I am organising a session at the forthcoming RGS/IBG annual conference in London (August 28-30, 2013). Details below:

Radical Geography in the Interwar Period:

Disciplinary Trajectories and Hidden Histories

Sponsored by Historical Geography Research Group

Organiser: Dr. Alex Vasudevan

(School of Geography, University of Nottingham)

This session builds on a brief note published in the journal Area in 1975 by the geographer David Stoddart on the disciplinary origins of “relevant” geography. For Stoddart, a “tradition of social relevance” can, in fact, be traced back to the end of the 19^th century and the work of Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin whose commitment to geographical knowledge was shaped by the radical political imperatives of anarchism (188). According to Stoddart, the emergence of a radical geography in the late 1960s represented, if anything, the latest moment in the history of a “socially relevant geography” and that the very idea of “relevance”…