Responsibilities of geographers: Are we role models or hypocrites?

1 INTRODUCTION

Geography is a discipline of interconnection that calls for taking account of how scales intercede and for asking how both physical and social ecologies combine and express themselves in complex systems from which none of us is separate. Its history has imperial baggage, but it also has much to contribute to contemporary challenges, and the obligations owed by the discipline and its practitioners are all the greater for both these reasons. But rather than discussing geographic research, in this commentary I want to write about us as geographers outside of our work. I draw on Chomsky’s (1967, n.p.) essay on the responsibility of the intellectual, and ask that we consider the responsibility of the geographer to use “the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.” Excuse the rationalist undertones. I do not intend this piece to be rhetorical alone. I ask genuinely, as people with expertise on how humans and other parts of nature co-relate, what are our responsibilities outside of research and consultancy work? What are our duties of care? In effect, how do we model the calls to action we make in the study of geography in living our everyday lives?

Similar questions have arisen regularly in tearoom banter and quiet office chats, but a scholarly call for individual action among researchers is rarer in a discipline whose affiliates rightly are aware of complex social, physical, and cultural pressures, power relationships, and situated experiences. Rather, I broach this subject by reference to examples in literature that set a foundation for obligations, and which have been empowering for me outside of writing. Among these examples are works by Mouat (2023), who has discussed the significance of love in geography, and by Dorling (2019), who has discussed the same about kindness. Head (2016) is an inspiration for starting conversations about the pressures on climate scientists trying to communicate grim and politicised information, her picture of the future, and for explaining that action in our close relationships drives household decision-making, even among the environmentally minded. Gillespie (2020) and Verlie (2022) have written beautiful accounts of how to navigate our changing climate using honest and regenerative storytelling that empowers us to face ongoing transformations of our world. Meanwhile Davidson et al. (2023) have grounded similar concerns with a passion to rearticulate key concepts in geography for a new generation of school students by drawing on examples from three members of a new generation of university geographers. Pulling together strands from these various works, I focus on the future of geography and geographers to discuss our responsibilities outside of research from sustainable practices to diverse community building.

What is geography? It is understanding human and natural systems through their interconnections and porous boundaries. As Jackson (2006) astutely has observed, geography is understood through pairings of space and place, scale and connection, proximity and distance, and relational thinking itself. To borrow from Head (2016, p. 170), I believe that geographers, like Anthropoceneans, understand “the many ways we are embedded—materially, ontologically, historically, biogeochemically—in the processes of the earth.” These are skills for engaging with the world to make connections between scales and to see relationships between the local and global. As Jackson (2006, p. 203) has identified, understanding geography involves being provided with a language to apprehend connections between places and scales that others might miss. It is on this basis that I argue we, myself included, must consider the responsibilities of geographers beyond research. We have something to contribute.

Thus, it is worth considering the ephemeral place of geography in the West’s partitioning of knowledge, which has generously provided us with our regular identity crises as members of the discipline (Turner, 2002). This trend is not helped by geography’s imperial legacy, particularly from the British Empire. Dorling (2019, p. 2) has shown how geography was the “discipline for young men drawn from the upper orders of society, those destined to rule over the lower orders.” Even today, geographical curricula merit reparative actions, including in relation to decolonising and Indigenising knowledge, such as is the case in Australia (Lobo, 2021; Williams et al., 2021).

In other words, the capacity for geographers to be role models here is thus high. For example, my time in the University of Tasmania’s School of Geography, Planning, and Spatial sciences has put me in contact with a stellar cohort of passionate humans who have made me more at ease with my membership in what is otherwise a destructive expression of our species. I am aware of the risk I run, overburdening well-minded people with yet more expectations. As Head (2016, p. 84) has suggested in relation to the similar case of climate scientists, the accusation by sceptics is draining, and so are calls from their own teams that they are not doing enough. I also recognise that not all geographers have the facilities, capacities, or influence to enact changes in their lives and institutions. Harvey (2000, p. 178) was right when he warned that there is “nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals.” Nevertheless, I believe it is valuable to view our identities as geographers outside of published research and to name how such identities can encourage pro-social flourishing without mediating outputs and technologies.

