Coming from the outside in: on reading David Seamon on 50 years of humanistic geography

This response to David Seamon’s ‘Celebrating Humanistic Geography’ provides a brief account of my own entry into the field, at the same time as it also explores several key issues concerning the concepts of place and space as they figure in contemporary geographic thought. Picking up on Seamon’s references to my own work as well as that of Ed Casey, I explain how the sort of philosophically framed approach to place that Casey and I have each developed converges with and diverges from ideas present in humanistic geography as well as in contemporary geography more broadly. Central to my discussion is the idea of place as a fundamental concept that is prior even to space and time, and this leads on to consideration of the way such an idea operates against the subjectivist tendency that remains commonplace across much of geographic thinking at the same time as it also suggests the need for a more genuinely reflective turn within geography back towards geography’s own place.