by Felicity Callard

Human geography – a discipline in the hinterland of the human sciences – is a discipline preoccupied with praxis. Analyses of the relationship between what the geographer writes, what the geographer says, and what the geographer does have animated many of the discipline’s vigorous epistemological and political battles. It is unsurprising, then, that the University & College Union (UCU) strike over Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) pensions has brought questions of praxis into fraught focus. Indeed, in Marxist and other radical geographies – whose histories are generally traced back to the 1960s  – the strike has been a privileged site of analytical and activist attention. But tensions today have not been solely about which geographers are – and are not – on the picket lines. Broader issues over where the discipline of geography is made, and who comes to represent that discipline are at stake. On the picket lines and on social media, geography’s present and past – both in material and fantasmatic form – are being worked up and worked through

On the first day of the strike, the Vice Chancellor (VC) of the University of Sussex, Adam Tickell, issued a statement that made it clear that he did not believe that there was an ‘affordable proposal’ for pensions that would satisfy both USS and the Pensions Regulator. As the hours passed, Tickell appeared uncompromising in the face of calls for him to join other VCs who had called for a return to negotiations. An interview with him conducted shortly before the strikes was re-circulated – where he was quoted as saying ‘The younger me may have taken part in the strikes, I don’t know about the current me.’

So far, perhaps so predictable. But Tickell’s words about strike participation could not but carry particular weight given that they had been uttered not only by an economic geographer, but one of the most prominent theorists of neo-liberalism. Indeed, Tickell, in the 1990s and 2000s, had published – often in articles co-authored with Jamie Peck – what became some of the most widely read, and remain some of the most widely taught, economic-geographical anatomizations of post-Fordism, neoliberalism, and global finance. (You can see a list of Tickell’s publications here.) On day 2 of the strike, I addressed Adam Tickell on Twitter lamenting how ‘my younger (geography undergrad & grad) self would not have wanted to imagine that I would be reading your work, years on, to help in the fight against what you are now upholding.’ (These perturbances are as much about disciplinary memory as well as about a discipline’s moral rectitude.) As the days of the strike passed, anger against the position adopted by Tickell amongst geographers grew, to the point where the lustre of the esteemed author was at risk of being  tarnished by the apparent intransigence of the university head. By day 4 of the strike, an anonymous parody Twitter account for Adam Tickle. VC. was up and running; it was tweeting about the strike and about the disparity between the alleged ‘early’ and ‘late’ Tickell.

Many human sciences have wrestled with how best to bring into focus the object that demands analysis (in this case, the current crisis within universities manifest through the USS strike) – debating which frameworks best allow us to understand that object, as well as the role of those variously positioned in relation to that object. In this sense, Tickell has become a useful figure. Through him, many more general issues – that are not actually about one, or even several individuals, and that relate to the production of academic knowledge and the organization of today’s universities – can be debated and contested.  Here those debates centre on the extent to which one university manager’s earlier publications on neoliberalism could and should be used to understand the current crisis in toto, as well as on the extent to which the existence of those same writings should give added weight to the moral opprobrium directed to that same manager’s current stance. There are two separate issues, here. One might, with Barnett, think that neoliberalism ‘was and is a crap concept.’ In this case, one might argue that Tickell’s earlier writings – and his formulation of concepts therein – don’t much help us in understanding, let alone combating, what is unfolding in universities today. Our energies would be better used if they sourced better writings from the archives and activism of geography – as well as from other social sciences and social movements. But that does not imply that the disruption provoked by the inferred disparity between ‘early’ and ‘late’ Tickell is misplaced. If the former concern is largely epistemological, the latter is as much ethico-political as epistemological.

Here we have a scene in which the history of geography, and the politics of that history, is undergoing disturbance. (The Adam Tickle Twitter parody account explicitly reworks the discipline’s historiography through its satiric phrase ‘formerly an economic geographer of note’.)  And below the contretemps over Tickell, something else pulses in the discipline’s corpus – something I do not think has been worked through. That is geography’s collective relationship to the long, and continuing, career of Nigel Thrift. Thrift is another prominent geographer and social theorist who was a highly visible and, in the words of student-facing website The Tab, ‘divisive’  VC at the University of Warwick. In the course of his tenure there, the institution – as Times Higher Education put it– ‘experienced a number of controversies.’ In relation to Thrift, there is obvious scope to reflect on the relationship between his earlier work on left politics and his later  career as a university manager. And there have been, online, some serious, critical reflections on this. But in the standard outlets for academic production, such as journals, there has been – as far as I know – very little substantive discussion. This is a noticeable – and meaning-ful – lacuna.

But I want to return to the affective and political disturbance generated by the stance taken by Adam Tickell. And to one reason why the apparent disparity between the so-called ‘early’ and ‘late’ Tickell seems to have been experienced by many – including me – as peculiarly wounding. To my mind, we should not uniformly expect or demand thinkers and writers to be free of contradiction. I recall, here, the opening of the obituary of one of geography’s most prominent radical theorists and activists, Neil Smith, which drew on words spoken by the radical geographer David Harvey (also Smith’s doctoral supervisor as well as colleague at CUNY) at Smith’s memorial service: ‘Neil Smith was the perfect practicing Marxist – completely defined by his contradictions’. (Such inconsistencies did not sway Smith’s steadfast commitment to radical politics.)

