Peter Jackson - shared for embedding in the GA Presidents Blog project. Delivered at the GA Conference 2018 in Sheffield by Peter Jackson, Professor Human Geography at the University of Sheffield. Downloaded from the Geographical Association website

1. 125 years of Geography
Peter Jackson
Professor of Human Geography,
University of Sheffield

2. 125 years of Geography
• On 20 May 1893, a dozen men gathered in
the New Common Room at Christ Church,
Oxford to establish what would become the
Geographical Association
• Led by Halford Mackinder and attended by
Douglas Freshfield (who later quit the RGS
over its refusal to admit women) and ten
others (mostly public school teachers)
• 2018 is therefore the 125th anniversary of the
founding of the GA: cause for celebration and
critical reflection.

3. Key questions
The first General Meeting of the GA in December
1894 was held at the Royal Colonial Institute in
London (the GA’s first corporate member) and
asked four questions:
– Should Geography exam papers be set by experts?
– Should physical geography be an essential feature of a
Geography course?
– Should knowledge of the whole world be required or
more detailed regional knowledge?
– Should Geography be a compulsory school subject?

4. What kind of disciplinary history?
• Daunting task to review the history of the
discipline over a century and a quarter
• Human and physical geography
• Geography and education
• Key events and institutions, leading figures,
academic trends, seminal publications – all
shaped by the wider social context and
shifting intellectual environment.

5. Key sources
• David Livingstone’s The Geographical
Tradition (1992), organised around a series
of ‘episodes’, describing our subject’s
history as ‘a contested enterprise’
• Goes back to the Renaissance but, in our
125-year period, his episodes include the
founding of the discipline; the relationship
between Geography, race and empire; the
rise and fall of regional geography; and the
debate over quantification.

6. • The Dictionary of Human Geography, edited
by Derek Gregory and others, now in its 5th
edition
• The Dictionary of Physical Geography,
edited by David Thomas, now in its 4th
edition
• Not ‘dictionaries’ in the conventional sense
– a series of (well referenced) essays,
tracing ‘words in motion’, open-ended
debate, shaped by wider context.

7. • Ron Johnston’s Geography and Geographers
(1979, now in its 7th edition): Anglo-
American human geography since 1945
• W.G.V. Balchin’s The Geographical
Association (1993), optimistically sub-titled
‘the first hundred years’
• And the GA’s ‘chronology of key people,
achievements, places and events’ (recently
updated).

8. Redefining the task
• All this is by way of refusing to attempt a
comprehensive or definitive history of the GA,
summarising a 125-year history in 40 mins (destined to
fail)
• Instead, want to ask:
– What kind of history do we need (what purpose)?
– What principles of inclusion/exclusion should we use?
– What would be the scope, in disciplinary terms and in
terms of the wider context?
• Still an impossible task – but slightly more tractable
• A loosely chronological approach, focussing on
episodes and moments, (dis)continuities of past and
present.

9. The 1890s…
• Was the period of Mackinder’s New
Geography (appointed at Oxford in 1887) and
of William Morris Davis’s geographical cycle of
erosion
• Mackinder saw Geography as an aid to
statecraft, a political geographer (and MP)
who wrote about the ‘geographical pivot’ of
history (GJ, 1904)
• Also an educationalist, writing on the scope
and methods of Geography (RGS Proceedings,
1887) and, later, on Geography as a pivotal
subject of education (GJ 1921).

10. Davis’s cycle of erosion
• Discussed at length in Chorley’s History of
the Study of Landforms (Vol II: the life and
work of William Morris Davis, 1973)
• A good example of the wider intellectual
context and influence of evolutionary
thought: Hartshorne’s The Nature of
Geography (1939) all-but ignores Darwin,
while David Stoddart argues that: ‘much of
the geographical work of the past hundred
years has taken its inspiration from biology
and in particular from Darwin’ (AAG Annals,
1996).

11. The 1900s
• Mackinder’s protégé, A J Herbertson, wrote about
the importance of geographical knowledge,
ignorance of which, he warned: ‘produces frequent
friction and occasional wars, stupidity in
commercial enterprise, hasty and reckless counsel
… and loss of life’ (1902).
• Herbertson also wrote about ‘the scope and
educational applications of Geography’ (GJ 1904)
noting that University geography and geographical
teaching in schools was increasingly disconnected -
- the ‘Great Divide’ about which Andrew Goudie
later wrote (1993).

12. Masculinist knowledge?
• Already becoming a history of ‘great white men’
(Mackinder and Herbertson, Darwin and Davis)
• Should note the role of ‘formidable’ women such
as Alice Garnett (b.1903) who served as President
of the GA and Vice-President of the RGS, occupying
her desk in the Department of Geography at
University of Sheffield for >40 years…
• … and pay more attention to the masculinist
nature of geographical knowledge as Gillian Rose
argues in her book on Feminism and Geography
(1993).

