Rebuilding geography for the 21st century through disciplinary reunification and social engagement

In this article, we reflect on the institutional conditions of disciplinary Geography and geographical knowledge production. While valuing diversity and vitality, we argue that Geography is becoming a ‘broken bottle’ with an increasingly loose conceptual or analytical ‘core’. Today, our disciplinary identity hinges more on the first half of various sub-fields – economic, urban, cultural – leaving the geography hanging and open to interpretation. The trend has been exacerbated by the intensification of academic neoliberalism and impact factor-driven publishing, which further stretches what it means to be a geographer. We propose to re-centre the region and make it the heart of geographical research and teaching of the 21st century, in order to rethink how the geographical scholarly community may rebuild ‘trading zones’ and social engagement.