Critical geography

Critical geography is theoretically informed geographical scholarship that promotes social justice, liberation, and leftist politics. Critical geography is also used as an umbrella term for Marxist, feminist, postmodern, poststructural, queer, left-wing, and activist geography. Critical geography is one variant of critical social science and the humanities that adopts Marx’s thesis to interpret and change the world. Fay (1987) defines contemporary critical science as the effort to understand oppression in a society and use this understanding to promote societal change and liberation. Agger (1998) identifies a number of features of critical social theory practiced in fields like geography, which include: a rejection of positivism; an endorsement of the possibility of progress; a claim for the structural dynamics of domination; an argument that dominance is derived from forms of false consciousness, ideology, and myth; a faith in the agency of everyday change and self-transformation and an attendant rejection of determinism; and a rejection of revolutionary expediency. History of geography Critical geography in the Anglo-American world rooted in the radical geography that emerged in the early 1970s. Peet (2000) provides an overview of the evolution of radical and critical geography. In the early 1970s, radical geographers tried to transform the scope of the discipline of geography by responding to the great issues of the time: civil rights, environmental pollution, and war. The mid- to late-1970s saw ascending critiques of the quantitative revolution and the adoption of Marxist approach. The 1980s were marked by fissures between humanistic, feminist and Marxist streams, and a reversal of structural excess. In the late 1980s, critical geography emerged and gradually became a self-identified field. Although closely related, critical geography and radical geography are not interchangeable.