Introduction: Yi-Fu Tuan and the Expanding Cosmos of Human Geography

This GeoHumanities Forum explores the continuing relevance of works by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1930–2022). Beyond his obvious legacy establishing the subfield of humanistic geography and writing some of the most frequently cited works in the discipline of geography, Tuan’s ideas paved the way for disciplinary shifts of the past several decades, including concerns with ethics, affect, writing, imaginaries, embodiment, and animal geographies. To highlight some of those taken-for-granted contributions to our field, this forum includes contributions from a range of scholars across intersecting fields of geography and the humanities. Each considers a perspective, argument, or insight that draws upon Tuan while engaging with contemporary debates and concerns. Contributions focus on the following: how humanism responds to a form of ideological extremism that can be characterized as Neo-Gnosticism, the sort of escapism that motivates scholars to flee from everyday experience into theories and ideals, the ways in which optimism and pessimism intertwine with each other in writings of figures as disparate as Yi-Fu Tuan and Theodor Adorno, how attention to animal lives carries us into and beyond humanistic reference frames, and how life experiences (including those of Tuan) can be captured in the unaccustomed language of poetry, no less than in the more prosaic language of letters and scholarly publications.