Crossing Boundaries: New Geographical Frontiers
Crossing boundaries: new geographical frontiersMadeleine Hatfield (RGS-IBG) and Jonathan Rigg (Durham University, UK, andNational University of Singapore)IntroductionIn the brief statement that accompanied the announcement of the theme for the RoyalGeographical Society (with IBG) Annual Conference (RGS-IBG AC2013) we explained thescope of the conference, ‘New Geographical Frontiers’, in the following terms:“The conference theme in 2013 is ‘New geographical frontiers’. This is one of those labelsthat is fairly open and can, therefore, be interpreted in a variety of ways. The frontier canbe employed as a concept, a metaphor or as a point of empirical focus – and while it is aclassic geographical preoccupation that has rightly been problematised, it should stillcommand our attention. There is a set of underpinning questions which can be seen tocome, loosely, under the rubric of ‘new geographical frontiers’: Where are the frontiers ingeographical theory and methods and what contributions and innovations is geographymaking to wider debates and practices? Have we fully come to terms with the continuingcall to think and research in inter-disciplinary ways, and can geography play a leadingrole in that initiative? What is geography’s impact and how can we further promote therole and place of geography in society and economy? Where are we, collectively, makinga contribution but, equally importantly, where should we be making a contribution?These questions relate to three, over-lapping areas of debate. First of all, to how wetheorise (think) and practice (do) our geography. Occasionally gradual, incrementalchange can hide from view quite fundamental transformations in methodologicalapproach or conceptual framing. The second area of debate concerns geography’scontribution to addressing the challenges that humanity faces, from climate change tointernational development. And third, these questions highlight the possibility, perhaps theneed, to go beyond disciplinary boundaries and geographical frontiers to research newtopics in innovative ways.”This Virtual Issue of papers drawn from Area, The Geographical Journal and Transactions ofthe Institute of British Geographers provides a fuller – although inevitably also partial –context for the conference and the debates that we anticipate will emerge.The broad theme of the conference can be sub-divided in a number of different ways, andwe realise that the sub-themes that we have identified, and into which we have placed thepapers in this Virtual Issue, sometimes uncomfortably corral material and debates (Table 1).That said, we believe that it provides a useful scaffold for organising the empirical,methodological and theoretical concerns that the papers cover. This introduction sets out thelogic of our sub-divisions, summarises the coverage of the twelve papers included here, andthen makes the links to some of the panels at the conference.
Resource frontiersPerhaps the most obvious and familiar way in which geography has engaged with frontiers isthrough mapping and interpreting land and resource frontiers. Edward Barbier in “Scarcity,frontiers and development” suggests that while these may be familiar fields forgeographical enquiry they have been overlooked in recent work in economics and economichistory despite the modern “frontier thesis” linking land and economic development.Geographical research, Barbier suggests, can nuance understandings of a linear frontierprogression to expose the prevalence of the ‘dual frontier economy’ and promote moresustainable resource management in less developed economies.The classic “Great Frontier” economies may be less typical but even in the 21st century thereare new frontiers – and not just Star Trek’s final frontier. Sometimes these new frontierscome into being because of the way that technological advances permit their exploration andexploitation, often in order to develop scarce resources: tar sands, shale gas, the north-westpassage, deep sea oil, and the Arctic and Antarctic, for instance. In addition, new frontiersmay reflect the closure or degradation of existing stocks of land or resources. The projectedeffects of climate change on land productivity in both positive and negative senses will likelylead to a geographical re-shaping of livelihoods, and therefore the emergence of newfrontiers of degradation, settlement and exploitation – political limitations notwithstanding.Nor will this be limited to sources and places of environmental decline; the loss of a quarterof Detroit’s population over the last decade is indicative of how old and new industrialfrontiers intersect with sometimes profound geographical consequences.The spatial politics of (eco)colonisation are illustrated in Emma Norman’s paper “Who'scounting? Spatial politics, ecocolonisation and the politics of calculation in BoundaryBay”, a site which straddles the Canada-US border on the Pacific Coast of North America.This paper is a rich and detailed case study that provides a valuable counterpoint toBarbier’s broader brush approach. What Norman shows is the way that regimes of regulationat the national level fundamentally