In, out and unspeakably about: taking social geography beyond an Anglo-American positionality

There appears to be something of an anxiety-producing impasse in British social geography with repeated calls to examine its positionality. Simultaneously, British, indeed Anglo-American, social geography appears to be enjoying something of a renaissance in the new millennium. I argue that such a paradoxical situation owes its existence to the hegemonic narrative of Anglo-American social geography. Starting with an overview of the development of constructions of the social in British social geography, I explore the extent to which such recurring identity crises are opening up avenues for change. Turning to the place of Anglo-American social geography in the international field, I examine the specificity of the institutional and linguistic positioning of British social geography claiming that change will remain surficial until it develops ways of thinking that do not deny the multivocal voices that have made it what it is. This denial constitutes social geography's ‘unspeakable’ and has two intertwining dimensions, an unwillingness to engage with its own whiteness and to move outside its own established repertoire to encompass non-western knowledges. Speculating about the redirection of Anglo-American social geography, I make a claim for a social geography that is constantly reinventing itself in ways that desire difference.