Contradiction in and of itself is not the problem. Then what is? Let’s look at how the passing of time is staged. Tickell said that while his ‘younger me’ may have taken part in the strikes, he was not sure about his older, contemporary self. Such a sentence resonates with a powerful discourse in which left politics is positioned as a childish practice, one that might well need to be given up as adulthood ensues. (Recall Saint Paul’s exhortation to ‘put away childish things.’) And this is not unconnected with the rhetorical campaign that Universities UK has been waging in an attempt to persuade others of the pragmatism, reasonableness and maturity of their assessment that there is no clear option around pensions other than the one they have proposed.

That the discipline of geography has produced a number of today’s UK Vice Chancellors (including Paul Boyle at the University of Leicester, Paul Curran at City University of London and Judith Petts at Plymouth University) – as well as the current UK Conservative Prime Minister – makes it urgent for many of us on the picket lines to demonstrate that geography as a discipline and as a political project is not exclusively held by or in those figures. The figure who might regard strikes as childish things needs to be substituted; another articulation of the social world, and of the geographer’s role in making it, needs to take their place. Hence geographers from UCL carrying a placard during the strikes announcing that ‘Not all geographers are neo-liberal vice-chancellors.’ Or the social and economic geographer, Alison Stenning, using the hashtag #notallgeographers, tweeting that, in spite of some ‘ignominious attention [that] certain geographers are getting’ geographers had nonetheless ‘been pretty impressive on the picket lines & the Twitter frontline.’

But I want to conclude with the outlines of a psychosocial argument, one that dismantles the apparent disjunction between the early and the late – or the gap that appears, as one Twitter user put it, within ‘the radical academic turned hard-line conservative’. Beneath the concern that many of us geographers have for the stances taken by prominent individuals within the discipline, perhaps lies a deeper wound that has not substantially been acknowledged or worked through. And that is the possibility that the very criticality of much of what passed for ‘critical geography,’ in the 1990s and beyond, precisely constituted the register of the successful and upward-moving academic. That criticality was part and parcel of adhering to and advancing a certain kind of theoretically-smart ‘knowledge’ that was required as evidence that would help one advance – even to the level of VC – within a professionalized space. Being critical in a particular way in the 1990s was, indeed, one of the pathways to advancement. And many of those ‘critical’ publications were at the heart of, rather than in conflict with, the current remaking of the university.

Rather than the adult putting away childish things, or the late eclipsing the early, what if the child made the adult? What if the early led to – was continuous with – the late, rather than being disavowed by it? If this were the case, then it would put many of us – and I include myself explicitly, here – in an uncomfortable position. For let us acknowledge the affective payoff that can accompany lamenting the eclipse of the early by the late: in addition to anger, it is possible to feel secure in one’s conviction that one has now cast out the late as the politically compromised. The radical credentials of a good geography are safe. By contrast, a situation in which there is no easy division between the early and late, the putatively radical and the compromised, is much more affectively and politically tricky to navigate. And this leads to some difficult questions that I have pondering over – on and off the pickets – these last few days

First, how do those of us inside as well as outside geography tell the history of critical geography in and beyond the 1990s? This is certainly important epistemologically – it’s part of the history of the human sciences that deserves greater attention than it has currently received. But it’s also central to how we understand what has been happening to the university. And this should help us think through how we might best use the strike in which we are currently involved to challenge what we see as most pernicious about these recent transformations.

Second, where and how is geography made? Where does it do its work? While there has been some interest in the apparent abundance of geographers who have become VCs, I don’t think we (those of us in and near geography and the history of the human sciences) have remotely got to grips with how to account for this. If there is that abundance in comparison with other disciplines, how does that reroute our accounts of where and how geography as an epistemological formation wields power? The tight relationship between PPE (the University of Oxford’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics) and the UK’s twentieth-century elite is a topic of frequent discussion. Beyond Neil Smith’s account of Isaiah Bowman, where are the historically and sociologically astute analyses of hard and soft geographical power?

Third, how do we widen the circles for forms of critical praxis that are not beholden to discourse and practices of promotion and managerial success in academia? What does that mean for those of us making geographies on and off the picket lines today? The interventions of black studies and anti-colonial studies, in particular, provide numerous routes through which to envisage – and put into practice – the reshaping of geography and of the university.

And there is one final note in relation to my previous point. It would be too easy to construe the historical tale of geography’s travails as a white boys’ story. Many of the protagonists in this post – those who have wielded power, and those configured as radicals who have contested it – do indeed fall within this category. But there are also many, ongoing attempts on the picket lines and on social media to disrupt that historical account, and to disrupt the future paths that geography and the university might take. As I finish this post, the geographer Gail Davies, for example, is unearthing the complex role that management consultants have played in the USS valuation and in the discursive shift that university senior managements have made towards ‘flexible pensions’. There is perhaps more work to be done along these lines before we can, indeed, comfort ourselves with the thought: #notallgeographers

I am profoundly indebted to Stan (Constantina) Papoulias in the writing of this blog post. They clarified for me much of what was most interesting in the figuring of the early and the late – in particular in relation to how a certain kind of criticality went hand in glove with the late twentieth-century transformations of the academy. Our discussions have taken place as we both take strike action in our respective universities.

Felicity Callard is Professor of Social Research in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, Director of the Birkbeck Institute of Social Research and Editor-in Chief of History of the Human Sciences.

This article represents the views of the author only, and is not written on behalf of History of The Human Sciences, its editors, or editorial board.