The Complex Politics of Relevance
in Geography
Lynn A. Staeheli* and Don Mitchell**
*Program on Political and Economic Change,
Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado
**Department of Geography, Syracuse University
As a discipline, geographers have debated what it means to make research relevant. In this article, we argue that
the issue of what makes research relevant cannot be separated from the questions of why research should be
relevant, how research becomes relevant, the goals of research, and for whom it is intended to be relevant. In this
sense, the determination of relevance is a social and political process. We make this point through an evaluation
of various writings on relevance, editorials that have appeared in the Newsletter of the Association of American
Geographers, and through interviews with researchers. We argue that relevance can be intended, but that
commitment to relevant research requires a long-term view and an appreciation for the indirect pathways of
relevance. Key Words: relevance, knowledge construction, social studies of science, ethics.
W
hat makes research relevant? How do we
know relevant research when we see it?
While these are empirical and practical
questions, they are also clearly—and perhaps primarily—
political questions. The issue of what makes research
relevant cannot be easily separated from the question of
for whom it is (or is meant to be) relevant, and the issue
of how relevance is recognized cannot be separated from
the person making the evaluation. While researchers
may intend that their research be relevant in certain
ways, that it may be picked up and used for particular
ends, they do not by themselves determine whether their
research will be relevant to some particular cause or
constituency, some policy or problem, or instead consigned
to irrelevancy. Rather, later users of research—
other scholars, students, lay people, politicians and bureaucrats,
and workers in near and distant fields—decide
what is and is not valuable to their own projects, needs,
and questions. And what is available to be used is a
function, inter alia, of structures and institutions in the
academy, in publishing and the media, and in funding
organizations. The determination of relevance, in other
words, is a social as well as a political process.
While calls for geographers to strive for greater relevance
in their research are common, it is far less common
for these calls to be framed within explicit
discussions of either the politics of relevance or of the
social practices that condition relevance. The purpose of
this article, therefore, is to focus explicitly on the politics
of relevance. Our basic position is that research is not
born relevant; it is made relevant in practice and for
particular ends. Any consideration of the sociology and
politics of relevance, therefore, requires consideration of
why research should be relevant, how research becomes
relevant, the goals of research (including political goals),
and the intended audiences and beneficiaries of research.
Each of these is a vexed issue; each is a locus of considerable
debate as researchers with differing intellectual,
social, and political agendas contend over what is right
and what is best. Yet, in important ways, attention to
these issues is muted in much of the published work on
relevance. This may happen because writers take the
political nature of relevance as axiomatic and therefore
not necessary to discuss. It may also be that authors are
not concerned with which politics or goals are mobilized;
they just want more engagement. It may also be the case
that authors assume a particular kind of relevance, but
do not articulate it.
As we shall argue, many narratives about relevance
circulate through the discipline; they can be found in the
presidential addresses of the AAG, in editorials, published
articles, and conversations with colleagues and in
classes. We attempt to bring these ideas into dialogue
and, in so doing, hope to democratize discussions
through inclusion of a broad range of definitions, perspectives,
and political goals. Our conclusion may seem
paradoxical: we argue that relevance may best be
thought of as an attitude and a set of practices intended
to produce research that will be useful in some way—
large or small, in public or private venues, or even in
changing ways of thinking or conceptualizing issues—
but that may not be manifest in any particular policy or
outcome. From this perspective, relevance is not easily
measured, and it may not be directly observable. While
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95(2), 2005, pp. 357–372 r 2005 by Association of American Geographers
Initial submission, August 2002; revised submissions, January 2004 & September 2004; final acceptance, October 2004
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, U.K.
this perspective may be at odds with the performance- or
productivity-based outcomes that increasingly dominate
evaluations of research, we argue that our approach
recognizes the ineluctably political nature of relevance
and the diverse goals that we, as a community of
scholars, promote. Our approach also highlights the role
of academics as educators of students, of policy makers,
of the public, but it is a particular view of education that
involves listening, critical analysis, and capacity building,
as much as recommending particular actions.
Debates over relevance are at a critical point, as
funding agencies want to see the societal merit or benefit
of research (e.g., the National Science Foundation), as
donors want to see tangible outcomes from their contributions,
and as public universities face criticism for
being removed from the public they are intended to
serve. But unless we confront different ideas about relevance
and the politics embedded within them, these
debates are likely to be unproductive and to be largely
irrelevant to academic practice. Our goal in this article is
to democratize the debate about relevance in ways that
bring voices and concerns not often aired in formal
settings into dialogue with voices from the institutions.
