The Stories We Tell: Challenging Exclusionary Histories of Geography in U.S. Graduate Curriculum

Abstract

In this article, we examine how the exclusionary and problematic aspects of geography’s history are narrated, reproduced, and challenged in graduate education in the United States. Approaching introductory graduate courses as sites in the reproduction of geography as a discipline, we consider how these courses can either bolster or challenge problematic legacies of geography’s disciplinary history. To do so, we analyze thirty-two syllabi from graduate-level “introduction to geography” courses in the United States with a focus on how issues of colonialism, race and racism, and gender figure into narratives about the history of geography. In drawing attention to seemingly minor decisions about framing, content, and organization within syllabi, and connecting these decisions to broader concerns about the history of geography and its exclusions, we demonstrate that syllabi indeed play a role in disciplinary reproduction. We argue that, with some conscious effort and design, we can rework the stories that we tell in our syllabi toward more inclusive and diverse imaginaries of the geographic tradition.

本文探讨了美国的研究生教育如何叙述、再现和挑战地理史中的排斥和问题。我们把研究生入门课程做为地理学的再现场所, 思考了这些课程如何支持或挑战地理史的遗留问题。为此, 我们分析了美国研究生课程《地理学概论》的32个教学大纲, 重点关注这些教学大纲如何描述地理史中的殖民主义、种族和种族主义、性别。通过关注教学大纲的框架、内容和组织等看似不重要的决定, 并将这些决定与地理史及其排除联系起来, 我们证实教学大纲在学科再现中确实发挥了作用。我们认为, 通过有意识的努力和设计, 我们可以重新编写教学大纲中的描述, 实现更具包容性和多样性的地理传统想象。

En este artículo, examinamos el modo como los aspectos excluyentes y problemáticos de la historia de la geografía son narrados, reproducidos y retados en la educación posgraduada de los Estados Unidos. Viendo los cursos posgraduados introductorios como los lugares de reproducción de la geografía como una disciplina, consideramos cómo pueden estos cursos reforzar o retar los legados problemáticos de la historia disciplinar de la geografía. Para hacerlo, analizamos treinta y dos programas del curso “introducción a la geografía” a nivel posgraduado en Estados Unidos, haciendo énfasis a cómo asuntos relacionados con colonialismo, raza y racismo, y género hallan cabida en narrativas sobre la historia de la geografía. Al atraer la atención sobre decisiones aparentemente menores sobre el encuadre, contenido y organización dentro del programa de estudios, y al conectar estas decisiones con preocupaciones de mayor trascendencia acerca de la historia de la geografía y sus exclusiones, demostramos que el programa en verdad juega un rol en la reproducción de la disciplina. Argüimos que, con algún esfuerzo consciente y con diseño, podemos reelaborar las historias que contamos en nuestros programas de curso hacia imaginarios más incluyentes y diversos de la tradición geográfica.

Key Words:

• colonialism
• curriculum
• exclusion
• gender
• history of geography
• race
• syllabus

关键词:

• 殖民主义
• 课程
• 排斥
• 性别
• 地理史
• 种族
• 教学大纲。

Palabras clave:

• colonialismos
• currículo
• exclusión
• género
• historia de la geografía
• programa de curso
• raza

Graduate courses on the history of geography are one site in which geography is defined, situated, and, to some extent, bounded. In the United States, first-year required courses in geography are one of the few places in which geography students across the subfields are brought together to contemplate and discuss the history and nature of geography.¹ In this sense, these courses constitute a “rite of passage” in the process of becoming geographers (Cresswell 2012, 3). Given this formative role of “introduction to geography” courses, they ought to be seen as “an important arena for coming to terms with the essence of the discipline” (Cox 2006, 377). These courses work to “(re)make the history of geography as a living concern” (Kirsch in Keighren et al. 2017, 255) and are spaces in which “Geography’s past is used … to establish its future” (Keighren, Abrahamsson, and della Dora 2012, 342). These courses then must be seen as a key site in the reproduction of the discipline.

We might wonder this: What histories of geography come alive in these courses? In part, these courses revolve around stories about major figures, formative debates, key concepts, methodological advancements, and the growing breadth of geographic thought. These courses acquaint students with what geography has been and what it is today. Yet the stories these courses tell are necessarily partial and selective, ones that can work to reproduce the historical and contemporary exclusions of Anglo-American geography (Seeman in Keighren et al. 2017, 258). As Rose (1995) contended “current knowledges of geographic traditions are … bound into power relations” (414), power relations that shape which stories we tell and which stories are left unspoken.

We might then ask this question: How are the histories of geography we tell and teach reflective of these power relations? Remarking on her fifteen years of experience teaching an introduction to geography course, Oswin (2020) described how the colonialist, heteromasculinist, and racist histories and cultures of geographic exploration, knowledge production, and disciplinary formation are often incorporated into a sanitized narrative of (White male) intellectual progress. This narrative has become a standardized template for digesting the history of our field (see also Roy 2020). Reflecting on these disciplinary histories, Hamilton (2020) wrote:

During my first year in graduate school, I read from the canon of white geographers and marveled at the audacity of it all. … In the “geographical tradition,” I read the classics where Black and Brown people were either erased or constructed as biologically inferior to whites. Race was a byproduct, an aside, to the “real” action of exploration and discovery. (299)

Hawthorne and Meché (2016) similarly commented on how disciplinary narratives presented in first-year courses exclude people of color, specifically Black people, from geographic knowledge production, consign issues of race and racism to a distant disciplinary past, and reproduce a White male canon in which women and, women of color in particular, are marginal if included at all. These accounts point to an abiding problem: How are we to teach the history of the discipline without reproducing its colonialism, racism, sexism, and other oppressive and exclusionary logics?

Given the particular role of introduction to geography courses in the (re)production of U.S. (and more broadly, Anglophone) geography, we approach these courses as a key site for examining the stories we tell about geography and the points of view that are continually omitted or sidelined from those stories. Furthermore, we situate these courses as sites where exclusionary histories of Anglo-American geography might be reckoned with toward a more inclusive and politically self-aware discipline. Although we are cautious about the politics of inclusion, how it can result in tokenization, and how it can fail to address the larger structural issues that reproduce coloniality, White supremacy, and other oppressive logics in our discipline, we nonetheless see syllabi as one site of intervention—among others—for interrupting the reproduction of our discipline’s problematic legacies. To consider this potential, we examine syllabi from introduction to geography courses in geography departments across the United States to analyze how they include, exclude, and frame key interventions around issues of colonialism, race and racism, and gender. In doing so, we hope to provide some direction for revising the stories we tell about geography and connecting our teaching and syllabi to the broader project of dismantling oppressive logics, practices, and institutions in Anglo-American geography.

