institutions of geography. Undoubtedly, he could have moved to another discipline, but he remained a geographer. This paper aims to understand why geography was so alluring for him. It is divided into three parts. The first identifies four broad intellectual themes or interests that course through much of his substantive work: his polymathic inclinations; the centrality of history; the influence of the humanities; and a curiosity about the material environment and landscape. The second is about Lowenthal’s conception of the discipline of geography and why despite being pulled towards other disciplinary concerns he stayed loyal, notwithstanding significant reservations. And the last is about how he understood the discipline’s history which, while he rarely wrote about, he knew well, and partly explaining his more-or-less faithful attachment.

This chapter expresses that David Harvey along with his students made Johns Hopkins University and Baltimore a key geographical node in North American radical geography. The role that geography plays in the production of knowledge has been conceptualized in several forms. In Michel Foucault's work, place is a heterotopic site, where the clash of difference within it produces new knowledge. The chapter examines how Harvey's engagement with Hopkins and Baltimore shaped the development of his Marxist radical geography. It focuses especially on his first decade in Baltimore during which he published his book, Social Justice and the City, and experienced a conversion from some form of liberalism to socialism. The chapter also examines how the geographical movements of Marxist radical geography going on outside Hopkins and Baltimore joined with Harvey's own, forming the complex spatio‐temporal evolution narrated.

This chapter expresses that one of the germinal sites for the radical reconstruction of economic geography during the 1970s, and a birthplace of what became known as the “restructuring approach,” or the “new industrial geography”. It presents a close‐focus analysis of intellectual and social life on the campus and its immediate environs. It is about Berkeley as a place, concerned especially with the material and sociological landscape that the Department of Geography and Department of City & Regional Planning (DCRP) shared. The chapter describes the Berkeley moment articulating with, and mutually conditioning, a host of off‐campus ideas, events, political movements, and connections. There was a significant cohort effect at work in the Berkeley moment. Industrial transformation ‐ in its up cycle as well as its down cycle ‐ remained an intrinsically open, political process. In the Berkeley case, these geographies played out in different ways and across a range of scales.

This chapter considers the regional and departmental context, and the intense engagement with the Union of Socialist Geographers (USG). It discusses two other centers of radical geographic innovation in the Midwest, the Universities of Wisconsin and Michigan. Minnesota, and the Upper Midwest more generally, was known for its Scandinavian collectivist political culture, a result of historical patterns of Northern European immigration and settlement. Although those forming the Midwest cluster of radical geography had largely graduated and moved on by the mid‐1980s, the activities they pursued resonated down the years. With respect to the USG and Antipode, Eric Sheppard was at the center of debates about whether to institutionalize radical geography by creating a Socialist Geography Specialty Group within the Association of American Geographers, arguing in favor of such a move. Influenced by the Midwest radical geographers and their reading group, Sheppard helped open the journal to a more eclectic vision for radical geography.