Pickles, John (1952-)

John Pickles currently holds the Earl N. Phillips Distinguished Chair of International Studies and Geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he is chair of the department of geography. He has also held academic appointments at the universities of Kentucky, Minnesota, and West Virginia; at the Ohio State University; at the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State); and at Natal Pietermaritzburg and Trieste.

For the past 20 yrs. (years), two main strands of scholarship have been the hallmark of Pickles's research work. The first and perhaps most well-known aspect of Pickles's scholarship concerns critical geographic information systems (GIS) and, more recently, critical cartography. The publication of the groundbreaking edited collection Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographical Information Systems in 1995 contributed to a critical rethinking of the nature of GIS as a social technology imbued with power relations. Importantly, this work injected critical social theory into understandings of technologies of control, analysis, and surveillance. More [Page 2183]recently, this interest has been extended to the development of a critical cartography. This research strand has involved a series of contributions to a critical social theoretic understanding of mapping and cartography, most clearly represented in the 2004 book A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World. This interest in critical cartographies has led to an engagement with a group of scholars and community activists in the United States and Europe aiming to produce alternative mappings of contemporary society through the Counter-Cartographies Collective.

The second area of Pickles's research and scholarship has focused on the development of a significant body of influential work on the political economies of power and development in South Africa and East-Central Europe. Much of this research has focused on the political economy of industrial and regional development and transformation through some of the most important societal transitions of the past 30 yrs.: apartheid and postapartheid in South Africa and transitions from state socialism in East-Central Europe. The work on industrial development and spatial power under late apartheid grew out of earlier PhD studies in South Africa. Part of this work focused on the emergence of Bantustan industrial production and inward investment from Taiwan, as the South African economy internationalized and as investors sought ways of overcoming the quota constraints on trade in the global apparel industry.

Since the late 1980s, following a series of bilateral U.S.-Bulgarian research exchange visits, Pickles's focus on industrial transformation, societal change, and power has resulted in a body of work on the globalization of the apparel industry in East-Central Europe. Seeking to explore the uneven integration and consequences of globalization and European integration in peripheral regions across that region, this work focused mostly on the transformation of peripheral regional economies through integration into global circuits of apparel production and export and the articulation between global commodity production and local societal forms, including ethnicity. More recently, these interests have been extended to consider the changing global economic geographies of apparel production following the end of quota-constrained trade in 2005.

There are two main hallmarks of Pickles's scholarship. The first is theoretical. Since his doctoral studies at Penn State in geography and philosophy, Pickles's work has involved a deep-seated engagement with critical social theory to try to understand the connections between space and power. This has been developed through his earlier work on phenomenology and spatiality (Phenomenology, Science, and Geography, 1985) and more recent work influenced by Marxist and post-Marxist social theory, from regulation theory to the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The second hallmark is methodological. A characteristic of the majority of his scholarship is that it involves collaborative forms of research and engagement, described in Pickles and Smith (2007). From South Africa to the critical cartographies research group and engagements, to research on the globalization of apparel production in East-Central Europe, Pickles's work has involved a deep commitment to building collaborative networks not only to enhance understandings of material transformations but also to enable “local” scholars to engage in global circuits of knowledge production.

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