Anglo-American Geography’s Historical and Ongoing Exclusions

To situate our concerns about colonialism, race, and gender in graduate training in geography, we begin with an account of the exclusions of Anglo-American geography, both in the discipline’s past and present. Before doing so, it is necessary to define our scope. The scope of this study is limited to U.S. geography programs largely because it is the tradition in which we (the authors) were trained as graduate students. In making this methodological decision, we understand that we risk recentering Anglo-American geography as a hegemonic “center” of the discipline. Yet, at the same time, we see it as our responsibility to critically intervene in the reproduction of the discipline from the positions, and within the traditions, in which we find ourselves. This analysis thus should not be taken to stand in for the status of the discipline geography as a whole.²

Furthermore, our focus on colonialism, race and racism, and gender is selective and reflects our perceptions of “what is missing” from narratives of geography, perceptions shaped by our training, positionalities, and political commitments. As authors and geographers, we situate ourselves as a White queer and trans person and a White bisexual cis-woman, both from middle-class U.S. backgrounds. We have both been trained as feminist human geographers in the United States and, through our own experiences navigating the field, have become attentive to the gendered dynamics that have shaped our own training and education. We have sought to become educated about and disrupt colonial and racist dynamics in our discipline. Our perceptions of how colonialism and racism shape the discipline are necessarily limited by our Whiteness and location within the U.S. academy. Nonetheless, by exercising our critical capacities and building from our colleagues’ scholarship, we hope to advance more critical and inclusive histories of geography.

In bringing together discussions of colonialism, race and racism, and gender, we recognize that these are complex problems worthy of their own treatment and that speaking of them together risks a kind of conflation and erasure of their specificities.³ Yet we also recognize what these problems share: They all designate positions of marginality in relation to dominant histories, stories, and identities of our discipline (see Kinkaid, Parikh, and Ranjbar 2021). Accordingly, the coloniality, Whiteness, and male-dominance of the discipline must be seen as intersecting and as intersectional issues. As McKittrick and Peake (2005) described, “the Anglo-American tradition of Geography has traditionally included Western white men and excluded women, non-white communities, and non-Western geographical subjects” (39). Dominant narratives position these subjects and their knowledge as marginal in geography’s history (and arguably, marginal in many of its contemporary intellectual formations). We argue that these “margins” are relationally produced through the ongoing reproduction of the discipline’s “center”; that is, the primacy of an unmarked Anglo, cis-White male subject as the subject of geographic knowledge (Berg, Gahman, and Nunn 2014, 59; Kinkaid, Parikh, and Ranjbar 2021). These problems are not unique to geography as a discipline—they are present in all of the modern disciplines emerging from colonialism. Furthermore, following Wynter (2003), we can see these problems as rooted more fundamentally in a colonial structure of knowledge that overrepresents White bourgeois men as the figure of the human. The overrepresentation of the White bourgeois man as the figure of the human and the epitome of civilization produces inequalities and exclusions that shape our intellectual spaces as geographers while also configuring the uneven geographies that we seek to describe and analyze as geographers.

Before turning to how these problems manifest in syllabi, curricula, and teaching, we outline the contours of debates regarding the role of colonialism, race and racism, and gender in shaping the production of geographic knowledge.

Colonialism and Its Legacies

It is well-established that geography’s emergence as an academic discipline is tied to its role in colonial enterprises (Livingstone 1992; McKittrick and Peake 2005; Bryan 2016; Hawthorne and Meché 2016; Driver 2020). According to Clayton (2020), “empire-building both activated and was activated by geographical knowledge and … the late nineteenth-century climax of Western imperialism was implicated in the promulgation of geography as an academic discipline” (1541). Clayton and others have situated this legacy within various practices of geography, including mapmaking and surveying; traditions of navigation, expedition, and discovery; and ongoing concerns with scientific classification (see also Kobayashi and Peake 2000; Daigle and Sundberg 2017). These practices were part of a White supremacist colonial racial project, one explicitly premised on classifying races and demonstrating the inferiority of non-White racial others (Kobayashi and Peake 2000, 399; Esson 2020).

This colonial legacy continues to shape the discipline in a number of ways. The ongoing exclusions of geography in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of difference can be traced to these colonial origins (McKittrick and Peake 2005, 43). In particular, and as many have pointed out, the inception of geography within the colonial project explains the discipline’s continued investment in White supremacy and a “coloniality-induced institutional racism” (Esson 2018, 1–2), and is one possible cause of the discipline’s ongoing lack of engagement with concepts of race and processes of racialization as geographic concerns (Mahtani 2004; Hawthorne and Meché 2016; Esson and Last 2019). Furthermore, the entanglements of geography and forms of imperialism and militarism continue to shape geographic research (Bryan 2016); according to Wainwright and Weaver (2021), “since around 2005, U.S. military and intelligence agencies have taken a keen interest in the discipline. Military and intelligence organizations have sought closer ties with geographers by funding or otherwise encouraging research and education that furthers their interests” (1137). Accordingly, “it is impossible to draw a clear or straight line between a geography that was once complicit in empire and one that is now not” (Clayton 2011, 50).

Given this uncomfortable proximity, there are ongoing calls to address the coloniality of geography’s history and its contemporary manifestations. As Jazeel (2017) argued, “the ongoing coloniality of geographical knowledge production is not only widely accepted, it is also now every geographer’s problem” (334). To disrupt geography’s colonial legacies, we need to critically examine curricula, pedagogy, and broader institutional structures that perpetuate colonial power structures and logics (Clayton 2020; Esson 2020, 711). Furthermore, the colonial legacies of geography require that we rewrite geography’s history and incorporate geographic theories and practices from beyond the Western Anglophone world (Craggs 2019, 445). As Jazeel (2017) argued, “It demands disciplinary geography interrogate its own teleology of intellectual progress” (334) and recognize and engage other ways of knowing. Without all geographers committed to taking on this work, the discipline will continue to reproduce Eurocentric, colonial, and markedly White traditions.

Racialized Exclusions

Related to the elision of colonial histories and legacies in geographic scholarship and teaching is the ongoing absence of sustained engagements with race and racism. Geographers have long lamented that “Our disciplinary history is one of near silence on issues of racialization, silence based on an almost overwhelming inattention to the details of racial practice, a silence, in other words, dominated by whiteness” (Kobayashi and Peake 2000, 399). Mahtani (2004) suggested that addressing geography’s silences on race should “start by examining how legitimate knowledge about race is constructed within our discipline, and considering more carefully who has access to controlling that knowledge” (97). Although some progress has been made across these realms, especially with the creation and growth of Indigenous Geographies, Black Geographies, and Latinx Geographies specialty groups of the American Association of Geographers, Anglo-American geography as a discipline “has yet to demonstrate that addressing racial injustice, and its intellectual, institutional, and personal losses, is a priority” (Faria et al. 2019, 365).

