Conference Agenda

From the early 1960s, the Netherlands had a growing societal and policy field focusing on development cooperation. Around this time, we can also signal a shift in Dutch geography academia. In the context of (expected) decolonisation, a transformed geographical specialisation emerged. It was named Human Geography of Developing Countries, or in short, development geography. When geographers in the Netherlands started development geography in the late 1960s, they did not yet have a clear synthesis of what distinguished this newfound specialisation as a geographical one theoretically. Jozef Hanrath was the first professor obtaining a chair on the so-called ‘geography of non-Western countries’ in 1965. Strongly emphasising geography’s practical aspects in his inaugural speech, he underlined geographers’ societal relevance in an era of increasing attention to development cooperation. The theoretical ‘how’ of this was yet unclear amongst involved geographers. It seems that Harnath’s inaugural lecture preluded an era of figuring out how to formulate a geographical synthesis. By the end of the 1970s, the four universities in the Netherlands that did development geography shared a geographical perspective on what researching ‘development’ meant. This perspective necessitated a warning against grand theory and plead for a nuanced middle-ground and multi-perspectivity. This raises the question of how the process towards a geographical synthesis unfolded in this decade. What did geographical thinking on ‘development’ come to mean and where did this thinking originate from? What were the changes and continuities in geographical thinking? Who voiced what and for whom? How was academic thinking affected by development practice and policy and vice versa? Using a mobilities of knowledge approach, this paper aims to research the travel and settling of ideas in the science-policy and science-society interfaces of the late 1960s and in the 1970s. It promises insights into how human geographers worked on theory formation, how this related to societal and political landscapes, and what roles theorists from abroad and students played in spreading ideas. Using archival research methods and oral history methods, it takes historical approach on how thinking about ‘development’ in Dutch geography became what it is today.

Given the unpredictable and destructive nature of droughts and floods, especially in farming-dependent countries, the importance of effective risk mitigation strategies cannot be understated. As a part of the transboundary research project “Exploring the paths to cope with hydro-climatic risks in transboundary rural areas along the Prut Valley. A multi-criteria analysis”, this article aims to explore the impacts of opposite hydrological hazard (i.e., droughts and floods) events 1920–1939 in the Prut River Valley (at the border of Romania and the Republic of Moldova), highlighting responses to these water crises. The methodological approach relies on newspaper reports as data sources, as these include details on the mitigation measures implemented by local authorities. The digital archive of newspapers Arcanum (Romania), which include newspapers from the last century, such as “Agriculture of Moldova,” “Basarabia Agriculture” and “Buletinul Agricol” (in the Republic of Moldova), was investigated and the information about hydrological hazards was extracted and aggregated into a database containing more than 200 entries. Each hazard event is documented in terms of date, location, impact, mitigation actions, and data source. A comparison with the available scientific literature was performed in order to validate the database entries. Additionally, GIS tools allowed us to spatialize all the extracted events and the cartographic outputs emphasize spatial clusters of water stress from opposite hydrological hazards in the study area. This study demonstrates the potential that analysis of historical sources holds when it comes to enhancing the understanding of current hydrological risk mitigation.

Born within seven months of each other, the two Edwards, Ackerman (1911-1973) and Ullman (1912-1976), were often reckoned the smartest, most capable American geographers of their cohort. Their conception of geography, their projects, their successes and disappointments, shed critical light on the development of US geography during the key transition to a post-War American 'high-modern' society. Drawing on sizable archival holdings, particularly the life-time correspondence between the two men, the purpose of the paper is to use the lives of Ackerman and Ullman to exemplify and to understand the mid-century professionalization of American geography. Their lives, and the geographical discipline to which they contributed, were drawn into an expanded interventionist modernist US state that valued scientific expertise, instrumental reason, problem solving, collective inquiry, and credentialism. These were tasks to which the two Edwards initially devoted themselves. The results were in the end mixed, but they set the stage for the quantitative revolution and later various anxieties within American geography that continued for the rest of the century. The paper will review the life of the two Edwards in conjunction with developments in American geography and society from the mid-1930s when they were students. It becomes clear that they were exponents of the drive to professionalize and modernize the antiquated discipline of American geography. The lives of the two Edwards were thus profoundly inscribed within the history of the 20th century US geography and its transformations. The personal was professional.

As part of a wider petition calling for anglophone geographers to rally more resolutely behind a dedicated normative project, in this article I make the case for dusting down and giving new life to Richard L. Morrill’s presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in Denver in 1983 and titled ‘The responsibility of Geography’. Notwithstanding endlessly proselytizing same, anglophone geographers lack a common understanding of to what it means to prosecute a responsible geography. Indeed, haunted by past misdeeds, they have come see virtue in historicising, provincializing and pluralising the practice of taking responsibility and to commend responsibilising geography from multiple heartlands and indeed multiple peripheries. Whilst meritorious such polyvocality also comes with jeopardy for a small discipline with limited resources and no collectively agreed public mission cannot impact and influence this world. Drawing upon Antionio Gramsci and Nancy Frasers idea of ‘interregnum’, I argue that engulfed in a twenty first century polycrisis, it is incumbent upon anglophone geographers to swarm more purposively around a shared statement of social purpose and agenda for social transformation. My contention is that fashioned as it was during the early days of an interregnum, Richard L Morrill’s science based radical social democratic manifesto for a responsible geography