In so doing, we hope to provide a foundation for continuing,
broadly based discussions of relevance in the
discipline.
The article is organized in four sections. In the first,
we provide a short overview of debates over relevance
within the discipline, focusing on the ways in which
ideas about relevance have often been framed within
different approaches to research. We argue that many of
the recent debates about relevance have pitted the
‘‘-isms’’ against each other, for instance, implying that
pragmatism may be more likely to yield relevant research
than Marxism, feminism, or poststructuralism. These
debates sometimes seem to equate the method or theory
of research with the politics of research, but they ultimately
provide little leverage in understanding different
ideas or definitions of relevance and the politics underlying
them. In the second section of the article, we
present our theoretical and methodological approach
to analyzing relevance. The third section presents a
framework for understanding narratives of relevance
based on an analysis of the published debate over relevance
in the 1990s and on interviews with researchers.
While there are many points of convergence between
the published discussions about relevance and our interviews,
there are also some important tensions. In the
final section, we focus on these convergences and tensions
in the hope of providing a foundation for continuing,
broadly based discussions of relevance in the
discipline.
Relevance and the ‘‘–isms’’ in Geography
Discussions about relevance in geography are not
new, as they have been a part of the modern discipline
since its founding in the second half of the nineteenth
century. More recently, intense debates over the relevance
of the discipline and specific research streams
within it erupted in English-language geography at the
end of the 1960s, as numerous scholars sought to tie
the discipline more closely to the politics of the period
and to find solutions for the numerous social, political, and
environmental problems these politics exposed.1
For many, the highly quantitative, positivist-oriented
research of the previous decade (as codified, e.g.,
in Harvey 1969) was inadequate to address the social
problems that seemed so deep and pressing, despite the
best intentions of practitioners (Yeates 2001). The putatively
‘‘value-free’’ orientation of the research masked,
many thought, a complicity with the social forces at the
root of inequality, racism, and the alienation that marked
modern life (see, e.g., Blaut 1969; Morrill 1969; Peet
1969; Stea 1969; Prince 1971; Zelinsky 1975; Mitchell
and Draper 1982; Mercer 1984). This sense of complicity
turned many geographers in two, not necessarily
unrelated, directions: toward more humanist modes of
knowing rooted in moral philosophy and toward radical
theories and politics rooted in anarchism, Marxism, and
other critical movements. One of the most interesting
aspects of the relevance debates of the late 1960s and
early 1970s was how charges of irrelevancy were directed
at a mode of knowing that was positivist and statistical.
The movement from attempts to establish a more scientific
footing for geography, to the questioning of
the values implicit in this science, to the humanist
and radical movements of the 1970s led to what Sayer
and Storper (1997) have called a ‘‘normative turn’’ in
geography (see also Kobayashi and Proctor 2003).
Concern with the normative—with what should be—
implies concern about intentions. For many geographers
who were not much taken with either the humanist or
radical movements, this concern implied not abandoning
the positivist, quantitative, skills-based geography, but,
instead, putting it more directly in the service of society.
So, at the same moment that humanist and radical
theories were being imported into geography, efforts were
also undertaken to better facilitate direct involvement
by geographers in the solving of social problems (see, e.g.,
Berry 1972; Harvey 1972, 1974; White 1972; Trewartha
1973). A critically important aspect of this desire to be
more closely involved in social problems has been a focus
on the development of technical knowledges and skills
that could be put in the service of public policy or that
Staeheli and Mitchell358
could be pragmatically useful to business (cf. Abler
1993). Often labeled ‘‘applied geography’’ (because it is
geography as applied to specific practical problems), this
pragmatic orientation to making research relevant has
been charged (even by its proponents, e.g., Kenzer 1989,
1992) with being atheoretical or ad hoc rather than
systematic; it is said, therefore, to run the risk of complicity
in projects that undermine its own normative
values. But the point here is that applied geography focused
on specific policy and business needs has developed
out of a desire among geographers to be relevant.
But because the means of relevancy of applied geography
differ from those of radical and humanist geography,
applied geography promoted a notion of relevance that is
in some ways sharply at odds with other ways of conceptualizing
relevance.