shape the frontiers – in both human andecological/environmental terms – that emerge. She concludes her paper by highlighting that,“the nation-state project of occupation continues to reify and entrench borders, rules andregulations that are often incongruent with historical and cultural practices of Indigenouscommunities”. Furthermore, border challenges are exacerbated, she says, by the fact that“the politics of calculation occur differently on either side of the international border”,suggesting as a result that we “need to [ ] offer a more nuanced interpretation of space thataccounts for both traditional boundaries and ecosystems” (p. 7). Her paper, then, reveals thesometimes uncomfortable relations that exist at the intersection of boundaries that may (ormay not) be congruent in spatial terms but are incongruent in terms of the means andmeanings of their delimitation.Cultural and political frontiersFrontiers in the traditional sense are not just places of human settlement, environmentalchange and economic exploitation. They sometimes become places where politics andculture, as Norman’s paper also shows, are thrown into high relief, dislocated as they arefrom the spatial mainstream. Here, the less-than-visible becomes visible. The two papers inthis section of the Virtual Issue provide such insights.In his paper “Humanism, race and the colonial frontier” Alan Lester proposes, throughan investigation of early 19th century colonial frontiers, an alternative interpretation of innatistdiscourses of race in which the frontier becomes a site of political contestation in the realmof ideas, as well as over land and livelihoods. Unlike Norman’s paper on the politics of thecontemporary frontier, Lester sees in these places of colonial settlement, in addition to a
violent struggle between settlers and indigenous groups, also a pernicious struggle betweensettlers’ racial determinist thought and that of non-settler Britons who were inspired by areligious humanist doctrine of universality. Lester contrasts his understanding of humanismwith contemporary ‘post-humanist’ research, which is critical of anthropocentrism. Instead,Lester suggests there is still value in humanism in order to understand human behaviours,such as racism.Elizabeth Olson’s “Gender and geopolitics in ‘secular time’” examines the connectionbetween gender and theorisations of emergent religious geopolitics. In contrast to Lester’spaper, Olson does not focus on change at the geographical frontier; she instead shows howreligious institutions – in this instance the Roman Catholic Church – “facilitate[s] theconstruction of boundaries and territories that transcend and cut through the politics of thestate”. Olson’s research in Latin America is therefore testament to the continuing multiplicityof frontiers influencing everyday life, including those of gender and religion in supposedly“secular” times.Frontiers, border crossings and enclosuresFrontiers in the papers reviewed so far are places of settlement and domination, whethereconomic or ideational. However, geographical research increasingly encourages us to stepoutside and beyond the notion that the frontier is bound up with the territorial nation state. Inhis paper “Nation, ‘migration’ and critical practice” Harald Bauder focuses on humanmobility and ‘migrant’ identities at non-national scales. He exposes the duality of migration’srole in nation building showing how it is represented as both threat and catalyst, the latterthrough the example of the classic settler societies (also a subject for Barbier) in whichmigrants are included citizens at the expense of indigenous peoples (as Norman also finds).Further, Bauder uses the example of contemporary ‘no border’ initiatives to illustrate thepotential for an unbounded and non-territorial identification with place, which can still besocially and politically active, just like nation-states. His paper, therefore, provides amplescope for re-imaging the frontier through the lens of the migrant, where new subjectidentities can be crafted and where transformative action is possible. In this way, Bauderencourages us to think and imagine beyond the (geographical) frontier and the nation statein looking for the key boundaries that become sites of change.Another way of re-thinking the frontier is to see it not as a place of separation, dominationand conflict but as one of linkage, engagement and cooperation. Seung-Hyun Yoon andSeung-Ook Lee do just this in their paper “From old comrades to new partnerships:dynamic development of economic relations between China and North Korea”. Theyset out the ways in which the frontier spaces between China and North Korea, since 2000,have become economically integrated with China's growing investment and trade in NorthKorea, and the emergence of a regional development zone linking the two countries. Whatthey also argue, however, is that the external obsession with geo-political issues hasglossed over the significance of geo-economic engagements between China and NorthKorea. Rather than seeing the economic emerging from the political, in their paper theymake a case that to understand geopolitical conditions it would be wise to start with graspinghow China and North Korea perform their geo-economic calculations.While Yoon and Lee demonstrate how borders can be crossed by global economicpractices, Reece Jones in “Border security, 9/11 and the enclosure of civilisation”argues that there has been a revival of borders-as-fences. This is due to the new (perceived)threats that face the ‘civilised’ world and the means that are being used to confront them.Consequently, there has been a toughening of the border and of the exclusionary practicesthat states employ both ideologically and physically. As Jones writes:
