Reflecting on humanistic geography

This reflection on Davis Seamon's autoethnography of his seminal contributions to 50 years of humanistic geography provides an appreciation of the way his phenomenological perspective has helped shape the research and scholarship of both the authors and the field. But there are limitations of his approach. We propose augmenting this tradition through the lens of Deweyan pragmatism, centred on ongoing action to address the problematic of contingent, uncertain, and changing situations. This entails a different understanding of place, application informed by meliorism, and engaged social inquiry. We provide a case study illustration of this approach in Reimagining Home, an ongoing community-based programme of older adult housing-related initiatives in a North American city. We conclude that melioristically oriented pragmatism provides a useful direction for the progress and enrichment of humanistic geography over the next 50 years.