Silences surrounding race must be understood in part as a symptom of the underrepresentation of people of color in U.S. geography departments (Pulido 2002). Between 2005 and 2015, the presence of Hispanic and African American faculty was between 4 to 5 percent in U.S. geography departments, with other academic disciplines averaging twice that of geography in 2015 (Faria et al. 2019, 366).⁴ Geography has not made significant strides in recruiting and retaining scholars of color, with many programs reporting “no undergraduate or graduate students of color in their programs” (Faria et al. 2019, 365). Even if people of color make their way into geography, institutional environments remain toxic for many (Mahtani 2014). To address these glaring issues, geographers advocate for altering hiring and recruitment practices to facilitate the retention of scholars of color in geography and enhance mentorship opportunities for students of color (Mahtani 2004; Faria et al. 2019).

The Whiteness and racism of the discipline permeates institutional cultures and spaces (Delaney 2002). These White institutional spaces produce forms of hypervisibility and invisibility for people of color and are shaped by microaggressions and everyday forms of racism (Akinleye 2006; Joshi, McCutcheon, and Sweet 2015; Tolia‐Kelly 2017). In various ways, Whiteness operates to create “geographies of power that inhibit people of color from moving freely within the discipline” (Joshi, McCutcheon, and Sweet 2015, 302). These spaces and their various effects can result in “the loss of talented underrepresented thinkers, untaken research directions, and significant emotional, professional, and personal tolls” (Al-Saleh and Noterman 2020, 5).

Gendered Exclusions

Decades of scholarship have demonstrated how gender (largely conceived in this scholarship as a cisgender binary) shapes the history of geography and the production of geographic knowledge. In terms of representation, the exclusion and “inclusion with a difference” of women in the field can be traced through forty-five years of scholarship documenting gender inequity in geography, which became a topic of scholarly concern in the 1970s (see Al-Hindi 2000; McEwan 2020). Although progress has certainly been made over the intervening decades, it remains the case that women are underrepresented in absolute terms in the discipline. Worse yet, if one breaks down these numbers across the career cycle, it becomes apparent that “glass ceilings” and “stone floors” hinder women’s career advancement while producing more casualized, flexible, feminized, and precarious forms of labor (Maddrell, Thomas, and Wyse 2019; see also Al-Hindi 2000; Crang 2003; Maddrell et al. 2016). In the United States in 2018, there were more than twice as many male tenure-track faculty as female, whereas at the level of full professor, there were only two female full professors for every seven males (Schurr, Müller, and Imhof 2020, 318). Although these accounts are useful for understanding some of the gendered dynamics in geography, they are limited in their cisnormativity and lack attention to how race and gender intersect. Geography’s gender problem is further complicated by the fact that feminist projects have often sidelined issues of racialization and more complex accounts of gender, reproducing hegemonic White and cishetero feminist perspectives and political priorities.

Although the presence or absence of women and queer people is key to understanding gendered issues in geography, it does not tell the whole story. As Domosh (1991) argued, “Our histories of geography are sexist not only because they do not include women, but because they are based on definitions of geography and history that have been male-defined” (489). Along these lines, scholars have pointed to the largely White male canon of geographic thought and its marked exclusion of women (Maddrell 2012, 2015). Another effect of gendered exclusion is that women’s issues, perspectives, and geographies are either outright excluded or marginalized (Monk and Hanson 1982; McEwan 2020), as are geographies of sexuality and the experiences of queer people (see Binnie 1997; Binnie and Valentine 1999; Bell and Valentine 2003; Bell 2017), from matters of “serious” geographic inquiry. White male perspectives and agendas continue to occupy disproportionate space in our discipline, as a glance at any anthology of major figures in the discipline makes clear (Oswin 2020, 10).

This historical development of geography as a straight White man’s discipline (Kinkaid, Parikh, and Ranjbar 2021) has produced a general masculinist intellectual culture (Brinegar 2001; McKittrick and Peake 2005; Mott and Cockayne 2017) that persists despite the entry of women and queer people into the discipline. This intellectual culture produces various forms of violence and exclusion for women, including harassment (Bartos and Ives 2019; Mansfield et al. 2019) and other everyday forms of sexism and discrimination (Mahtani 2002, 2014; Tolia‐Kelly 2017; Maddrell, Thomas, and Wyse 2019). For women of color, these forms of violence are intensified by the Whiteness and racist culture of geography, which produces forms of silencing (Tolia‐Kelly 2017; Faria et al. 2019), invisibility, and hypervisibility (Akinleye 2006; Tolia‐Kelly 2017). The unspoken heteronormativity of the discipline also complicates and undermines the belonging of queer identified geographers and their intellectual and political concerns (Binnie 1997; Bell 2017; Kinkaid 2019; Eaves 2020; Kinkaid, Parikh, and Ranjbar 2021). This White heteromasculinist culture continues to manifest and be reproduced at conferences, in research, and in everyday academic spaces (Mott and Cockayne 2017, 955).

Exclusions in Geography Curriculum

These historical and ongoing exclusions of geography are mirrored in our curricula in numerous ways, making curricula key sites of examination in understanding how geography’s exclusions persist. Geography’s colonial legacies persist in the Eurocentrism of curricula and through the silences around colonialism that haunt geography’s self-narration (Hawthorne and Meché 2016; Daigle and Sundberg 2017; Esson 2020, 708–09). As Esson and Last (2019) noted, “One of the reasons why ‘white geographies’ are being perpetuated through the curriculum is because of our engagement with colonialism and empire’s role in shaping how geographical knowledge, modes of learning and assessing come into being is inadequate” (233). Additionally, our curricula and teaching continue to be shaped by “white space-making practices” (Hamilton 2020, 300), affecting the content in syllabi and the discussions in classes, often resulting in little to no sustained engagement with race and racism in geography courses (Kobayashi and Peake 2000). When race is engaged, “whiteness” itself is rarely an object of analysis, an oversight Bonnett (1997) argued is a carryover of the colonial project. Similarly, gendered constructions of the canon have clear implications for how we teach geographic knowledge. Maddrell (2012) raised the question of “where have all the women gone” (325), pointing to the male dominance in what are considered to be key geographic texts. Here we see how the institutionalization of a colonial, White-washed, male-dominated history of the field produces various forms of racialized and gendered exclusion.

To combat these exclusionary legacies and tendencies in geography—and to redefine who geographers are and what geography is—scholars have sought to reorient how and what we teach. To contest the ongoing marginalization and exclusion of topics of colonialism, race and racism, and gender in our classrooms, Esson and Last (2019) urged “geographers to embrace a ‘curriculum against domination’, which rejects learning, teaching and knowledge production that perpetuates hierarchies of superiority and inferiority” (227). Calls to transform geography curriculum are proliferating (Domosh 2015; Daigle and Sundberg 2017; Jazeel 2017; Esson and Last 2019; Esson 2020; Hinton and Ono-George 2020; Hamilton 2020), indicating that geographers still have work to do to challenge and undo the dominant structures of oppression as they manifest in our teaching practices, curricula, and syllabi. These interventions are particularly urgent in graduate training, as graduate courses constitute a formative intellectual and disciplinary space wherein graduate students are socialized into the discipline, its history, and its identity. The kinds of histories students encounter in these spaces will strongly shape how they situate geography in their own research and teaching, and thus how they reproduce or revise particular imaginaries of the discipline.

