Making Population Geography by Bailey Adrian;

Author:Bailey, Adrian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2005-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Power, knowledge and context

Population geography was affected by profound changes in beliefs about knowledge. As global interdependencies and uncertainties buffeted society, long-standing Enlightenment beliefs were opened up by a number of social theorists, including Derrida, Bourdieu, Foucault and Lefebvre. They asked, was it possible to imagine new ways of thinking about space, about time, about progress and about politics? Acknowledging interdependence, Derrida overturned the Cartesian logic that order and disorder were separate and absolutes and suggested that order and disorder made each other in relational ways: one could not exist without the other. The idea that knowledge could be relational was revolutionary and added a new dimension to the approaches that social scientists used to understand the world around them.

Relational views of knowledge had particular salience for a geography project long committed to a Kantian search for meaning in proximity and context. As order and disorder could make each other, space (and time) lost ontological primacy and were no longer ‘out there, then’ but ‘here, and now’. Contingency and context mattered. Proximity was still relevant, but only as one of a number of properties of space that helped make society. Across the social sciences and humanities, theorizations of space became part of discussions of how knowledge was produced in a way rarely seen since Kant’s earlier treatises. Geographers like Ed Soja, David Harvey, Derek Gregory and Doreen Massey were deeply committed to these discussions and helped infuse geography with social theory and social theory with geography.

The significant waves of theoretical development in human geography that have been associated with feminism, the cultural turn and the new regional geography debated this relational view of knowledge. They further considered the implications for thinking about context, and for thinking about the links between power and creating knowledge. At the risk of over-simplification, and following Gregory (1996), the approaches to geography in the 1980s and 1990s can be compared along three axes. The first two axes refer to how each approach treats context and power (i.e. the same distinctions made for the approaches of the 1950s and 1960s). A third ‘post-Enlightenment’ axis differentiates approaches based on their view of knowledge as absolute or relational.

Within population geography, relational thinking flowed through a limited number of approaches, including geographical materialism, social constructivism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism and structurationism. To be sure, human geography was busy exploring several other readings, including critical realism and postmodern (textual) landscape analyses, but the five identified above were the main ones that infused – to varying degrees – relational thinking within the field. Figure 4.1 ‘locates’ each approach and can be compared with table 3.1 to illustrate how population geography enlarged its view of the world after the 1970s. In introducing how such relational approaches connect together population with the concepts of space, environment and place, my twin goals are to establish the intellectual context for the research agendas that did emerge during the 1980s and 1990s, and to beg a series of questions about research agendas that did not appear but could have appeared.

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