Thoughts on Geographic Imaginaries for the 21st Century

Abstract

Introduction: My thoughts are informed by my five years as Dean for Arts and Humanities at Harvard University, where I have been able to observe the intellectual configurations that have emerged and taken shape in response to the ways in which the world is being reimagined and represented in the first decade of this century. By tracing how the categories of space, materiality and movement are being thought about, I want to understand the institutional and intellectual transformations that are taking place in the humanities and the interpretive social sciences. One of my goals is to reduce the distance that tends to separate the institutional, administrative world from the strictly intellectual one, and to further their coexistence under the larger academic umbrella which shelters both.