Critical Human Geography

A disciplinary trend, critical human geography is the result of the growing influence of—and interest in—critical theory in the social sciences. This paradigm change in scholarly thought must be understood in relation to, and as the result of, historical and social conditions. Although critical human geography is an emergent paradigm at a global scale, the discussion here focuses on its development in Anglo-American geography.

The emergence of critical human geography is tied closely to the social tensions of U.S. and British politics during the late 1960s. In the United States, it was especially the impact of the civil rights movement and the reaction to the Vietnam War that resulted in various forms of social critique and protest. In academia, this trend translated into the influence of a wide array of theoretical developments. Among them were Marxist critiques of capitalism, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, French poststructuralism, post-colonial theory, feminist thought, and queer theory. A general theme uniting these different philosophical approaches is their use in reconceptualizing two aspects of human geography.

First, critical human geography seeks to provide a broad critique of the prevalent paradigms of scientific inquiry in the discipline. It is a reaction against positivism and its concern with objectivity and the scientific method. In addition, it undermines the assumptions of behaviorism and its emphasis on the goal-oriented decision-making models. Furthermore, it rallies against humanistic geography and its phenomenological approach to the lived world that often universalizes patterns of human behavior and meaning making. Last, it is a reaction against what it perceived as masculine models of science, and it contrasts these with distinctly feminist perspectives on science and knowledge acquisition. In summary, critical human geography intends to function as a potent critique of traditional scientific models in the discipline. It especially aims to deconstruct previously taken-for-granted scientific models by showing how scientific researchers, projects, data, and reports all are embedded in the power structures of a society and thus actively involved in socially constructing certain realities.

Second, critical human geography seeks to provide a powerful critique of the cultural, economic, social, and political geography of capitalist societies. Such endeavors have resulted in Marxist critiques of the capitalist logic behind urban design, expositions of the global patterns of exploitation in trade, studies on the increasing uniformity of cultural expression as a result of an emerging global culture industry, and much more. In addition, geographers have paid particular[Page 67] attention to the growing infringement on the public sphere, as evidenced by the number of studies addressing the surveillance and regulation of public space.