Comments on Julie Cupples' analysis of “geoscientisation”

Julie Cupples does geographers a great service by naming and analysing the effects of “geoscientisation,” a pattern of institutional reorganisation whereby former Departments or Institutes of Geography are brought together in larger academic units with physical science disciplines like geology, earth sciences or environmental sciences (Cupples, MS 1). Geoscientisation, Cupples argues, exacerbates the more general effects of the neoliberalization of higher education of which it is a part, and tends to marginalise, render invisible and/or delegitimate critical human geography in particular. “[A]sserting our right to analyse our working conditions,” as Cupples does with this paper, is simultaneously more difficult and more necessary than ever (Cupples, MS 10). My comments here are based on my own experiences and conversations with colleagues in North America and Europe. Much of the material I draw upon is very “grey”: snippets of conversations among others overheard in the hallway, brief comments in faculty meetings, sotto voce whisperings during lectures by visiting scholars, and the like. As critical human geographers know, these genres, marginal though they may seem, are the very stuff of what we hypostatize as “institutional culture.” And culture is the central question here. A second preliminary note is in order as well: many of the issues discussed below concern attitudes that largely remain latent, simmering beneath the surface of institutional culture. To the credit of many of my physical science colleagues, they only seldom break out into the open in ways that could do concrete harm. Nevertheless, their pervasive presence is in itself already a burden and a low-level threat that, as Cupples rightly insists, we ignore at our peril. In Germany, where I now work, it is not so much geoscientisation as a process but rather the condition of being in a geosciences unit that is the problem. Many institutes of geography in Germany have always been closely integrated with physical geosciences. At my university, the impacts of living in the geosciences are compounded by the fact that the geosciences are in turn located within a larger faculty composed also of chemistry and biology. Most importantly, it is at the faculty level that binding decisions on hiring or the awarding of postgraduate degrees are made. The often quite subtle forms of “epistemic erasure” attendant on geoscientisation are the product of a pervasive “lack of understanding of contemporary human geography” (Cupples, MS 4) on the part of most physical colleagues and of institutional and cultural power structures through which this ignorance is allowed to persist and even flourish. I would supplement the examples Cupples gives with a series of brief observations about this “epistemic erasure” and “lack of understanding.” Of course the degree of understanding—and the degree of openness to serious engagement with human-geographic scholarship—varies among colleagues on the natural science side. Nevertheless, beneath individual variation run some cultural issues that can be thought of as facets of a “style of thought” (Fleck, 1981 [1935]). First, a “lack of understanding of contemporary human geography” by itself is not necessarily a problem. Many human geographers do not understand large DOI: 10.1111/nzg.12249