To understand how these disciplinary exclusions are reproduced or challenged in introduction to geography courses in U.S. PhD programs, we examine their syllabi. To make clear the role of syllabi in reproducing geography’s histories, narratives, and exclusions, it is helpful to consider syllabi in relation to geography’s canon: a collection of highly valued works, approaches, and ideas that form the “core” of a discipline and its identity. The canon exists as a shared disciplinary imaginary, and the syllabus documents and operationalizes that imaginary. As Mayhew (2015) put it, “imaginary canons are made concrete via printed syllabi” (10). In this sense, “university teachers who determine curricula are vital gatekeepers of the canon” (Maddrell 2015, 32). Instructors contribute to the reproduction of the canon by teaching geography’s key works, but they do not do so entirely on their own. Syllabi are rarely solely authored and are often shared by instructors and departments (Sidorkin 2012, 3); they therefore represent institutional histories and conventions that exceed the views of their authors. The canons constructed thus have “considerable longevity” and “are part of the disciplinary identity formation which pedagogy instills” (Mayhew 2015, 16). Accordingly, syllabi in introduction to geography courses are an illuminating site to consider processes of canon formation, disciplinary identity, and inclusion or exclusion.

Methods: Analyzing Syllabi

In the following discussion, we present our analysis of introduction to geography graduate syllabi through which we examine how geography is represented and narrated. Here, we mainly focus on how the content and organization of course units and the content of course expositions shape the stories being told in syllabi.

For this analysis, we collected thirty-two syllabi from what we are calling “introduction to geography” graduate courses, across twenty-six U.S. geography PhD programs.⁵ By our calculation, there are fifty-eight geography PhD programs in the United States.⁶ Accordingly, our sample includes syllabi from 45 percent of geography PhD programs in the United States. By “introduction to geography courses,” we are referring to required courses typically taken in the first year of graduate study that focus on the history, debates, and concepts central to (typically Anglo-American) geographic thought. Given some variation in this genre of course, we developed a set of criteria for inclusion in the study, presented in Table 1. The temporal distribution of our sample is presented in Table 2.

Table 1. Eligibility criteria for inclusion in sample

Criterion	Included	Excluded
Topic/content covered	Required courses on the history/nature/philosophy of geography and/or key geographic concepts	Required courses focused more on professional development skills or the history of a specific subfield (e.g., geospatial sciences)
Institutions	Any institution offering a PhD program in geography	Institutions that offer only master’s degrees in geography
Geographic region	Within the United States	Outside of the United States
Time frame	Fall 2015–Fall 2020	Before 2015

Table 2. Temporal distribution of syllabi in sample

Year	Number of syllabi
2015	2
2016	3
2017	0
2018	4
2019	13
2020	10

To collect our sample, we gathered syllabi from instructors of record through professional networks, geography listservs, online searches,⁷ and by directly e-mailing geography programs across the United States. Instructors of record provided the syllabi and consented for their syllabi to be used in our sample in accordance with institutional review board protocols.

To analyze the syllabi, we designed a qualitative coding scheme with modes of inductive and deductive analysis. First, we inductively and thematically coded syllabus expositions to assess the purpose of the course and analyze how instructors define and situate geography and its history. Second, we analyzed the overall structure of each syllabus and noted the organizational strategies of the course, including temporal versus thematic approaches, course sections, and the progression of themes, as conveyed through the titles and content of weekly units. To understand where and how our themes of interest—colonialism, race and racism, and gender—appeared, we designed a deductive coding strategy. Starting from our themes of interest, we coded and tallied the incidence of each theme in thematic course units and individual course readings. For example, if a course had a unit (typically lasting for a week; i.e., one to two class sessions) on race and racism in geography, that unit was coded as such. At the level of individual course readings, we thematically coded and tallied readings that had a substantive focus on issues of colonialism, race and racism, and gender and sexuality, as gauged through titles and abstracts. Furthermore, for both units and readings, we took detailed notes on their inclusion, including their placement in the course and their required versus recommended status. Although our analysis focuses on matters of framing, structure, and organization of syllabi, a closer analysis of the readings lists, including author identities and locations, would add further depth to this analysis.

Although we hold that an analysis of syllabi can yield important insights about geography, its identity, and the power relations that shape the field in the United States, we do acknowledge the limitations to this study. First, what happens in the classroom might not be reflected in the syllabus (Gorski 2009, 309) given that as discussion-based classes, courses can veer into dialogues that are not necessarily represented in the syllabus. We argue, though, that the syllabus nonetheless is a crucial site in which particular histories and narratives are conveyed and stabilized. We also emphasize that this study pertains to the history and formation of geography within the United States and that our analysis is particular to that site.

Teaching the History of Geography and Its Exclusions

Our analysis yielded a complex picture of how the history of geography and its core concepts are presented to graduate students in U.S.-based introduction to geography courses. Not surprisingly, the inclusion of our main concerns—colonialism, race and racism, and gender—varied considerably across syllabi. Here, we present our observations of how these histories and issues are included or excluded, and how these syllabi work in different ways to reproduce the exclusionary history of geography or to destabilize and challenge it.

Although we divide our analysis into two categories—reinforcing and destabilizing dominant histories and their exclusions—we want to note that a single syllabus did not fall squarely into one category or another, but often enacted instances of both reproduction and rupture of geography’s problematic narratives. Furthermore, understanding what function a particular theme or discussion was playing in a course was not a simple case of inclusion or exclusion, presence or absence. Rather than simply noting if a particular theme was present in a course, we examine how and where that theme appeared in relation to other course material to understand the effect of its inclusion in the course. In many cases, themes of gender, race, and colonialism did appear in syllabi;⁸ yet a simple accounting of the presence of these themes does not tell us about the more subtle dynamics of inclusion and exclusion shaping the stories that syllabi narrate. By looking more closely at course framing, organization, sequencing, and the finer scale mechanics of syllabi, we begin to see the more subtle ways that this content is positioned differently than the unmarked White male histories of geography. Although there is reason to be excited about the growing inclusion of these histories and themes, there is also plenty of room to remain skeptical about how they are often included “with a difference,” or incorporated tokenistically, as we describe in this section.

In the remainder of this discussion, we provide examples of how syllabi reproduce dominant narratives of geography by excluding certain histories, temporally bracketing ongoing debates and struggles, structurally marginalizing critical interventions, and offering performative acknowledgment of geography’s exclusions. We also provide examples of how dominant narratives are destabilized by examining the politics of historiography, querying geography’s exclusions, and incorporating texts from nondominant perspectives in various ways. In drawing attention to the seemingly minor decisions of framing, content, and organization within syllabi and connecting these decisions to broader concerns about the history of geography, we demonstrate that syllabi indeed play a role in disciplinary reproduction and that, with some conscious effort and design, we can begin to reorient the stories syllabi tell.

