The Geographical Thought Reader

Without social movements and wider struggles for progressive social change, the field of Geography would lack much of its contemporary relevance and vibrancy. Moreover, these struggles and the geographical scholarship that engages with them, have changed the philosophical underpinnings of the discipline and have inflected the quest for geographical knowledge with a sense not only of urgency but also hope. This reader, intended for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate courses in Geographic Thought, is at once an analysis of Geography's feedstock of progressive political struggles and a collection of more than two dozen examples of grounded engagements with those struggles.

The reader is composed of substantive introductory essays by the editors and unabridged published works by leading scholars whose work illustrates the tight connection between politics, social movements, and the development of social and geographical knowledge. Throughout different sections of the reader a wide array of topics is addressed: Why geographic thought is always political, how geographic knowledge is always steeped in moral and ethical claims, how oppression is recognizable, and how a politicized geography has been practiced by attaching itself to various struggles to claim or reframe rights, to seek social or environmental justice, or to outline new ethical ways of being.

The reader is unique not only in knowing Geographic Thought through its progressive political attachments, instead of through a series of abstract "isms", but in gathering together salient works by geographers as well as scholars in cognate fields, such as Nancy Fraser, Chantal Mouffe, Iris Marion Young, and Jack Kloppenberg, whose own engagements have proved lasting and influential.