Political geography and language: A reappraisal for a diverse discipline

After decades of going beyond the linguistic and textual concerns of early critical geopolitical scholarship, literatures in political geography are today offering rich engagements with the affective, material, embodied, and technological world. However, this paper argues that despite pressures to continually break new intellectual ground, political geography needs not and should not move wholly past concerns with language and language use. Instead, there is at present a need to reassess the value of language as both analytical topic and academic practice; not as alternative, but additive to new insights and conversations. The paper sketches how attention to language has been foregrounded and backgrounded in political geographical endeavours, using the examples of “new Cold War” claims and cybersecurity to show what some consider dichotomous approaches may be brought into conversation. A new research agenda is broadly outlined in order to diversify the discipline. This call for engagement with the linguistic extends not just to the empirical and methodological, but also the academically political: in efforts to diversify the academy, language is a key topic to be grappled with. In reconsidering academic practices, the argument thus extends to writing, publishing, and research writ large: through language and language use, political geography too may be re‐articulated.