Reinforcing Dominant Stories

The first mode of exclusion we identified in syllabi was simply the exclusion of particular histories of the discipline. For example, the history of geography’s emergence from and entanglement in colonial projects was most clearly excluded in this manner. Only four syllabi contained a unit (typically one week long) specifically focused on colonialism and empire (which were historical in scope and often relied on a textbook, which have their limitations), and three others contained a unit including more critical postcolonial perspectives. This lack of attention to colonialism in the formation of the discipline is not entirely surprising, given that key textbooks,⁹ like Cresswell’s (2012) Geographic Thought, only directly broach the subject in the final pages of the book. Rarely do these moments of engagement lend themselves in an obvious way to a critical reckoning with how colonial projects and epistemologies actively shape the discipline, nor do they seem to respond to ongoing calls to “decolonize” the discipline (Daigle and Sundberg 2017; Jazeel 2017; Hinton and Ono-George 2020) and address its ongoing entanglement with projects of imperialism and militarism (see AAG Geography and Military Study Committee 2019).

The second mode of exclusion we identified is what we call temporal bracketing. Whereas some syllabi evidence a wholesale exclusion of geography’s problematic histories, others did incorporate these issues, albeit in ways that consigned them to an antiquated past. In other words, we found that when incorporating readings on themes of colonialism, race, and gender, many syllabi seemed to position these issues as contained in the past and unconnected to contemporary concerns. For example, race and empire are often only addressed (and even then, only implicitly) in readings on environmental determinism, a geographic body of thought associated with the late nineteenth century. As Hawthorne and Meché (2016) noted, although these courses “make some mention of the discipline’s historical connections to Enlightenment-era scientific racisms and climate determinisms,” geography’s entanglements with scientific racism seem to stop there and can be easily relegated as part of a contentious and ultimately rejected paradigm. Indeed, discussions of race and racism were limited: Eleven syllabi (34 percent) contained weeks either dealing with issues of race and racism independently (seven syllabi) or in combination with other themes (e.g., gender, postcolonial perspectives, “difference;” [four syllabi]). Although some instructors incorporate readings on race and racism throughout the syllabi, many (thirteen syllabi [40 percent]) do not have any readings explicitly addressing these issues outside of a week on environmental determinism in which race is an implicit (and problematic) theme. This selective treatment of race gives the impression that geography has moved beyond its racism (and its colonialism) and that race is somehow no longer a problem deserving of analytical or political attention. In reality, issues of race and racism remain crucial themes for understanding both geographic processes and for understanding identity and power dynamics within the discipline, making their consignment to the past deeply concerning.

We observed similar forms of temporal bracketing in discussions of feminist geographies and issues of gender in geography. Although many syllabi (twenty-two [69 percent]) include a week on feminist geography (either as a stand-alone week [ten syllabi] or in conjunction with other key themes [e.g., race, Marxism, or poststructuralism; twelve syllabi]), engagements with this body of thought often portray feminist geography as a phenomenon of the 1980s and 1990s. Although incorporating readings published during the emergence of feminist geographies provides important historical and intellectual context, relying solely on these readings has unintended effects. First and foremost, bracketing feminist geographies to a time where women were more obviously excluded from the field gives the impression that these issues are problems of the past. Introducing feminist geography as it was thirty years ago also fails to account for how feminist geography has advanced beyond solely attending to gender, and has emerged as a key body of theory informing many geographic subdisciplines. A more thorough integration of contemporary work on gender and feminist perspectives would illuminate that gender is still very much a site of contention in geography in both intellectual and professional realms and that feminist theory is not solely the purview of women or scholars studying gender.

A third mode of exclusion we analyzed is the structural marginalization of colonialism, race and racism, and gender in syllabi. In addition to discussing key facets of geographic knowledge and history as a thing of the past, some syllabi also structurally reinforce the marginalization of certain topics and bodies of thought. Although issues of gender and race were included in syllabi (feminist geographies more so than scholarship on race), they were sometimes included in ways that (unintentionally) communicated their marginality or particularity in relation to unmarked (i.e., White male) histories of geography. For example, some syllabi had weeks on “race and gender” (S27) or “feminism and geographies of difference” (S04), as though race and gender are specialty topics that do not inflect all geographic processes and forms of knowledge production.

Even if these topics are introduced in a stand-alone week, issues of race, gender, and colonialism are often siloed and not placed into conversation with topics such as place, environment–society relations, or physical geography. Taking race and colonialism seriously as concepts, projects, and dynamics shaping society means that we must think through how they inform geographic patterns, processes, and practices across sites and scales. With feminist, antiracist, and postcolonial approaches strongly established in fields like political ecology, environmental justice, political economy, and countless others, there is no reason that our engagements with these concepts should be sequestered into a specific unit. Rather, feminist, antiracist, and postcolonial perspectives should be incorporated into thematic discussions throughout the course.

In another example of structural marginalization, we found that although readings about gender in the history of geography were occasionally present, they were sometimes listed as recommended rather than required readings (for gender and feminism, S07, S18). We are pleased to see these readings incorporated into syllabi, but we question how many students actually read the recommended readings, as graduate courses are often already reading intensive. Furthermore, placing these critical readings in a recommended section signals that these readings are not core to the course and students’ understanding of the field. Thus, the structure, organization, and mechanics of syllabi subtly communicate the place of gender and other related themes outside the “main narrative” of geography’s history.

The fourth mode of exclusion we noted is the performance of geography’s exclusions. The performance of geography’s exclusions occurred when a syllabus or narrative acknowledged its exclusions regarding colonialism, racism, and gender, but did nothing to change the dominant narrative it was reproducing, save for an acknowledgment of these omissions. This occurred when discussions of colonialism, race and racism, and gender were reserved to the final weeks of the course, for example, under the unit heading “geography’s exclusions.” In most syllabi, topics of race, gender, or geographies of difference were more often than not introduced toward the end of the course, which also has the effect of making them appear as an “add on” to an already established storyline. By tagging these stories on last, there is no need to revise how one is telling the history of geography up to that point, which functions to blunt the critical interventions that “geography’s exclusions” perform on disciplinary histories and identities. This is thus partly a form of structural marginalization and relates to the temporal sequencing of a course, but also involves a rhetorical move beyond the matter of course organization; this manner of “incorporating” geography’s exclusion represents a performance of awareness and a move to innocence (Tuck and Yang 2012) that largely leaves colonial White male storylines intact.