Humanist and radical scholars were also deeply concerned
about immediate social problems, but they sought
to understand the root causes that gave rise to them—
the political, economic, and environmental contexts
within which they arose, and the deep implications that
they had for people’s lives. For both sets of scholars,
values were absolutely critical (Harvey 1973; Buttimer
1974; see Kobayashi and Mackenzie 1989). This meant
asking ‘‘big questions’’ about geopolitics, ecological
transformation, economic restructuring, human welfare,
war and peace. For radicals like David Harvey (1984,
10), such big questions implied developing historicalmaterialist
‘‘people’s geographies’’ ‘‘that open[ed] the
way to the creation of new forms of society in which
common people have the power to create their own
geography and history in the image of liberty and mutual
respect of opposed interests.’’ For humanists like Anne
Buttimer (1976) or Yi-Fu Tuan (1976), ‘‘big questions’’
entailed exploring the nature of differing people’s ‘‘lifeworlds’’
(see also Seamon 1979).
By the early 1980s, Janice Monk and Susan Hanson
(1982) were calling on geographers to ‘‘not exclud[e]
half of the human in human geography,’’ as feminists
showed that any analysis was relevant only to the degree
that it took difference to heart; they argued that both
social theory and social policy must recognize that differences
in identity matter seriously and incorporate this
understanding into research practices. Similarly, the later
rise of geographies of sexuality reinforced the point that
identity was a crucial, ineluctable part of geography (e.g.,
Bell and Valentine 1995). Antiracist scholars have made
a similar claim with regard to race and ethnicity (e.g.,
Kobayashi 1994).
The rise of various forms of radicalism, humanism,
and feminism in geography, and their mutual interaction,
led to a period of intense development of social theory in
the discipline. In a generation, geographers recapitulated
a century or more of social theoretical argument and
development that had largely passed the discipline by.
Much of this debate has been difficult, and the language
in which it has been conducted necessarily reflected
that. And herein lies a central irony of human geography’s
turn to social theory: while rapid theoretical development
has perhaps drawn geography closer to the
heart of main debates in the social sciences and humanities,
it may have also drawn it further from the
social movements, political formations, policy makers,
and lay people many of us hope to reach (see Kitchen
and Hubbard 1999; Castree 2000; but see Pain 2003 for
a more positive assessment). And so the debate about
how to make research relevant continues, even within
groups of geographers adhering to a common approach
to research.
Approaching relevance through the lens of paradigms
or ‘‘the -isms’’ has led to a sense that some theoretical
and methodological approaches—say, pragmatism as
compared to postmodernism—may be more conducive
to relevant research than others. Such a conclusion,
however, diverts attention from the nature of relevance
itself and is often associated with an outlook that puts
relevance in opposition to theory. As Bruce Mitchell and
Diane Draper (1982, 2) argue, the desire for greater
relevance discourages geographers from ‘‘confining
themselves primarily to theoretical problems’’ and instead
encourages them to commit themselves ‘‘to resolving
societal problems.’’ In turn, this leads ‘‘more
geographers to become involved as professional consultants,
offering their services to clients whether in the
public or private sector.’’ The authors assert, however,
that significant ethical and values questions arise when
scholars concern themselves with ‘‘practical significance,
advocacy and consulting’’ (p. 3), and their book is
dedicated to exploring these conflicts. They argue that
the desire to resolve societal problems only compounds
the riddle of what constitutes relevance, since resolving
societal problems requires both practical interventions—
as advocates and consultants—and the reformulation of
the problems themselves—the more traditional scholarly
role. We need, then, a way to talk about relevance that
avoids the dualism between theory and practice and that
eschews the temptation to imply that some research
traditions are less amenable to relevance than others.
Theoretical and Methodological Approach
We take it as axiomatic that scholarly research is a
social enterprise (Bloor 1976; Law 1986; Pickering 1992;
Demeritt 2000). A key argument from the sociology of
The Complex Politics of Relevance in Geography 359
scientific knowledge and from feminist studies of science
is that the boundary between what is studied and the
social context within which it is studied is not fixed
(Collins 1982; Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Harding 1991;
Livingstone 1992; Shapin 1992). Rather, the delineation
of a research area, the development of theory, and the
findings produced interact with the social context in
which the research is conducted. Scholarly practices
themselves are deeply implicated in larger social processes
and forces that are critically important to the
production of knowledge (Harding 1991; Katz 1992;
Kobayashi 1994; Demeritt 2000). How people do their
scholarly work, why they do it, and how others do and do
not join in their practices (by picking up and transforming
their ideas, by drawing on them in their own
research practices) shape the knowledge we produce, if
not the actual physical or social processes. In this sense,
the production of knowledge is reflexive (Woolgar 1988;
Ashmore 1989; Katz 1994; Kobayashi 1994; Nast 1994;
Latour 1996). But, equally, so is the consumption of
knowledge (Hannah and Strohmayer 2001).