I name these possibilities by reference to two examples. First is the place of geographers as polluters; this includes how we perform our identities alongside the hosting, travelling to, and catering for conferences. Second is our role as community and diversity builders, which relates to recurring calls for community and diversity to implement findings from our research in practical ways. After elaborating on these examples, next, I consider the future of geography. Unlike accounts of such matters by Thrift (2002) and others, I focus on how our efforts to be responsible geographers outside of scholarship is informed by understanding our embeddedness in the processes of the Earth, witnessing the interrelationships of scales, and thinking geographically.

2 GEOGRAPHER AS ROLE MODEL

COP28 in the United Arab Emirates concluded in December last year, and organisers set themselves a target that at least 50% of catering at the meeting should fall within sustainable carbon and water limits (COP28 UAE, 2023). I have alternated between optimism and despair that a whole half (or only half) of its food was sustainable. COP is a significant event annually for geographers, both because its conduct and outcomes are subjects of great inquiry and because its precedents help establish behaviours and attitudes on climate change and sustainability generally—and it also constantly disappoints those well versed in the subject.

Like COP28, climate change is a subject discussed at geography conferences. How seriously we also take climate solutions is expressed in what we discuss and in how we organise, implement, and cater such events. Regarding climate action and adaptation, eight years ago, Head (2016, p. 173) stated that “many of the capacities we need are ones we already have.” As geographers, we have the training to go beyond green label environmentalism—to make more than token supermarket choices and to engage in long term planning. The same skill-sets help us understand the power of demonstration and symbolism. When planning our own events, providing a sustainable meal option is common. But until sustainability is the default option and unsustainable choices are the optional extra, can we say we are taking our planetary problems seriously?

Chatterton suggests assisting conference entry for anyone who does not fly. Conferences can bear some of the cost for attendees from distant parts of the Global South or organise simultaneous sessions in closer hubs around the world where there is interest. While some, like regional Australians such as myself, are at a disadvantage for sustainable travel options, the fact is these planning questions are not someone else’s problem. If we organise, attend, or benefit from conferences, these and other events are part of our responsibility, and their emissions with them.

3 GEOGRAPHER AS COMMUNITY BUILDER

Community is a returning theme in geographical work and a regular ingredient in geographers’ recommendations for action. The same may be said of diversity. Head (2016, p. 170), for example, has encouraged us to find and build community in flexible ways, so we can “maximise the conditions under which diverse life can flourish.” Examples also include decolonising through diversity (Lobo, 2021; Williams et al., 2021), teaching about more-than-human communities and community-based approaches to environmental management (Davidson et al., 2023), and increasing bush fire preparedness by raising neighbourhood communication and awareness (Lucas et al., 2022). Surely we have some responsibility to act on such knowledge as those calling for diverse communities. Beginning to answer this call can be as simple as connecting with our neighbours, talking about disaster risks, and making shared plans.

Yet, I recognise a measure of what might be called hypocrisy in my own words and deeds. For example, exchanges with my neighbours are rarely more than polite nods or apologies for barking dogs. Even though I only rent my accommodation, I should know better. Dorling (2019, p. 4) is another geographer who admits hypocrisy, referring to past work on the inequality and unreliability of school grades and commenting on how he has failed to challenge how university places are awarded. We all have such stories. I have certainly grappled with how to take on more obligations while being time-poor and open myself to self-criticism in places that are delicate to me. But I wonder, now, can we turn the problem on its head? To tweak a line from Verlie (2022, p. 5), what if lived, embodied, emotional, interpersonal, and relational actions were considered constitutive of geographical thinking, and as valuable ways to comprehend it?

4 THE FUTURE GEOGRAPHER

When looking to the future within the discipline, I have found that authors tend to focus on emerging methods, fields, and scholarship trends rather than responsibilities of geographers (Simandan, 2023; Thrift, 2002; Turner, 2002). When considering these responsibilities, I find myself arguing that the personal is political, as critical and feminist geographers have long done, and that the personal is professional as well. In a discipline concerned with social change, Harvey (2000, pp. 234–5) has demonstrated this responsibility when he states that by “changing our world we change ourselves; how, then, can any of us talk about social change without at the same time being prepared, both mentally and physically, to change ourselves?”

I have been presumptuous already in this essay. Telling each geographer how to navigate their own unique qualities, values, and circumstances would be a step too far. But to give examples for the future of geography generally, I return to questions about conferences, travel, and education in schools.

