Enhancing Geography's Role in Public Debate

Even though many geographers work on topics of great societal import, geography is largely missing from wider debates on political and social matters. This state of affairs reflects the historical marginalization of the discipline and the paucity of visible studies linking geographical scholarship to the major concerns of the day. Addressing this situation presents fundamental challenges for the community of geographers—ones that go far beyond efforts simply to promote geography as a discipline. Geographers need to grapple more frequently with larger-scale questions, foster more in-depth understanding of different parts of the world, enhance interactions between discrete parts of the discipline, and make explicit the implications of geographical work for the discussions that are shaping public and intellectual agendas. None of this means that geography should allow its agenda to be set by others or that research without explicit social or policy relevance should be abandoned. If the virtual absence of geographical perspectives in public debate goes unchallenged, however, academic geography will not be the only casualty. Efforts to comprehend the nature and changing character of the world in which we live will be fundamentally impoverished.