Dialogues in Human Geography

The pervasive quality of governments to reach directly into our lives, the striking ability of far-flung corporations to make their presence felt at close quarters, and the ease with which NGOs fold distant harms into local campaigns all speak to a world in which distances are no longer a good indication of either separation or proximity. Such actions speak to a world in which proximity and distance play across one another, where topology not topography, it is argued, offers a better starting point to grasp many of the spatial and temporal dynamics involved. The article sets out the limits of territorial and networked approaches to power and goes on to show how the ability  of powerful bodies to draw distant others within close reach or construct the close-at-hand at a distance opens up an understanding of power more in tune with the spatial reworkings of authority and influence today. More significantly, it goes on to illustrate how power-topologies enable actors to register their presence through quieter, less brash forms of power than domination and overt control, and, in so doing, allow some actors to exert an influence and reach way beyond their means and resources.

‘Topological twists’ is one part of John Allen’s long project where he has profoundly examined the spatialities of (political) power and has considerably expanded our horizons. This commentary will reflect four themes related to his article (Allen, 2011). Since there are currently several challenging views on the changing forms of power, I will first briefly compare his ideas of power with that of others. Second, I will scrutinize the re-emergence of topological thinking in social sciences and geography – ‘re-emergence’ because this idea has long roots. I will then comment on current ideas and related ‘geometric’ vocabularies, and finally discuss the issue of generalization versus context in the social sciences.

This response to John Allen (2011) focuses on the understandings of geometry, topology, topography and territory used in the article. I challenge his largely ahistorical renderings of these terms, suggesting that these terms cannot be seen as static, and therefore put into convenient oppositions. Territory, for instance, is not simply a bounded space, and therefore topographical, which can be criticized as reductive. Rather territory is a dynamic, historically produced concept and practice, which can take on the form of a bounded space in particular circumstances. Allen’s article also often risks confusing an object of analysis with a mode of approach: territory is not something that is the explanation, but the thing that needs explaining. In sum, the question is whether it is the object of analysis that is shifting, or our way of understanding it. It may be both, but the historical-conceptual weaknesses of the account offered here make it difficult to tell.

Allen’s (2011) provocative argument on the difference between topographic and topologic ontologies in human geography offers human geographers an important opportunity to re-engage with other similarly spirited arguments about the limitations of the topographic. For example, debate over Marston et al.’s (2005) argument for a ‘site ontology’ has tended to sidestep the question of topological space and has instead dwelled on whether or not their representation of human geography research on scale is accurate. However, if Allen’s research gives human geographers another opportunity to take up the question of sociospatial practice as contingent, site-specific, and self-structuring, it also poses at least two problems. On the one hand, Allen characterizes the topographic and topologic according to a too neat calendar of sociospatial relations. On the other hand, Allen overlooks a long-standing appreciation for the topologic in human geography by drawing a strong distinction between past and newer intellectual approaches to power and space.

Over the past couple of decades, human geography has seen a proliferation in its empirical reach. This proliferation has been associated with a series of ongoing attempts to reconsider the kinds of time-spaces through which the world is made. Responding to Allen (2011), this article argues that thinking topologically about time-space does not simply add one more spatial register to existing framings of time-space. Rather, in all sorts of ways it challenges these understandings.

It is now widely accepted that this is a period of crisis, although commentators differ as to the appropriate comparisons. This article begins by emphasizing that this is not the first time that social scientists have invoked claims of crisis and qualitative change, then examines geographical accounts of neoliberalism to see how crisis is analysed in this literature. It asks if the geographical frameworks and modes of analysis that emerged are adequate to analyse the current period, identifying the significance of five Cs; namely the ‘credit crunch’, climate change, China and the other ‘BRIC’ economies, crusades or the resurgence of religion, and cyborgism. The article concludes that in order to examine the changing terrains of the five Cs, both individually and collectively, it will be important to carefully consider the processes through which heterogeneous elements are being configured into new political assemblages, the mutations and transformations that happen as an integral part of these redeployments, and the objects and subjects that are being constituted in these new governmental terrains.