When considering geography in schools, Davidson et al. (2023, p. 432) have returned to concepts that delineate the discipline, including Jackson’s (2006) earlier pairings of space and place, scale and connection, proximity and distance, and relational thinking. Just as these concepts assist school students understand and react to complex challenges such as eco-anxiety, they are useful to scholars outside of research as well. Perhaps future geographers are those who encourage and reward how these concepts may be shown, practically, in our everyday lives today, to the benefit of ourselves and others. In so doing, we can integrate our geographical selves with other parts of our identities and update role models within our discipline to reflect this expanded focus.

The geography discipline that I write from has a legacy of frontier explorers, imperial agents, and the military. Dorling (2019, p. 1) rightly has warned that geographers “climb mountains, they are still explorers, they are more robust, more rigorous and more ‘out there’ than other academics, and thus that legacy of toughness of attitude still endures.” Even Alexander von Humboldt, a modern progenitor of geography who stands up to contemporary scrutiny, is remembered more with a spyglass in his hand, trekking through the Andes, than for his role as a science communicator and for his humanitarian convictions.

But it is perhaps as citizen scientists that we must be able to show how, as a hands-on discipline, geography can and is being redeployed in ways that are reshaping us as a democratic group of diverse community builders. If it is too top-down to say ‘problem-solvers’, we can at least be process-makers. For more guidance, I turn to Head’s (2016) account of Anthropoceneans.

Head tends to write about social transformation rather than small-scale social action, but one often inspires the other. In its original context, Anthropoceneans refers to the “well-off citizens of the Modern world who, having contributed so much to the problems, have to try and remake ourselves and our worlds” (Head, 2016, p. 168). Considering modern Western geography’s imperialist history, as well as geographers’ unique position to enact change, I think applying Anthropoceneans to geographers is fair and informative. To be an Anthropocenean is to find hope in being and in practice. It is to generate networks of care and sharing, to accept grief about the disruptive times we are part of, to farewell our past modern selves, who look at these processes only in a removed way, so we can take on the intellectual and practical task of creating new kinds of selves (Head, 2016). As geographers, these labours allow us to model healthy disruptions to broken ways of being in the world—to promote new and old kinds of flourishing in the future.

Harvey (2000, p. 235) said it well when he explained that “routine, by virtue of its comfort and security, can mask the ways in which the jarring prospects of transformative change must in the long run be confronted.” Maybe some discomfort is part of our responsibility. Role models are often reduced to positive, flattering, and aspirational idealisations. But in the overlapping and interconnected crises of human–nature relationships, geographers must model grief and disruption, and must act to accommodate these lived realities—or at least use our skillsets in diverse cohorts, energised by our failures and vulnerabilities (Verlie, 2022). To quote Head (2016, p. 168) one last time, such work includes challenging our “cultural frame with a relentless emphasis on being positive and optimistic as an approach to the future.” In that way, we admit we do not choose the times we live in, but nevertheless we choose the stories we tell and live by (Gillespie, 2020).

5 CONCLUSION

Geographers have political and indeed ethical actions that come with our positions as experts in human–nature processes. To be clear, kindness and love are not limited to sensations. If they were, such actions would be easier. This essay would be easier. Kindness, love, and accountability are engrained in physical processes. In our case, what is at stake is how we take values we have learned empirically or rationally, how we practice them in our everyday lives, both personally and communally, and how we do so without tearing ourselves or others apart.

I have deliberately avoided focusing on geographer’s research responsibilities. But Dorling (2019) is right when he has argued that by grappling with geography’s past—and, I add, with ourselves as role models—ours can be a discipline of and for the future, and one in which we study the world in involved and helpful, rather than distant or virtue signalling ways. On this basis, as geographers we must practice what we preach or advocate. We must reward geographical thinking in our own lives and treat such thinking as providing valuable ways to comprehend and perform our discipline. Many of us embody and encourage such forms of modelling already. I do think that geographers today often are the engaged citizen scientist rather than the frontier explorer and often promote diverse community building in our neighbourhoods, schools, and institutions. But we must be open to seeing these behaviours and attitudes as a responsibility, in accordance with each of our unique facilities, capacities, and influence, to answer our own calls to action.