Whose Geography, Whose History? Reimagining How We Teach the History of Geography
Date
2025-09-11
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Professional Geographer
Abstract
What is the purpose of teaching the history of geography? To what end do we – or should we – tell stories of the discipline?
In this Roundtable, we join ongoing dialogues reflecting on the purpose and politics of teaching the history of geography (Kinkaid and Fritzsche 2022, Keighren et al. 2017, Cox 2006). As a group of faculty and students in the US, Canada, and Britain, we ask: How can we teach the history of geography within Anglo-American institutions in a present shaped by climate and environmental crisis; war and genocide; ongoing settler colonialism, imperialism, and militarism; contestations over borders, boundaries, and public space; and the ongoing exclusions and violence of our discipline’s spaces and histories?
To answer these questions, we approach History of Geographic Thought courses as a site of disciplinary reproduction (Kinkaid and Fritzsche 2022, Mayhew 2015) in which “the canon,” our professional identities, and our epistemologies and pedagogies are reproduced and potentially contested. In problematizing the “history of geography” enacted in these courses, we reflect on how a rather expansive and diverse intellectual history of geographic thought is selectively fashioned into disciplinary foundations and something of a canon (see Mayhew 2015 on debates about geography’s canon). In the process, history of geography courses can reproduce common exclusions and erase the diversity of geographic thought (see Kinkaid and Fritzsche 2022). Our goal in these commentaries is to propose ways in which the plural, polyvocal practice of geography that comprises the discipline’s actual history – which, for decades, has been shaped by strong currents of postcolonial, decolonial, feminist, Black, Indigenous, and queer thought and other perspectives outside of Anglo white male epistemologies – might become better aligned with “The History of Geographic Thought” as an intellectual, normative, and disciplinary formation we teach and situate ourselves within as scholars.
In each of the following commentaries, the contributors provide a “view from here” – grounding these concerns in their classrooms , subdisciplines, and geographic locations (in the US, UK, and Canada) and detailing how they have wrestled with geography’s legacies and attempted, in small ways, to rework them. In the conclusion, we reflect on the limitations of this dialogue and what is required to move it forward.
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Description
This article was originally published in The Professional Geographer. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2025.2549768
This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in The Professional Geographer.
Kinkaid, E., Craig, B., Noble-Varney, R., Last, A., Ashutosh, I., Ehrkamp, P., … Wilson, M. (2025). Whose Geography, Whose History? Reimagining How We Teach the History of Geography. The Professional Geographer, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2025.2549768
It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article will be embargoed until September 11, 2026
Keywords
colonialism, curriculum, geography, history of geography, pedagogy
Citation
Kinkaid, E., Craig, B., Noble-Varney, R., Last, A., Ashutosh, I., Ehrkamp, P., … Wilson, M. (2025). Whose Geography, Whose History? Reimagining How We Teach the History of Geography. The Professional Geographer, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2025.2549768