In these terms, the issue of relevance may be defined—as
it often is—as one of understanding the ways
that people do and do not use scholarly knowledge.2
The
important point here, however, is that how people do
and do not use research is complex, wrapped up in
myriad practices and social forces; it is not just an effect
of the research itself (e.g., good ideas will win out over
bad) or how it was presented (e.g., good writing will
attract adherents). To put it another way, what makes
research relevant is shaped by the social context in
which research is presented, interpreted, and used.
Yet at the same time, research is a response to—and is
produced out of—diverse social pressures. In the most
general sense, these social pressures might be understood
as issues facing a society (e.g., White 1972), but the
pressures also include the norms or values of scholarly
communities, the teaching needs of departments, the
reward structure of the academy, the priorities of external
grant agencies and corporate sponsors, the press
of political events, and the ongoing restructuring of
the publishing business (Castree and Sparke 2000). The
pressure from each kind of audience may generate different
and often competing definitions of relevance, and
each influences how research is done and what research
means. The myriad structures of influence that shape the
traffic in knowledge are not easily swept aside. Research
cannot thus become ‘‘more relevant’’ through sheer
force of will—especially if we are not crystal clear about
for whom it will be relevant. Thus, relevance involves
exceedingly complex questions of whose relevance and
whose geography.
To evaluate how relevance is understood in geography
and to explore the social and political practices that
make research relevant, we have adopted a two-pronged
approach. First, we analyzed published calls for and
discussions of relevance. These included disciplinary
statements such as presidential columns in the AAG
Newsletter and the prominent National Research
Council (NRC) (1997) report, Rediscovering Geography:
New Relevance for Science and Society, as well as key
books and journal special issues that explore the topic in
some, often critical, depth (e.g., Mitchell and Draper
1982; Pacione1999a; Castree and Sparke 2000). These
published statements may represent only a portion of a
broader discourse of relevance, however, so it is important
to bring in a different set of voices—voices without,
perhaps, the legitimacy or credentials of the first set.
The second element of our approach, then, involves
interviews with people who are not part of the public
discourse but who, nevertheless, have something to offer
the discussion by virtue of their participation in the
discipline. As part of a larger project exploring the sociology
of knowledge with regard to a single research
area, we asked twenty-five geographers engaged in public
space research in the U.S. to reflect on issues of relevance,
its practice, and its politics.3
We then attempt to
create a dialogue around different conceptualizations of
relevance that emerge from the literature and from the
interviews. In so doing, we take a grounded approach
in order to recast the terms of the relevance debate in
geography.
Some concerns related to the interviews, however,
need to be addressed. First, the use of interviews such as
these to assess issues related to relevance may be open to
the criticism that it allows self-serving statements or is
not objective. While such may be the case, that possibility
is balanced against the fact that our interviews
with scholars allowed us to explore aspects of relevance
that might be hidden in the publication process and in
the sorts of normative statements that constitute the
public discourses. For example, the review process may
lead authors to shape their arguments in particular ways
that may or may not be entirely reflective of the author’s
intent (Johnston 1991). Similarly, some have argued that
the reward structures within the academy often work
against advertising the fact that scholars are involved in
outreach activities (e.g., Sabin 2002), and interviews
allowed us to explore whether respondents presented
their research in settings or in formats intended for
nonacademic audiences. And, finally, through the interviews,
it became clear that it was important to explore
the importance of teaching for the sociology and politics
of relevance, which, as we will show more fully below,
Staeheli and Mitchell360
turns out to be a critical, and underdiscussed, foundation
of relevance.
A second, perhaps more serious, concern is that in
the context of the current article—which purports, by its
title, to examine the politics and sociology of relevance
for all of geography—interviews with a group of researchers
selected as part of a wider project on a specific
research area (public space) might seem idiosyncratic.
