Geographical Journeys

This book provides concise insights from a diverse range of leading scholars, reflecting on how they became geographers—representative of the field’s diversity. It explores the trajectory of their academic career, their formative influences, interpretive frameworks and divisions within geography, and what it means to have a geographic sensibility. It asks how geographers came to acquire an interest and how they developed that interest. It interrogates the various influences and conditions that helped make them geographers; the interpretive frameworks that guided them; the role of the serendipitous; and how their ideas shifted. The various trajectories cover a period of dramatic change in the field, and this is registered in the stories told. Within that frame, and despite the particularity of each contribution, there are both similarities and contrasts.

In these ways, the book offers insightful contributions on how geographies and the history of the field get made, and for those considering embarking on a career in geography, just what to expect.