As our analysis demonstrates, many syllabi replicate the structure of an apparently standardized telling of geography’s history—one in which postcolonial, imperial, racialized, and gendered histories and theories are relegated as an afterthought or isolated to a discrete week seemingly detached from the rest of geography’s histories. Curiously, some instructors seem to acknowledge these oversights in their syllabus statements but nonetheless reproduce them by continuing to treat them as “geography’s exclusions,” “hidden histories,” and so on, or structurally incorporating them as additional and seemingly tangential perspectives. This performance of geography’s exclusions is not limited to syllabi, but is a larger issue in how we tell the story of geography. For example, in Cresswell’s textbook (used in twelve syllabi [38 percent]), issues of race and colonialism only appear in the final chapter, “Geographies’ Exclusions.” In this chapter, Cresswell (2012) recognized the book’s (and his own) exclusions: “Here I am, in the final chapter of a long exposition of thousands of years of geographic theory, introducing race, and blackness in particular, as evidence of geography’s exclusions and my own ignorance” (272). Despite this apparent self-awareness, Cresswell reproduced these exclusions anyway, making his recognition of these exclusions performative and limiting the potential of these histories to reorient the stories we tell about geography.

Such performative gestures do little to change the nature of the story being told. This kind of move “acknowledges the existence of a body of work through name-checking, but … fails to attend to, disseminate, reinforce or critique the detail of that work” (Maddrell 2012, 326). If we were to truly engage and reckon with this work, we would have to rethink the entire story we are telling. We must avoid what Hawthorne and Meché (2016) called an “‘add diversity and stir’ approach to research and canon building.” Rather, these histories and theories need to be reconceptualized and reintegrated such that they are central to the story of geography.

Destabilizing Dominant Stories

Although we found many examples of decisions that reinforced the dominant story of geography, we also observed strategies that destabilize dominant narratives of Anglo-American geography. These interventions function in various ways to destabilize the story of the discipline, creating moments for alternative narratives to arise and allowing for critical questions to be asked. In this section, we discuss three such strategies: posing questions of historiography and its politics, querying geography’s exclusions, and incorporating nondominant reference points. The potential to challenge geography’s dominant forms of knowledge remains constrained by racialized and colonial legacies, but in our minds, these syllabi represent an improvement as compared to syllabi that make no such attempt at self-awareness or inclusion.

First, some instructors provided expositions to their syllabi that critically situated the content of the course and posed questions of disciplinary historiography and its politics. In presenting a narrative of geography’s history, several instructors acknowledge that their course is presenting a partial history that is necessarily exclusive. We found that there were more and less effective ways to do this. For example, one instructor noted that, “The history read and discussed will be limited to European and Anglo-American geography from the fifteenth century to the present. This history, while exclusive of many other geographic traditions (e.g., Islamic), is an important narrative and starting point for understanding contemporary approaches within geography” (S25). Although this framing acknowledges other traditions, it ends up recentering Anglo-American geography as a necessary starting point without much stated rationale. Several other instructors similarly specify the scope of the history of geography being taught (either in the title or exposition) as Anglo-American (e.g., S03, S09, S10, S12, S15, S16, S21, S32). Although this move does little to expose students to other histories of geography, it at least marks the one being taught as a particular history, and not the history of geography as a whole. Less commonly, instructors incorporate some readings from outside of this reference point, for example, by including a piece about approaching the history of geography from Nigeria (Craggs and Neate 2020), incorporating a reading on Indigenous places and geographies, or challenging students to consider alternative histories and locations of geographic thought in classroom exercises. These moments in syllabi signal the exclusions of Anglo-American and European geography and the alternative histories one might construct of the field. These framings are certainly insufficient to challenge the hegemony of Anglo-American geography and can run the risk of being a rhetorical and performative move (i.e., a performance of geography’s exclusions) if this move does not inflect the rest of the syllabus; nonetheless, marking Anglo-American geography as a particular history is a necessary step in disrupting hegemonic renderings of the discipline.

Beyond identifying the limitations of Anglo-American geography in this sense, a few instructors went further to actively query geography’s exclusions in the framing of the course and their course activities. One instructor described that their course “begins from a recognition that how we narrate the history of geography matters for how we understand what geography is, who geographers are, and where we locate geography. In this course we will take an approach to the history of geographic thought that questions what is included in the canon, why, and with what implications” (S11).

In various syllabi, these moments of questioning appear in small ways. For example, section headers from two courses hint at these struggles over knowledge production: “Difficult geographies: identity, privilege, power, war” and “Silenced and subaltern views: hidden histories of geography from the perspectives of feminism, post-colonialism, Indigeneity, and beyond.” This framing of “hidden histories” begins to point to the politics of representation at work in narratives of geography’s disciplinary development. Yet it is also worth reflecting on how the framing of hidden histories used in some syllabi assumes that these histories and legacies are in fact hidden; these histories could be experienced as alive, readily apparent, and a source of tension for geographers who are present in our classrooms but marginalized in the history of discipline.

These framing moves are imperfect, but they do encourage some curiosity about the production of geography’s history. In one course, students are instructed to “choose a contemporary article that analyzes the problems of the history of geography primarily being a story of and by elite, white, Anglo-European males OR you may find some ‘primary source’ material in the form of something written before about 1950 [sic] from an author who fits this category of ‘silenced and subaltern views’” (S18). In another example, one instructor included the following question, among others, about the geographic subfields as an orienting question in their exposition: “Who is the ‘human’ of human geography?; How have geographers theorized gender, sexuality, and race?” (S12). In doing so, this instructor introduces issues of gender, race, and sexuality into the framing of the course. These moments shed light on struggles and contests over knowledge production—questions about the dominance of certain epistemologies, intellectual priorities, and subjects in the discipline—and the particular ways these power dynamics manifest in geography’s history and retellings.

For one instructor, the history of geography must be situated within the politics of and struggles over knowledge production. The exposition to their syllabus explains:

“what constitutes ‘academic knowledge’ is shaped by silences and exclusions” (Hubbard et al. 2002, p. 9). Exploring the historic present of geographic concepts proves significant in a number of ways. First, what exactly constitutes concepts—much less key concepts—in geography is not universally agreed-upon … the exact meanings attached to concepts are not only debated, but they are struggled over. … By understanding such arguments—through a careful and theoretically informed critical reading—we can assess what has been and what currently is at stake in not only our discipline’s struggles over concepts and their meanings, but also local and global struggles over these concepts and their meanings for different social and political groups. (S09, italics added)

For this instructor, critically analyzing the politics of geographic knowledge is a matter of political and ethical necessity: “Why should we mull over historical and temporary conflict about the production of geographic knowledge? Because researchers ignoring social power do so at the risk of being irrelevant and/or unethical” (S09). These interventions work to open up a space to query geography’s exclusions and how they configure present conversations about the discipline.