That limitation noted, there is considerable diversity of
theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches
brought to studies of public space, which means that
research in this area is emblematic of the eclecticism of
geography in important ways. Furthermore, by interviewing
a more focused sample of researchers, we were
able to ask about relevance in relation to a specific research
object. That is, we were able to ask a diversity of
scholars about how different kinds of research on the
same topic did or did not (or could or could not) become
relevant. Finally, because public space researchers examine
a topic that is also the focus of intense political,
policy, and citizen debate, they often have had to think
carefully about the social value of their research; in this,
they are no different than other geographers. We want to
be clear, however, that while our interviews are with
public space researchers, we do not focus on public
space.
Our purpose in combining an analysis of published
statements, on the one hand, with interviews with
members of a research community, on the other, is not at
all to suggest that these two discourses are always oppositional.
Indeed, as will be seen, we have found a much
more interesting and complex dynamic at work. Quite
often, the views of disciplinary leaders, as they made
normative statements about the need for more relevant
research, converged with the views of researchers engaged
in specific projects. At other times, striking
dissonances arose. At still other times, the lines of
reasoning seemed to move in entirely separate, even
unrelated, directions. The two sets of material we analyze,
in other words, work together like counterpoint in a
musical composition. By developing two separate sources
of information, we have been able to compose a more
varied and complex view of the sociology and politics of
relevance than a focus on only one of the sources would
have allowed.
Aspects of Relevance
From our reading of the literature and the interviews,
several ways of thinking about relevance—about aspects
of relevance—emerged. Three of these are neatly described
by Michael Dear in a 1999 article in the Scottish
Geographical Magazine: relevance as pertinence, as
commitment, and as application. We use his framework
as an entre´e to the issue because it matches the themes
that emerged from the published articles and interviews.
But our analysis also suggests two further aspects of
relevance circulating in the debate: relevance as intellectual
centrality and relevance through teaching. Each
aspect of relevance is hotly contested, as authors and
interviewees describe what relevance means to them
and, perhaps, how these ideas should be taken up by the
discipline.
One of the most significant distinctions between
these elements of relevance is in where relevance is located:
in the issue examined, in the act of research being
used, or in the mobilization of core values. As we shall
argue, these are not simply different conceptualizations
of relevance; they reflect particular political and social
positions in the debate over what constitutes relevance
and for whom research should be relevant. In the following
pages, we examine the ways in which authors and
interviewees talked about relevance and the issues that
confront researchers as they attempt to make their work
more relevant. We make no effort to provide a final,
conclusive statement about what relevance ‘‘really’’ is,
but instead highlight the point and counterpoint in the
dialogue, the debate and dilemmas in the narratives
about relevance.
Relevance as Pertinence
Dear (1999, 144) defines ‘‘pertinence’’ (or ‘‘timeliness’’)
as when some issue ‘‘has significance (however
defined) for a particular time and place; by extension,
exactly the same issue could be irrelevant at another
time and place.’’ Making research pertinent, then, involves
the identification of important issues and making
interventions in them—making interventions that are
‘‘appropriate, suitable in nature or character,’’ as standard
dictionaries define pertinence. But it also means
ensuring that such interventions are timely. In the president’s
columns of the AAG Newsletter, it is almost taken
for granted that geographers can and should be pertinent
in this dual sense. The integrative nature of the discipline
(e.g., Cutter 2000) in combination with powerful
analytical tools provided through geographic information
technologies (e.g., Golledge 1999a) mean that geographers
are well poised to react quickly and appropriately
to developing events.
In published statements on relevance, pertinence is
often associated with the ‘‘big issues’’ of the day. Gilbert
White’s (1972) call for more relevant research began
with an inventory of crises: the widening gap between
The Complex Politics of Relevance in Geography 361
rich and poor countries, the carrying capacity of
places and the world as a whole, environmental degradation,
racial tensions, social fragmentation, the decay
of cities, and urban sprawl. Similarly, the NRC’s Rediscovering
Geography (1997) report identifies looming
problems that geographers can address including economic
and environmental sustainability, ethnic conflict,
health care, and climate change (see also Brown 1997).
Over the past several years AAG presidents have reiterated
many of the same issues—and added hunger and
war to them. These are critical issues, they argue, that
must be addressed for a livable and fair world; the implication
(and sometimes the direct statement) is that
geographers should address them if our work is to
be relevant.
The researchers with whom we spoke also see pertinence
as an important element of relevance; nineteen of
twenty-five researchers mentioned this issue in one form
or another. But in addition to looming social and global
issues, our respondents often discussed pertinence in
terms of the issues confronting people in their everyday
lives and in terms of helping people to understand these
problems, if not solve them.4
For these scholars, pertinence
was expressed as a desire to use research on
contemporary social issues as a way of helping people
think about their world—a fairly different sensibility
than using such research to directly solve problems.
