Critical geography

Development

Two main schools of thought emerged from human geography and behavioral geography which made a brief comeback. Behavioural geography sought to counter the perceived tendency of quantitative geography to deal with humanity as a statistical phenomenon. It flourished briefly during the 1970s and sought to provide a greater understanding of how people perceived places and made locational decisions and sought to challenge mathematical models of society, in particular the use of econometric techniques. But the lack of a sound theoretical base left behavioural geography open to critique as merely descriptive and amounting to little more than a listing of spatial preferences.

Radical geography emerged during the 1970s and 1980s as the inadequacies of behavioralist methods became clear. It sought to counter the positivist quantitative methods with normative techniques drawn from Marxist theory: quantitative methods, it argued, were not useful unless alternatives or solutions were proposed for problems.

The final and, arguably, most successful of the three schools was humanistic geography, initially formed part of behavioural geography but fundamentally disagreed with the use of quantitative methods in assessing human behaviour and thoughts in favour of qualitative analysis. Humanistic geography used many of the techniques that the humanities use such as source analysis and the use of text and literature to try to ‘get into the mind’ of the subject(s). Furthermore, cultural geography revived due to humanistic geography and new areas of study such as feminist geography, postmodernist and poststructuralist geography, and anarchist geography began to emerge.

Critiques of critical geography

Overall, critical geography is subject to some, but not much, critique, in part due to its predominant place in the discipline of geography, offering gaps in the literature that provide a large amount of room for contestation. The few extant critiques are sometimes, but not always, the same critiques as other applications of critical theory in the social sciences. One criticism of critical geography is from an article by Haverluk et al., who argue that critical geopolitics as a theoretical discourse contains several major flaws, citing critical geography and particularly critical geopolitics as unnecessarily self-marginalizing due to scholars' "intentional isolation" from any perceived power structures, rendering it a small and insular field with little utility or influence outside of the academy. Geographer Nuno Murgado further critiques critical geography for both its inherent lack of intellectual rigor and for its scholars' refusal to engage the possibility of a valid, descriptive classical or neoclassical school of geopolitics, often on normative ideological grounds.

Relation to other approaches in geography

Geography is a large field with a multitude of techniques and subjects of study. The prevalence of 'critical' approaches to geographic studies varies enormously. In some academic departments it is clearly the dominant mode; in others it hardly appears at all. Critical geography has clearly been on the rise over the last several decades, but it also exists more or less comfortably alongside geographers taking quantitative and empirical approaches to their work. Large gatherings of geographers, such as the AAG, typically divide sessions into streams based on methodology, with critical and quantitative geographers rarely presenting alongside one another.

However, within human geography specifically, critical geography occupies something of a hegemonic place within the discipline, with few or no truly competing academic paradigms utilizing a humanistic or qualitative methodology.