Introduction: Professional geography and the corporatization of the university: Experiences, evaluations, and engagements

Authors

Noel Castree, University of WollongongFollow
Matthew Sparke, University of Washington

RIS ID

109288

Publication Details

Castree, N. & Sparke, M. (2000). Introduction: Professional geography and the corporatization of the university: Experiences, evaluations, and engagements. Antipode: a radical journal of geography, 32 (3), 222-229.

Abstract

While the recent "cultural turn" in geography has sometimes led to a neglect of political economy, the capitalist economy in all its creative and destructive dynamism has not neglected professional geographers. Instead, as both producers and consumers of academic knowledge and as teachers, students, researchers, and readers, we have been witness to, or at very least blind participants in, a sweeping set of economically driven changes steadily transforming academic institutions around the world from the 1980s onwards. In the last decade we busily debated how postmodernism might relate to both postFordist economic reorganization and postfoundationalist thinking, moved on to address situated knowledges and the politics of location, and have become fascinated more recently with bodies and their diverse cultural geographies. However, we have tended not to address as directly as we might the ways in which our own bodies as academics situated in universities are being fed, counted, and variously decorated, maintained, and exhausted in institutions altered at the very foundation by the same flexible accumulation dynamics that earlier excited such analytical enthusiasm.