“The dominant narrative of globalisation is no longer ‘the borderless world’, but rather onethat describes the protection of civilisation in the US, Europe and other privilegedsocieties through the prevention of dangerous flows from other places. Indeed, theconfluence of the narratives of globalisation and the global war on terror produced themost bounded and bordered world we have ever known” (p. 216).Frontiers in geographical methods and practiceThe theme of the conference is intended to extend much more widely than frontiers in themore traditional sense, even when they are re-thought, re-examined and re-framed asoutlined above. AC2013 also seeks to be a forum for debate regarding frontiers ingeographical methods and practice. The three papers in this section of the Virtual Issuedwell on just some of the many aspects of this frontier field. The title of Stuart Lane andcolleagues’ paper sums up what the paper seeks to achieve: “Doing flood risk sciencedifferently: an experiment in radical scientific method”.With a focus on flood risk management, the paper crosses – or challenges – two keyfrontiers. The first is the disciplinary frontier between natural science and social scienceemphasising, like many other have done, the need to research and work in interdisciplinaryways. But more important is a second frontier between scientists (experts) and the public inwhich they seek to achieve a co-production of knowledge, where the distance betweenexpert and lay knowledge (or what they term certified and non-certified knowledge) isbridged. They make a case not only for the ethical need to undertake such boundarycrossing, but also for the inherent value of local, lay expertise in understanding the problem,in this case flooding. They show that lay knowledge is valuable in and of itself, and that byharnessing such knowledge and the agents of such knowledge it is possible to make publicinterventions in flood risk management more effective. As they write: “the purpose of ourexperiment became as much about creating a new public capable of making a politicalintervention in a situation of impasse, as it was about producing the solution itself” (p.15).Lane et al.’s paper concerns itself, in part, with what counts as ‘evidence’. This is the moreexplicit concern of John Turnpenny, Duncan Russel and Tim Rayner’s paper “Thecomplexity of evidence for sustainable development policy: analysing the boundarywork of the UK Parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee”. Like Lane et al., theyare interested in how evidence/research enters policy – and where the boundaries are drawnbetween what might be legitimately counted as evidence and what is seen to be beyond thebounds. They do this through an examination of the actions of the United KingdomParliamentary Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) which was established in 1997 toassess how far government departments in the UK were integrating environment andsustainable development concerns into policymaking. The authors “argue that betterunderstanding of evidence uptake in policymaking for sustainable development can begained by considering the boundaries present” (p.1), reflecting the analytical potential offrontiers as well as their formative roles. The paper investigates the EAC’s ‘boundary work’to show that there is no clear or simple reading of where its remit lies and the evidencepresented in the paper is “evidence of the controversial and politicised nature of the field”(p.11).The final paper in this section of the Virtual Issue, Sarah Elwood and AgnieszkaLeszczynski’s “New spatial media, new knowledge politics”, takes an inductiveapproach to understanding the potential role of new spatial media in supporting the socialchange efforts of activist, civic, grassroots, indigenous and other groups. In this way, theyexplore the possibility for such new spatial media to ferment a new knowledge politics. Theimportance of these new media lies not, they argue, in their technological ‘newness’, butrather the way in which they permit authority, significance and legitimacy to be re-worked,thus opening up a new space for political action by such groups. The spaces opened up by
