The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

This session was streamed but not recorded

Curated Track: Economic Geography Specialty Group Highlights and Crisis, Inequality, and Left-Behind Places, Economic Geography Specialty Group Highlights and Feminist and Digital Economic Geographies

Description:

Sponsored by EPA: Economy & Space, this panel will feature contributions from editorial members on the opportunities for constructive methodological innovation in economic geography, a field that has long made a virtue of its pluralism, experimentation, and creativity, but which has tended to devote rather less attention to methodological talk, transparency, reflection, and reflexivity.

The session will include an open invitation for contributions to the Exchanges section of the journal that address these themes, with an emphasis on “positive” proposals that move conversations forward. There is less interest in judgmental assessments of the state of things, in contributions that advance favored approaches in opposition to others, or that otherwise diminish alternatives. As a heterodox field, perhaps even a heterodox “project,” economic geography ought to value not only heterogeneity and pluralism itself, but the ongoing cultivation of cultures of effective communication and dialogue across difference, not least in terms of methodology and modes of explanation. Rather than relitigating old debates, or resuscitating arguments to the effect that one methodology is inherently superior to another, which too often perpetuate negative stereotypes about paths not taken, the journal instead invites constructive contributions, made support of a chosen approach, that are justified in their own terms. Some of the questions that might be addressed include: What particular problems and problematizations can be said to reside in economic geography’s wheelhouse, and what methodological strategies and modes of explanation is the field coming up with in response? Is it the case that economic geographers are methodological magpies, mixing, matching and “borrowing,” or can their methodological principles and practices be considered to be somehow distinctive, creative or innovative? What could economic geographers be doing differently, or better even, to propagate more generative cultures of methodological rigor, responsible practice, and constructive critique? What are the expectations (or “standards”) of methodological transparency and openness in the field? What methodological issues, challenges, problems, and opportunities warrant more sustained attention in economic geography’s ongoing renewal?

Non-Presenting Participants