This piece is sympathetic to the critical questions and epistemological arguments Larner (2011) presents for the current conjuncture of global transformations. I mobilize Larner’s arguments for process-oriented assemblage thinking and apply them to the particular conjuncture through which one of these transformations – climate change – is being problematized in the Australian empirical context, and its connection to existing and emergent institutional and political formations and knowledge practices. I also point to emergent process-oriented, situated scholarly accounts of climate change in Australia and their potential to expand the contestable spaces whereby alternative politicizations and alternative political and institutional forms might be imagined and enacted. In closing, I reflect on the connection between situated accounts, such as these, and the potential performative effects of situated theorizing.

This article engages with Larner's (2011) important intervention on the geographies of crisis. I situate her argument within recent debates on explanation and description in the social sciences. The significance of Larner's argument is that it provides a new approach to change and crisis. This new approach opens up space and hope for a politics of the possible.

This commentary responds to Wendy Larner’s (2011) article regarding contemporary crisis, in which she asks whether the present is a period of change or continuity, and what forms of analysis are appropriate for both understanding and responding to the current situation. A non-essentializing approach to the present allows us to recognize continuity (of, for example, capitalism, racism, or environmental change) while also remembering that patterns and processes of the past are never reproduced exactly. This is crucial for analysis and for more practical responses, which must be premised not on a politics of purity but a politics of messy engagement that proliferates new ways of thinking and being.

The work of Larner on neoliberalism (e.g. Larner, 2003, 2011) has had an important influence on scholars in the arguably most neoliberalized of economies – New Zealand (Larner et al., 2007). Of particular importance is the direct confrontation of one of the key implicit framings within the prior scholarship on neoliberalism which has tended to equate all economic change during the last two decades as being caused by neoliberalization and all outcomes of these transformations as automatically bad. Larner (2011) argues for a decentring of the neoliberalism narrative as a sole explanation of all change in places like New Zealand. This commentary uses the revised approach of Larner and her New Zealand collaborators – Richard Le Heron and Nick Lewis – to briefly examine the consequences of neoliberalization in the context of state-funded science institutions in New Zealand. The result is an understanding of neoliberalization in the context of state-funded knowledge-production that recognizes multiple outcomes which resulted in both a reaffirmation of a core political project around traditional agricultural science, as well as the simultaneous emergence of new approaches, concepts and challenges. These new approaches are demonstrated by a group of new ‘transdisciplinary’ or methodologically innovative projects that are producing new kinds of knowledge about key transformations in primary production and new economic land use in New Zealand.

As physical/environmental geographers, we respond to Larner (2011) in two ways. First, we argue that the crisis frame – which she caveats, but implicitly accepts – is problematic because it performs and legitimates a certain kind of politics, and pulls analytical foci away from other approaches. The ontological and epistemological moments of Larner’s crises require clarification, and the ‘value added’ from declaring yet more geographical crises needs to be assessed. Second, we develop epochal themes from physical geography to converse with Larner’s call for more situated approaches to the production and circulation of knowledge. Place-based and historically contingent science and knowledge networks are increasingly important for understanding and enacting progressive and sustainable environmental governance regimes. Physical and human geographers can find productive common ground in developing situated knowledges of ‘change response’ across a spectrum of social-environmental concerns.

This commentary is a response to Larner’s (2011) article ‘C-change? Geographies of crisis’. It applauds her arguments while suggesting that it might be helpful to (re)consider development in the recent period of global(izing) crisis. Furthermore, it discusses what economic geography as a subfield of geography can contribute to better understand C-change.

This comment on Larner's (2011) article deals with the political power of certain conceptualisations of neoliberalism and questions the Anglo-American ways of reading the history of neoliberalism. The inclusion of key moments of neoliberalisation and crisis outside the Anglo-American world would provide different readings of the processes of neoliberalisation. The ‘choice’ of crises matters for our understanding of the contemporary neoliberal condition.