13. 1910s and 20s
• The Geographical Teacher was founded in
1905, confidently renamed Geography in
1927
• GA standing committees established in 1918
(this year marks 100 years of committees…)
• GA cooperated with the BBC on ‘Climbing
Everest’ (1924) and other programmes –
beginnings of wider public engagement/
impact?

14. Travelling theory?
• The 1920s also provides a good example of how
some ideas don’t travel well
• Carl Sauer’s ‘The morphology of landscape’ (1925)
had a huge influence on American geography
(cultural geography as a synonym for human
geography in the US)
• Included the memorable lines: ‘The cultural
landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by
a culture group. Culture is the agent, the natural
area is the medium, the cultural landscape the
result’.
• Became a target of criticism during the development
of the ‘new’ cultural geography in the 1980s.

15. 1930s and 40s
• Land Utilisation Survey of Britain initiated in
1930 – collaboration between the GA (Dudley
Stamp), the Ordnance Survey and the Ministry
of Agriculture
• Context: significance of increased food
production during Second World War
(geography and public policy)
• 1933 foundation of IBG - heralded the
‘professionalization’ of academic geography
(and potential threat to GA membership)
• 1947 GA moved to Sheffield after 16 years in
Manchester (unlike RGS, never London-
centric).

16. 1950s and 60s
• Second Land Utilisation Survey began in
1961 (led by Alice Coleman)
• Madingley Lectures led to the
publication of Frontiers in Geographical
Teaching (1965) and Models in
Geography (1967), both edited by
Richard Chorley and Peter Haggett.

17. 1970s and 80s
• 1975 Teaching Geography launched, followed by
Primary Geographer in 1989
• 1980s dominated by the debate over Geography’s
potential exclusion as a core subject in the school
curriculum
• 1985 Sir Keith Joseph addressed an invited GA
audience on place of Geography in curriculum
• 1987 meeting with Kenneth Baker led to inclusion of
Geography as a foundation subject
• 1989 National Curriculum Working Group with key
input from Eleanor Rawling, Rex Walford and others.

18. 1990s and 2000s
• National Curriculum introduced in 1991 (see
Eleanor Rawling’s ‘Changing the Subject’ on the
impact of national policy on school geography)
• Landmark texts such as Margaret Roberts’
Learning through Enquiry (2003)
• Valuing Places project, funded by DfID and led by
Diane Swift (2003-6)
• Action Plan for Geography, in collaboration with
RGS-IBG (2006-11)
• Manifesto for Geography: A Different View (2009)
led by David Lambert.

19. 2010s…
• 2010 partnership with the Field Studies
Council, the Ordnance Survey and ESRI
(2015-16 Year of Fieldwork)
• 2012-17 Global Learning Programme
funded by DfID, challenging conventional
thinking about ‘development’ geography
• 2015-16 new GCSE and A-level syllabus,
following advice from ALCAB (A-level
Content Advisory Board).

20. Reflections
• How have we got from ‘Geography in the service
of Empire’ to concerns about international
development to debates about post-colonialism
and ‘decolonizing geographical knowledges’ (the
theme of the RGS-IBG conference in 2017)?
• And why, in the words of recent AAG President,
Mona Domosh, is our Geography curriculum still
so White (AAG Newsletter, June 2015)?

21. Future directions
• Returning to our foundation in 1893, what are the key
questions for the discipline today and what objectives
would we set ourselves for the next few decades?
• What is the relation between the universal and the
particular? or between the discipline’s vocabulary and
its grammar?
• What is (or should be) the balance between human
and physical geography? and the role of fieldwork?
• What is our ‘mission’ as geography teachers (beyond
exam success, teaching to the test and meeting our
targets)? How should we respond to the marketization
of education (in schools and universities)?

22. Other stories…
• Not said much about wider changes in
educational policy or political history (dangers
of writing an internal history)
• What about changing technologies (from
lantern slides and school atlases to GIS and
remote sensing)?
• What similarities and differences between
Geography and other subject associations?

23. Conclusion
• A partial (selective and no-doubt biased) reading of our
geographical history; with lots of rhetorical questions
about the past and present state of the discipline; and
the need for a historical perspective to help define the
role of what Alan Kinder calls our ‘community of practice’
• Struck by continuities with the past, including
Mackinder’s (1900) question about ‘Geography as a
training for the mind’
• End with Frances Soar’s observation on the GA’s
anniversary year: ‘We’re not good because we’re 125
years old, we’re 125 years old because we’re good’.
Discuss.