Form, genre, voice, and authority in human geography: A speculative genealogy

Abstract

This speculative genealogy of trends in the written forms of geographical scholarship, 2020–2043, explores the dramatic transformations in the discipline that came with a ‘neo-formalist’ turn towards critical reflection on and experiment with the formal aspects of geographical writing, including structure, genre, voice, and style. At the start of the 2020s, the forms, genres, and styles of academic geographical writing in Anglophone research journals were still rather homogeneous in form. Experiments with form were mostly restricted to sub-disciplinary silos. Following a series of important scholarly interventions, the discipline started to reflect more earnestly on the different kinds of authority that are claimed through the use of particular written forms and authorial personas. Whereas in the early decades of the 21st century, authorial personas were mostly confident, self-assured, decisive, and expressing a ‘mastery’ of concepts, the turn towards greater critical analysis of geography's written forms led to a proliferation of authorial personas, often rejecting personas associated with ‘mastery’ and instead exploring hesitation, anxiety, indecision, passivity, improvisation, unreliability, plurality, failure, humour, and self-deprecation, as ways of claiming different, more egalitarian forms of epistemic authority. This genealogy concludes that despite the problem of eclecticism, this turn towards greater methodological reflection on geography's written forms has greatly enriched the discipline from the mid-2020s until today.