Meghan Cope, for example, spoke in her interview of the
desire to conduct research that touches people’s lives,
arguing that such research would help people better
understand the society in which they live. To do so,
Cope and several other respondents (e.g., John Paul
Jones, III, Sallie Marston, Edward Soja) discussed the
importance of theory in showing how daily experiences
are connected to broad structural issues. Research is
pertinent when it helps people draw those connections
to make the ‘‘everyday’’ a ‘‘big’’ issue. Significantly, it is
not just researchers who work from a critical social
theory perspective who talked about pertinence in this
way. For example, Richard Frankaviglia said,
I think what makes research relevant is just that it has
potential applicability. In my particular research, if it helps
them plumb their deeper collective unconsciousness, great.
If they can understand that they’re part of a broader process
that’s going on, it is relevant in that regard.
But pertinence is tricky. Many of the people with
whom we spoke mentioned the difficulty of identifying
issues that would allow people to draw connections between
broad social structures and daily life. Good, clear
writing with lots of graphics or images was seen as important
in this regard, but so was the question of the
kinds of issues that research addresses. Larry Ford suggested
that focusing on ‘‘consensus issues’’ was a means
to assure relevance. He seemed to define consensus issues
as those that came from people using a space rather
than from a predetermined theoretical question. Identifying
those issues sometimes may involve a bit of luck
or a special knack for finding compelling issues, as Roman
Cybriwsky noted. In a similar vein, Jennifer Wolch
believed this often involves conceptualization of an issue
that is
just beneath the level of the existing public agenda, or
needs to be brought onto the public agenda. And it is
framed in a way that allows people to understand how the
results might actually affect day-to-day practice.
The sense of relevance as pertinence expressed by
Cybriwsky and Wolch is in some ways different than that
espoused in the published discourse. For Cybriwsky and
Wolch, pertinence consists in bringing new issues to the
table. In the published discourse, pertinence is more
often defined in terms of responding to already existing
issues and debates, making geographers’ voices heard in
agendas that already exist, a position that is shared to
some extent by Ford. But there is also a difference between
the sort of ‘‘consensus issue’’ pertinence advocated
by Ford and that indicated in presidential columns
and publications such as Rediscovering Geography.
For the former, consensus issues arise from the street, as
it were, and are matters of social concern, big or small.
For the latter, specific ‘‘big’’ problems—the mechanics
of global warming or the rise of financial networks
that fund terrorism, for example—deserve geographers’
attention.
But all agree that timeliness is central to pertinence, as
Dear’s (1999, 144) definition made clear. And a persistent
fear is that geographers are either too slow in
responding to the rise of important issues, or that they
somehow fail to identify them. But timeliness is also
difficult. Thinking about policy work, Mitchell and
Draper (1982) argue that the time horizon for policy
makers is often relatively short and emphasizes immediate
answers to pressing problems; such a horizon focuses
on short-term analyses and solutions in which
theory and a longer perspective may seem irrelevant, at
least when relevance is defined in terms of pertinence.
Yet they argue that understanding the processes that
give rise to pressing problems often requires a longerterm
view and an articulated theoretical perspective.
Balancing the two sets of needs—immediate responses
to immediate problems and longer-term analyses of
broad social processes—is difficult, but necessary, if
Staeheli and Mitchell362
research is to be pertinent. This balance may require
different kinds of analyses, not all of which may be
represented in policy documents, but each of which is
critical to understanding and evaluating the effectiveness
of potential responses.
The preceding discussion suggests two important
conclusions about relevance as pertinence. First, ‘‘pertinence’’
is itself a slippery term; it can mean a variety of
things, ranging from intervening so as to change intellectual
and political debates, to contributing to those
debates, to contesting them. Those calling for greater
pertinence of geographical research need to be cognizant
of this. Second, and more importantly, while pertinence
can be intended, it cannot really be predicted. Attempts
to do so rely on a model that both inflates scholars’
power to intervene in societal movements and underestimates
the complex pathways by which disciplinary
interests, concerns, and modes of analysis develop. Pertinence
is determined post facto by the users of research.