In another instance of this strategy of querying geography’s exclusions, one instructor begins the course with a week on “Which Geography? Whose Geography?” (S11), and others incorporate critical readings in the first week that seek to destabilize what counts as geographic knowledge. In “Which Geography? Whose Geography?,” students read about the Whiteness of the discipline, the politics of citation, and the exclusion of women, and consider whose history is included and legitimated. Beginning the course with these critical readings reorients discussions about what geography is, the politics of knowledge production, and who is included and excluded in the discipline’s history. In another example (S12), in the first week, students reflect on the history of the discipline by reading Craggs and Neate’s (2020) recent article on diversifying and relocating the histories of geography. Although the authors of this article are White and based in the United Kingdom, the article questions the histories we tell about geography and advocates for a relocation of knowledge production—in this case to Nigeria—to illuminate exclusions and alternative histories of geography. Although this move is welcome, we can also see how this example runs into broader structural issues shaping the field: the inclusion of a White, British account rather than the work of a Nigerian geographer points to the ongoing racial and colonial dynamics shaping geography and knowledge production. In another example (S29), one instructor incorporates Hawthorne’s (2019) article “Black Matters Are Spatial Matters” in the first unit on historical geography, placing Black geographies firmly within the geographic tradition. This was notable given that Black geographies are largely missing from these courses and when they do appear, they appear in marginal ways. By incorporating articles that question or relocate the foundations of the discipline into the start of the courses, these interventions begin to destabilize dominant narratives and recognize the other locations and voices that speak to geography’s history and present. Although these interventions do work to query geography’s exclusions, they are often limited due to the discipline’s racial and colonial dynamics.

The third strategy for dislodging dominant histories was to incorporate nondominant reference points—those from outside of White, male, European perspectives throughout the syllabus. We found that there exists a wide spectrum of engagement with readings on race, gender, and colonialism across the syllabi we analyzed. Whereas some instructors do not seem to engage these issues at all, others are much more effective at incorporating feminist, antiracist, postcolonial, or Indigenous perspectives throughout the syllabus in recognition that these bodies of thought are essential to our understandings of geography. Instead of partitioning these approaches to discrete weeks, readings that center historically excluded perspectives are positioned as integral to the entire course. For example, one instructor intentionally incorporates discussions of race, gender, and (post)colonialism throughout their syllabus (personal communication [S11]); here, students encounter feminist perspectives in units on geopolitics and GIScience in addition to a stand-alone unit on feminist geographies. In doing so, this instructor challenges dominant notions in which discussions of race, gender, and postcolonialism are viewed as “particular,” and the rest of the syllabus—which remains unmarked as Anglo-American/European, White, and male—operates as universal. This signals that issues of race, gender, and (post)colonialism are foundational to all aspects of geographic thought and history.

There exists a tension, then, in how to incorporate readings on these themes. On one hand, we are critical of the partitioning of issues of race, gender, postcolonialism, and other forms of “difference” in a single week (and often a combined one). Yet we also recognize the value in having stand-alone weeks on feminist, Black, Indigenous, and post- and decolonial geographies. Having units that deal explicitly with these topics signals their value to our discipline’s intellectual tradition. Thus it is not necessarily a bad thing to have stand-alone weeks on these themes. The problem arises when all discussions of gender, race, and colonialism are contained in these weeks and are not integrated throughout the course, as though discussions of gender, race, and colonialism are solely the purview of some geographers and not others.

As this analysis demonstrates, we must remain attentive not only to what is in syllabi, but also to how course content is framed. There are small ways we can begin to shift disciplinary narratives—by making explicit the politics of historiography, actively querying geography’s exclusions, and incorporating nondominant reference points—while being aware of the limitations and pitfalls of these strategies. Too often, forms of inclusion fail to shift the foundations of our discipline. Accordingly, we need to think carefully about how we include critical perspectives in the stories we tell about geography and how what might seem like inclusion might actually function as a subtle form of exclusion and marginalization. Ultimately, there might be no way to produce a truly inclusive and unproblematic retelling of Anglo-American geography, but we can at least incorporate materials and course discussions that ensure students critically reflect on the origins, politics, and limitations of Anglo-American geography and begin to imagine other geographies.

Conclusion: Reimagining the History of Geography and Its Possible Futures

There is much to be done to revise how we teach the history of geography in the United States. Although some syllabi offered a more self-aware and critical take on this history, more critical and reflexive analysis of the racialized, colonial, and gendered production of geographic knowledge, institutions, and practices is necessary. It might prove impossible to truly decolonize geography (Laing 2021, 14), but we can work to challenge the ways our teaching reproduces geography’s exclusions. As Tuck and Yang (2012) argued, decolonization is about the return of land; syllabi cannot be decolonized, but they can be designed to disrupt settler colonial perspectives. Seemingly minor and incremental changes to syllabi are, of course, insufficient to address the colonialism, White supremacy, and other oppressive projects that shape our discipline. Nevertheless, we advocate for an attention to syllabi as one site of disciplinary reproduction where these ongoing legacies can be disrupted.

Our analysis provides some concrete starting points for making our syllabi more attentive to the problematic legacies of geography’s histories, legacies that continue to shape our discipline. We identified the ways that these problematic histories are erased, ignored, bolstered, and ultimately, reproduced, through acts of total exclusion, forms of temporal bracketing, structural marginalization, and performative gestures of inclusion. We also found small ways in which these legacies—and the historiographical practices that reproduce their effects—were momentarily disrupted. This occurred through explicit discussions of historiography and its politics, acts of querying the historical and ongoing exclusions of geography, and the meaningful incorporation of critical, nondominant, or minoritized perspectives throughout introductory courses. Although these tactics are imperfect, we argue that they can serve as starting point to open up and reimagine our disciplinary history and how it configures our disciplinary present.

Indeed, as a professional community, we need to collectively interrogate how the exclusions of our discipline are reinforced through teaching, professional training, research, and other professional practices in individual and collective ways. Commenting on the erasure of particular geographic knowledges, Cresswell (2012) remarked: “The relationship between the kinds of knowledge that pass for geographical theory … and the kinds of knowledge that do not, can be thought of as a process of exclusion that happens in an unplanned and accidental way” (264). This “accidental” and “unplanned” exclusion is a product of White privilege (among other forms of privilege) and White supremacy and cannot be dissociated from larger structural forces shaping the production and valuing of geographic knowledge. Making connections between these structural factors and our individual agency as instructors is key to challenging these exclusions.

If maintaining the silenced and erased histories of geography is an “unintentional” but nonetheless reproduced instinct, we should consider intentionally centering such histories in our teaching and scholarship. We saw how a few instructors brought this to the fore by posing questions about the politics of knowledge production, historical narrative, and disciplinary identity. Yet these approaches were rare. Incorporating these kinds of questions and issues into the stated purposes of our courses can bring attention to the importance of a critical engagement with geography’s history and historiography while challenging instructors to find ways to accomplish this purpose in course materials and teaching practices. What if a stated goal of introduction to geography courses were to expose students to the social and political contexts in which geographic knowledge is produced and struggled over, or, to borrow from one instructor’s class exercise, “develop a reflexive awareness of ‘problems of the history of geography primarily being a story of and by elite, white, Anglo-European males’” (S18)? These framing devices produce an opening in which students can begin to situate, reflect on, and critically engage the histories being taught.