technological media are new frontiers in themselves, but are also produced through thebreaking down of dualisms such as ‘expert-amateur’ (p.13) and real-virtual.Research frontiersThe final two papers address what we term here ‘research frontiers’, although we accept thatall the contributions to this Virtual Issue are at one research frontier or another. Here,though, we are paying particular attention to ‘new’ research frontiers that may emergethrough new/novel methods, new conceptual framings and the emergence of new concerns.In their paper ‘Geographies of impact: power, participation and potential’, Rachel Pain,Mike Kesby and Kye Askins do not dispute that academics should be concerned with theimpacts of their research – and in that sense at least are supportive of the impact agenda ofthe UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF). However for them, impact should bepursued in a manner that supports progressive social change and does not reproduce elitemodels of knowledge production. Drawing on and developing their work on participatorygeographies, they make a case – and in this way they echo Lane et al.’s paper discussedabove – for impact being achieved through universities and communities working together toco-produce knowledge. This, they argue “is more likely to result in more equitable andradically transformative impacts of knowledge, making us socially accountable rather thandriven by economic accountancy” (p.183). The REF’s impact agenda, for Pain, Kesby andAskins, may reasonably highlight what geographers should be doing, but does not go nearlyfar enough in mapping out the how; nor does it adequately critically explore the impact ofimpact.The final paper addresses a theme that has been the subject of intense interest not just togeographers but across the natural and social sciences, and into policy: resilience. Thechallenge of climate change, the global economic crisis, new security concerns – all of thesehave led scholars and policy makers to see whether ‘resilience’ offers some integrating wayto think about building and sustaining robust social and natural systems. In his paper“Resilience and responsibility: governing uncertainty in a complex world” Marc Welshmobilises an argument that echoes some of the debates about participation: that statediscourses about resilience have led to ‘neoliberal practices of security that shift from statebased to society-based conceptions of distributed risk and reaction’ (p.5). He discussesresilience itself as a boundary object between the natural and social sciences and is criticalof the systemisation of resilience which he sees as having the effect of naturalisingresilience: ‘the only certainty is uncertainty’ (p.1), as Welsh puts it, shocks are normal andeverywhere and, therefore, citizens must be directly involved in resilience building. Thismakes resilience – the frontier of so much current research – problematically post-political.ConclusionThe term ‘frontier’ brings with it a wide range of pre-conceptions based on its long, oftentraditional usage. A number of papers in this Virtual Issue clearly set-out the long-standingsignificance of frontiers, which have been historically embedded in geographical fields ofenquiry. At the same time, new frontiers, such as the virtual, continue to emerge, whiletraditional frontiers, such as borders, shift through time to create new dynamics.There are many ways of understanding frontiers in geographical research and researchpractice, just as there are many ways of creating, challenging or crossing them. The papersincluded in this Virtual Issue reflect the diversity of frontiers with which geographicalresearch is concerned, including resource, geopolitical, physical, gendered, economic andvirtual. Research frontiers can also be methodological and conceptual. These lists, and theVirtual Issue, are far from exhaustive.
New reflections on geographical frontiers will also be showcased at the RGS-IBG AC2013through a wide range of sessions on topics across the discipline. The Chair’s plenariesinclude a questioning of land frontiers by Tania Li (University of Toronto) in her lecturesponsored by Transactions of the IBG and provisionally titled, ‘What is land? Making-up aresource’. Through her talk and in her previous work Li has questioned the construction ofland as a resource, drawing attention to the ways in which its value as a commodity hasbeen generated through the assemblage of materialities, technologies and discourses.Another Chair’s plenary speaker, Tony Bebbington (Clark University), has worked at thefrontiers between (and within) people and environments. His research on the politicalecology of rural change has included a focus on extractive industries for resource gain andthe accompanying socio-environmental conflicts and social movements, especially byindigenous organisations as a result of the impact
Frontiers in geographical methods and practice The theme of the conference is intended to extend much more widely than frontiers in the more traditional sense, even when they are re-thought, re-examined and re-framed as outlined above. AC2013 also seeks to be a forum for debate regarding frontiers in geographical methods and practice.
Frontiers in Energy Research Frontiers in Environmental Chemistry Frontiers in Environmental Science Frontiers in Forests and Global Change . Frontiers in Medical Technology Frontiers in Medicine Frontiers in Neurology Frontiers in Nutrition Frontiers in Oncology Frontiers in Oral Health Frontiers in Pain Research
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