ABSTRACT
As a geographer, one of the first things you learn about your discipline is that it is not necessarily considered to be one. In fact, the subject was nearly eradicated in North American universities in the 1940s for lack of academic integrity. The geography department at Harvard, for instance, was closed for being ‘hopelessly amorphous’ (Neil Smith, cited in Paglen 2009). Getting rid of geography meant getting rid of unscientific descriptions of places, more fit for the school classroom or the fanciful travelogues of aristocratic explorers. Instead of physical and human geography, the subject could simply be split into geology and sociology. This struggle for legitimacy continues and now extends to geographical information systems (GIS), which are, again, seen as ‘unscientific’ and lacking disciplinary integrity (Drummond, cited in Last 2015).