Including a diversity of voices is a first step, but we must be careful about the terms in which these voices are included. Following Roy (2020, 20), we must avoid “citational alibis,” the tokenistic and appropriative forms of citation that bolster, rather than disrupt, dominant narratives. We must resist the incorporation of marginalized perspectives into a progress narrative of the discipline that continues to be marked by its gendered and racialized exclusions. Simply adding in readings, be they optional or required, that contend with issues of gender, race, and other “hidden histories” of geography will not go far if the overall narrative does not budge. In other words, it is not enough to add in diverse voices if instructors do not challenge and reorient the story being told. Citation practices must be approached critically as a feminist and antiracist practice (Mott and Cockayne 2017, 956).

Transforming the way we narrate and embody geography’s history is no simple task. As we have noted, disrupting dominant retellings of Anglo-American geography will necessarily run up against structural barriers. Monolingualism and issues of translation limit the ability to center texts outside of dominant Anglo-American reference points in U.S. courses. These issues themselves are an afterlife of colonialism. Furthermore, the diversification of course materials can only go so far if instructors are not willing to facilitate or are not capable of facilitating potentially fraught conversations about colonialism, racism, and gender and how they shape geographic knowledges, institutions, and practices. Indeed, in the absence of capable facilitation, bringing up discussions of colonialism, racism, and sexism in graduate courses can lead to microaggressions and epistemological violence for students already marginalized by the terms of the conversation. Anti-oppressive geographic pedagogies (Fritzsche 2022), including antiracist pedagogies (Jackson 1989; Alderman et al. 2020) and decolonial pedagogies (Daigle and Sundberg 2017; Stanek 2019; Laing 2021) are thus key practices that must accompany changes to our syllabi.

Diversifying syllabi and hosting critical conversations about the history of geography is an important first step, but we must reach further if we are to meaningfully challenge the ways that our discipline perpetuates sexism, colonialism, racism, and White supremacy. Anglo-American geography’s White supremacy is the culmination of its colonial impetus, racist institutions, demographic composition, and continued centering of White histories, epistemologies, and cultures. As Jackson (1989) described, antiracist teaching in geography must “be connected to a wider political agenda” (10). Laing (2021) and Stanek (2019) made similar arguments about the project of decolonization; diversifying reading lists is not enough and, in isolation, can actually perpetuate colonial epistemological and institutional structures. Although we can incorporate more critical and diverse viewpoints into our syllabi, we must also work to transform the institutions, traditions, and knowledges we have collectively inherited so that teaching more inclusive histories of geography does not itself become a move to innocence within an otherwise exclusionary discipline. This is to say that changing the way we teach and train graduate students in the history of geography will have to happen alongside changing the realities of our discipline. We cannot faithfully tell inclusive stories of our discipline until we stop perpetuating coloniality, militarism, sexism, racism, classism, cisheteronormativity, and other forms of oppression in our institutions, knowledges, and professional practices.

Although the complexity of this task is daunting, we are encouraged by the ways that syllabi and critical pedagogies can foster a critical imagination, one that detects and listens to silences, questions tradition, and hungers for other stories. It is this critical imagination that encourages us to tell different stories and ask new questions of ourselves and our discipline. Fostering this critical imagination is crucial for building a more inclusive and just Anglo-American geography. Revising our syllabi might seem like a minor detail amid the accumulation of historical and ongoing forms of injustice in our discipline, but it could provide an opening, however small, for another geography to emerge.

With this spirit in mind, we hope this discussion provides some fodder for critical reflection on the way geographers understand and teach the history of geography. Rather than arriving on settled conclusions about what geography is or providing a blueprint for how it is to be taught, our analysis opens up an inquiry into the way we conceptualize and narrate our disciplinary identity and history to ourselves and others. We have aimed to offer both critical reflection and concrete strategies that can aid geographers in the task of reencountering, redescribing, and reenvisioning geography’s past, present, and possible futures.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. Jill Williams and Dr. Sara Cavallo for their feedback on and engagement with this project. We would also like to thank the instructors who shared their syllabi with us.

Additional information

Funding

We are grateful to have received a small grant from The School of Geography, Development, and Environment that supported this work.

Notes on contributors

Eden Kinkaid

EDEN KINKAID is a PhD Candidate in Geography in the School of Geography, Development, and Environment, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85719. E-mail: [email protected]. Their research interests include food, culture, and development; geographic theory; feminist and queer geography; and creative geography.

Lauren Fritzsche

LAUREN FRITZSCHE is a PhD Candidate in the School of Geography, Development, and Environment, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85719. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include refugee resettlement in the United States, race and racialization, belonging and inclusion and exclusion, and geographic education.

Notes

1 These courses are more of a feature in U.S. departments; in the United Kingdom, this course usually occurs at the undergraduate level (Powell 2012, 339).

2 This analysis would be deepened through comparative work examining how the history of geography is narrated in other traditions to understand how these contexts shape the exclusions and politics of the discipline.

3 We also recognize that these are not the only logics shaping Anglo-American geography; class and sexuality, for example, also shape the production of geographic knowledge.

4 Data for Indigenous faculty were not provided in this analysis. According to a 2018 AAG report, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders comprise less than 1 percent of faculty in U.S. geography departments (AAG Geography and Military Study Committee 2018).

5 Two of the institutions we sampled organize their required introductory courses in a series of two courses that are meant to build off of each other. For these institutions, we analyzed the syllabi for both of these courses. In four instances, we gathered syllabi from the same institution, as the course had changed as it was taught in a different year and by a different instructor.

6 The AAG tally includes PhDs in interdisciplinary programs that are administered by geography departments and PhDs in a field other than geography that include a concentration in geography. We excluded these programs because they were not centrally concerned with geography as a discipline

7 Syllabi posted online were treated as part of the public domain in accordance with the recommendations of the institutional review board.

8 Twenty-two syllabi (69 percent) included work on feminism, gender, or both, either in stand-alone weeks in feminist geographies (ten syllabi) or weeks that combined feminist geographies and issues of gender with other topics (twelve syllabi). Eleven syllabi (34 percent) contained weeks either dealing with issues of race and racism independently (seven syllabi) or in combination with other themes (e.g., gender, postcolonial perspectives, “difference”; four syllabi). Only four syllabi (13 percent) contained modules with themes of colonialism and empire, and three others (9 percent) contained a module including more critical postcolonial perspectives.

9 Geography textbooks and reference works were often included in syllabi, most commonly Cresswell’s Geographic Thought (twelve syllabi) and Livingstone’s The Geographical Tradition (four syllabi), among several others.