Researching hybrid ‘economic’/‘development’ geographies in practice

In an increasingly globalized world, the long-standing intellectual division of labour between ‘economic’ geographers and ‘development’ scholars is becoming less tenable. This paper explores some of the practical implications and synergistic outcomes of developing a hybrid economic/development geography ‘trading zone’. Drawing on experiences from our collaborative research on India’s new service economy, we reflect on: our intellectual journey through this project from relatively conventional subdisciplinary start points; how we were forced to rethink those start points at each stage of the research project; and the wider implications of these experiences for contemporary debates on internal interdisciplinarity within human geography.