21 Apr Clamoring camps of academia

We had the pleasure of the company of a visiting scholar for the past few weeks at the University of Washington – Naomi Millner, from Bristol University. It’s always such a delight to have visitors with whom to chat and engage with. She left this morning, but not before we had one last chat.

This AAG’s, i found myself frustrated by some of the stronger pronouncements made by Geographers:

Art is not revolution!

Read Lenin- he had it right!

We are the working class – we just use our brains!

Most of my frustrations stemmed from the lack of reading the situatedness of authors, talks, activists, etc (both those doing the speaking and of those of whom they spoke) – not just in time and place, but within the literature, as well.

So it was, yesterday, that i found myself ranting to Naomi who very elegantly pointed to the ways in which we could (or should?) find commonality rather than oppositionality. In every other aspect of my life, i strive to be open to all of the difference that presents itself, but in this instance, i found myself entrenching more firmly in my beliefs. Even as a i rambled on about the mis-readings of philosophers’ positioning within the broader debates of their time, i realized that we geographers were on the brink of doing the same.

For as much as i would like to blame my personal frustrations on the (wholly and completely inappropriate) discussant comments of one of the sessions i attended, i realized that it is entirely my own doing that jammed my feet in between the rocks of stubbornness. Even as we admonish ourselves (and others) for our paltry and pitiful attempts at inter-disciplinary communication and exercise, we (or at least “i”) have failed to take that self-reflexive moment of inter-philosophical claims within the discipline to task.

I suppose now would be a good time to begin to loosen that grip…