Geography as Public Scholarship

Presidential Address delivered to the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, 77^th annual meeting, Tucson, Arizona; September 27, 2014

In my own professional way, “What kind of geography for what kind of public policy?” is the question I have been trying to answer for a number of years. Throughout this inquiry, I have become all the more convinced that geography as public scholarship provides me with immensely valuable opportunities to be a “public intellectual” geographer who can contribute to discussions. Thus, consistent with the public scholarship approach that I have practiced for a few years now, I decided against writing this essay as a traditional journal article, and have instead authored it in a format that will be accessible to the public as well.

As a graduate student at the University of Southern California, I came across a reference to Russell Jacoby emphasizing the “public intellectual” and felt an immediate connection to it. As Scott McLemee recently noted:

When the expression “public intellectual” was revived by Russell Jacoby in the late 1980s, it served in large part to express unhappiness with the rhetorical obtuseness of academics, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. The frustration was not usually expressed quite that way. It instead took the form of a complaint that intellectuals were selling their birthright as engaged social and cultural critics in exchange for the mess of pottage known as tenure. It left them stuck in niches of hyperspecialized expertise. There they cultivated insular concerns and leaden prose styles, as well as inexplicable delusions of political relevance.

The public intellectual was a negation of all of this.

I wanted to engage with the public, and not to merely converse with a few academic colleagues. I did not want to write papers in response to the dreaded “publish or perish” culture that we get to know about during the first day in graduate school. I worried that the traditional research emphasized hyper-reductionist approaches to problems, whose importance is lost on the general public. The public, on the other hand, is often interested in the big and contemporary questions, which traditional academic research seldom addressed.

In the two decades since, the “public intellectual” approach has been further diminished in, and marginalized by, academe that has been taken over by hyperspecialization. Thus, it seems rare anymore for even geographers to introduce themselves as geographers, without the appropriate prefixes that refer to their specialization. Of course, geography is not the only academic discipline to suffer such a fate. But it is only geography’s fate that interests me in the context of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers (APCG.) It is also geography’s fate that interests me because of the phenomenal opportunity that professionals in the discipline have to contribute to those big and contemporary questions for which the public is eagerly looking for answers. Even when fully aware of my intellectual limitations, my interests, like those of the public, are in the big and contemporary questions. The public eagerness on the big questions was also the point of departure for Susan Cutter, et al., in “The Big Questions in Geography,” which was published in the August 2002 issue of Professional Geographer:

At the 2001 national meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in New York City, the opening session featured an address by John Noble Wilford, science correspondent for The New York Times. In very candid language, Wilford challenged the discipline to articulate the big questions in our field— questions that would capture the attention of the public, the media, and policymakers (Abler 2001). The major questions posed by Wilford’s remarks include the following: Are geographers missing big questions in their research? Why is the research by geographers on big issues not being reported? And what role can the AAG play in improving geographic contributions to address big issues?

Cutter, et al., laid out a research agenda, but one that would be addressed only within the traditional academic approaches to inquiry. Implicit is the assumption that such a research agenda would automatically “capture the attention of the public, the media, and policymakers.” I would argue that we geographers...