I’ve mentioned this before, but there is now a pdf advertising this new major reference work, edited by Derek Gregory and Noel Castree, that gathers together 85 previously published pieces across the breadth of human geography. While the price means it is intended for (rich) university libraries that don’t have access to many key Anglophone journals, for others the list of pieces gives something a sampling of the discipline.
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I don’t want to be prick but isn’t it slightly ironic given all the talk of situated knowledge in the discipline when books like these are published and they contain 3 (!) pieces written by people working outside Anglophone academia and no translated work at all. Not to say anything of the particular – not fundamental – historiography applied. The politics of stuff like this is really weird. What is the point? Is fundamental geography only done in North America and the UK?
Thanks for the comment Christian. You’d need to ask the editors for their logic, of course. My sense is that this was an attempt to survey recent debates in Anglophone geography. The point is that these kinds of collections sell, as I understand it, principally to libraries in China and east Asia that do not otherwise have access to this material – that is, they don’t subscribe or have the archive to the key Anglophone journals. Of course, people from outside North America and the UK publish in those journals, so there is a choice being made there. As for translation, this isn’t the outlet for it – the major reference works reprint existing material, they don’t look to commission new essays or translate. In some ways it would be worse if they did translate stuff, because it would then be largely inaccessible – unless your library bought the collection. As it is, collections like these are redundant for most Anglophone libraries which already have the content in its previous outlets. There are inevitably questions to be asked about choice and the worth of collections like this – or the Environment and Planning one I’ve just edited – but hopefully this gives some context to the project.