Geography as an academic discipline is called upon to help make sense of multiple political, social, and ecological crises. At the same time, it is increasingly coming under attack by actors seeking to delegitimize and police knowledge production in geography and adjacent disciplines. Attempts to delegitimize and police geography stem from within and beyond academia and on and off campus and cut across the political spectrum. In this theme issue, we find contributions that critically engage with the delegitimizing and policing of geography under the guise of critiquing perspectives, theories, and fields that many geographers adopt in their work, such as postcolonial, settler-colonial, and decolonial studies; gender and race studies; racial capitalism and critical race theory; political ecology; and critical physical geography.

The current anti-scientific climate in society has a longer history and can be placed in the wider context of cultural politics of gender and diversity, memory and identity, and history and science (denialism). The more recent rise of right-wing, authoritarian, and diagonalist political movements (Klein, 2023; Amlinger and Nachtwey, 2022; Callison and Slobodian, 2021; Daggett, 2018) coupled with current geopolitical events, such as the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, has further led to a rapidly shrinking space for critical academic speech – in Europe, North America, and elsewhere. These attempts have led not only to personal attacks on geographers and geographic institutional spaces, but also to self-policing within the discipline.

With this theme issue we seek to contribute to much-needed debates on the impacts of the current anti-scientific climate on academia.

References

Amlinger, C. and Nachtwey, O.: Gekränkte Freiheit, Aspekte des libertären Autoritarismus, Suhrkamp, 2022.

Callison, W. and Slobodian, Q.: Coronapolitics from the Reichstag to the Capitol, Boston Review, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/quinn-slobodian-toxic-politics-coronakspeticism/ (last access: 12 September 2024), 2021.

Daggett, C.: Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire, Millennium-J. Int. St., 47, 25–44, 2018.

Klein, N.: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirrow World, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 9780374610326, 2023.