MOSPUS seminar: The Revolutionary, the Geographer and the Spy

In The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon (1961) argued that decolonisation 'cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content’. Yet, for the Australian philosopher, John Passmore, the 'persistent occupational disease' of the theorist was 'to exaggerate his own originality' and 'conceal the origins of their thought.’ Between the reclamation and concealment of knowledge, is the field in which intellectual history plays out. Every discipline is founded on some form of a scholastic canon, but how that history is told can vary in considerable depth and quality.
In my talk, I will discuss this challenge with regard to the problematic institutionalisation of spatial thought in the social sciences in the wake of the Second World War. My contention is that whereas nearly every domain of spatial theory has become more dynamic, culturally-attentive and complex in its articulation, when it comes to our own historical awareness of this theoretical tradition, we encounter a body of work too often accepting of outdated, simplistic and fragmented frameworks that would rarely be tolerated in any other context.
Drawing on an ongoing project on the transatlantic history of radical geography, I will tell three stories (the revolutionary, the geographer, and the spy) to explain why spatial theorists struggle with the spectre of their own intellectual history, and some persistent methodological problems that hinder its restitution. The overarching purpose of these examples is to underscore the need to think reflexively about how we spatialise intellectual history and historicise spatial thought, not as a transactional purpose, but an ethical choice in the care of and care for knowledge.

William Kutz is a geographer affiliated with the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences at Lund University. He is the founder and coordinator of the Comparative Borderlands Research Group at the Centre for Modern European Studies, a network linking Lund University to the University of Copenhagen and Malmö University. Among his recent projects, he coordinated the preservation of Torsten Hägerstrand's archive and the creation of a digital collection on The International Dialogue Project at Lund University Library

Registration
All welcome, no need to register. For more information, please write to dpinder@ruc.dk 

The seminar is organised by MOSPUS, a research group in the Department of People and Technology that focuses on Space, Place, Mobility and Urban Studies.