Subject and Subjectivity

The couplet subject/subjectivity connotes a multifaceted set of issues addressed in distinctive ways by different schools of human geographic research. Before outlining different approaches to the topic, two broad contexts in which issues around subject/subjectivity become pertinent to human geography can be identified:

• How human subjects, through their actions and values, actually produce and make meaningful the geographies that we study—and, conversely, how particular subject positions (particular identities, attitudes, and practices) are shaped by wider social, political, cultural, and economic processes, discourses, and structures. This involves issues such as the determination of individual or personal geographies by social–cultural–economic circumstances; questions of agency, creativity, free will, and resistance; and gendered, racialized, and sexualized identities and their concomitant geographies.
• The role and status of subjectivity in the production of geographic knowledge. How does the subjectivity of researchers (their opinions and background as well as their gender, ethnicity, and sexuality) feed into the research they do (the topics they choose to study, the methods they employ, and how they interpret results)? Should subjective values inform research, or should researchers strive to remain neutral and objective? What role might biographical or autoethno-graphic writing play in human geographic research?

Debates around the human subject and subjectivity have come to the fore in human geography via the range of postpositivist approaches that have influenced the discipline over the past 30 years. Marxist/ Radical approaches, for example, position the individual human subject as the product of economic conditions under capitalism. Thus, the individual is understood primarily in terms of social class role and position, and individual beliefs, desires, and motivations—indeed, the very concept of the individual as a[Page 468] free autonomous agent—are held to be produced within the cultural and political ideologies of capitalism. In marked contrast, the varieties of humanistic geography that also emerged during the 1970s focused on the human subject as a locus and fountainhead of creative and imaginative abilities and explicitly positioned subjective beliefs and practices as central topics of geographic study. Structuration theory, associated with the work of Anthony Giddens and influential in human geography during the 1980s, may be understood as an attempt to find a middle ground between these conceptions of the subject as either wholly determined or wholly autonomous by arguing that knowledgeable and capable human subjects operate within broader social, political, and economic structures that both enable and constrain subjective actions.

The advent of geographic feminisms throughout the 1980s and 1990s has had a major impact on the ways in which human geographers conceptualize and engage with issues of subjectivity. This impact has been substantive insofar as feminist geographers have conducted numerous studies highlighting the structured gendered nature of human experience and the gendering of material and symbolic spaces. It has also been methodological and epistemological in that feminism is in part a critique of traditional modes of social science knowledge production emphasizing objectivity, detachment, and neutrality as virtues on the part of the researcher. Feminist geographers have been instrumental in the development of qualitative research methods within human geography, methods that involve acknowledgment of the human subjectivity of both the researcher and those being researched via principles of empathy and dialogue and that place subjective knowledges, emotions, and beliefs at the center of geographic study.

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