Critical Human Geography

The term critical human geography arose in the mid 1990s in Anglophonic geography as a way of representing a broad coalition of progressive approaches to the discipline. Critical human geography can be seen as a diverse set of ideas and practices linked by a shared commitment to a broadly conceived emancipatory politics, progressive social change, and the use of a range of critical sociogeographic theories. Critical human geographers draw on theoretical approaches such as anarchism, anticolonialism, critical race theory, environmentalism, feminism, Marxism, nonrepresentational theory, post-Marxism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, situationism, and socialism. This entry describes the growth and development of critical human geography in primarily Anglophonic settings, and also in a number of other non-Anglophonic academic spaces (but ones that operate in, or articulate with, the wider hegemony of Anglophonic American geography). Much of the focus is on some of the key publications marking different eras in critical geography. From this perspective, the practice of critical human geography can be seen as a tentative move toward development of a historical geography of knowledge production in critical geographies.

The discussions that follow are necessarily schematic rather than a full outline of the nuanced character of these approaches. Suffice it to say that there is a good deal of overlap and a much more complex (and contradictory) character to these historical geographies of knowledge production than it is possible to present here. In outlining these various forms of geography, it is clear that critical human geography cannot be defined in a singular way but instead must be understood as multiple, dynamic, and contested and that the term critical human geographies should be used in recognition of this fact; that is, we should call them critical human geographies. Critical human geographers are committed to transforming their worlds, and they are thus—almost by definition—engaged in significant contestation over how we should interpret existing spatial relations and how we might improve [Page 617]on them. At the same time, they recognize that coalitional politics may be one of the best ways to achieve their ends.