Progress in Human Geography

This paper addresses the dilemma of how easy it is to talk and write about human geographies of ethics and justice compared to the difficulties of living out those geographies in our everyday life practices. If radical ideas and radical practices are to go hand in hand, we need to address the apparent inability to retain a critical political edge in human geography. The paper comments on new readings of moral and ethical geographies, noting Marc Augé's distinction between a sense of the other and a sense for the other, and arguing that any goal in human geography for developing an emotional, connected and committed sense for the other may necessitate a prompting of the moral imagination which includes political/ethical/spiritual constellations of issues such as charity, agape and evil. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Melissa Orlie, the paper emphasizes imaginations of power that recognize ‘evil’, the crisis of the citizen-subject, and the recovery of political enthusiasms for ‘invisible powers’. It envisions a human geography in which living ethically and acting politically can be essentially intertwined with a sense for the other in a sensitive, committed and active approach to the subject. This entails both a continuing engagement in collective political action against ordered evil, and taking responsibility for what we have been made to be and for who we are becoming.

In this paper, we reflect on the positioning of health geography within the wider academic landscapes of geography and health-related research. Drawing on examples from a number of countries, we consider the extent to which a ‘new geography of health’ has emerged in recent years. We structure our discussion around the themes of place, theoretical engagement and critical relevancy. Changes within the subdiscipline are placed in the context of a central question: what is new about the new geography of health?

In the 1980s and 1990s, poverty and inequality in Britain increased, yet the discipline of (human) geography was apparently disinterested. This paper poses the question as to why part of the discipline turned its back on public policy and particularly issues of poverty and inequality. The aim of the paper is to encourage students and advocates of geography to think a little about what they are involved in (and to think about the role of academia more generally). Recent publications in a number of geography journals have revealed much angst among prominent geographers concerning the state of human geography and, in particular, its links to contemporary policy debate. However, while geographers discuss the debate, we argue that they are not a significant part of it. We take a critical turn and look at the debate that two geographers – Ron Martin and Doreen Massey – have raised within the light of wider debates on public policy, politics, quantification, academia and the policy agenda. We conclude that for many reasons there is unlikely to be a large shift towards policy-orientated research within human geography.