There is an important moral to be taken from this: calls
for ‘‘easy’’ pertinence can run the danger of narrowing
the scholarly enterprise and thus limiting the range of
work that may later have the possibility of being made
pertinent. What we can hope for is that researchers look
for venues through which their work might become
pertinent or that they might attempt to bring their work
to venues in which it might become pertinent; in short,
that they bring an attitude to their work that is open to
making their work pertinent.
Relevance as Commitment
Agenda setting, contributing to consensus issues, and
contributing directly to the solution of some specific
problem all require the making of commitments on the
part of scholars, if for no other reason than finite time
requires committing to one course of scholarship rather
than another. But such commitments are usually not
only commitments of convenience or even of scholarly
sensibility; they also entail making a political commitment
or a commitment to some sort of action (Pain
2003). Relevance as commitment speaks to the motivations
for and goals of a research program. Dear (1999,
145) relates this way of thinking about relevance to the
promotion of liberal and leftist political and research
agendas in the 1970s that were focused on the reduction
of inequality and the promotion of social justice. In those
cases, the motivations for research reflected a commitment
to working for a more just world. Much of the work
in the pragmatist tradition—which is more wary of the
overtly political agenda of social justice research—also
originates a strong sense of commitment. Gilbert White
and Bob Kates, for example, are motivated by a profound
desire to improve chances for human survival and, beyond
that, for improved lives (White 1972; Kates 1994;
see also Smith 1984). For some researchers, the source of
commitment is a moral framework rooted in spiritual
beliefs (Pacione 1999b); for others, the moral framework
is rooted in politics. As such, commitment is laden with
normative values, even if those values do not map easily
onto a political spectrum of right and left. Commitment
of this kind is usually commitment to some sort of
‘‘project’’ that, in turn, can be decisive in how research is
conducted. Susan Hanson (1999), for example, argues
that commitment to feminist values leads directly to
feminist research practices.
Such commitment is not exclusive to feminists or to
researchers who directly refer to their politics in their
work. Rather, as Mitchell and Draper (1982) argue, all
research ultimately rests on values, whether articulated
or not. And, in fact, the values and commitments that
provide the foundation for research in geography often
are not articulated, even when people are provided a
forum for addressing the discipline on the topic of how it
should be developing. The AAG presidency, for example,
provides prominent scholars with a ‘‘bully pulpit,’’ and
many presidents use their Newsletter column to promote
their vision of what geography should contribute to society.
While one gets a general sense of commitment in
some columns, it is not always easy to identify the nature
of the normative visions—or values—that shape commitment,
to identify the object of commitment (commitment,
after all, requires that there be some thing or
idea to which one is committed), or to trace the influence
of commitment on research practices.
There are several reasons why this might be the case.
First, not everyone feels comfortable issuing calls to
the barricades, perhaps preferring other means to rally
commitment. Second, relevance as commitment involves
normative judgments as to whether an agenda is
important, worthy, and/or scientific. Ideas of an agenda
or a normative vision of what society should be like are
something that many in the academy seem wary of addressing
individually, never mind for the discipline as a
whole. Presidents of the discipline may feel it is inappropriate
or ineffective to imprint their own values
and judgments by setting out an agenda or project,
so speaking from a bully pulpit to a discipline can be a
difficult position within which to operate, raising intractable
questions. How can a geographer act on her/his
own sense of commitment when also speaking for a
diverse discipline? And what role should politics and
moral values play in research initiatives within a discipline
and in organized efforts to act upon them? Because
The Complex Politics of Relevance in Geography 363
it is rooted, however ambiguously, in politics, goals,
and agendas, commitment complicates the evaluation of
research, even as a commitment to, for example, some
form ‘‘objectivity,’’ may limit the degrees of freedom in
any research project.
By contrast, the researchers we interviewed frequently
situate their research within the context of
specific political commitments and values. The following
exchange with Robert Tata is typical:
LAS: Why do you think [public space] is an important
topic?
RT: Well, it kind of gets back to some basic philosophy of
my own. Mostly, I would consider myself a conservative,
but on the other hand, I believe in government support of
education and legal systems and also the health system. I
always have felt that government should provide at least a
minimum standard of living for every citizen, and there are
certain groups within society that, for whatever reason,
can’t keep up and get the benefits the entire society has to
offer. It’s government’s responsibility to provide those
things if we’re going to have a just society.
Commitment here is to a moral and political philosophy
of social justice, and research is directed both toward
conforming to that commitment and toward helping to
realize the values that lie at its root. These values can be
deep-seated, and they can take a variety of forms, including
a political project, a set of values, or a particular
outcome.
We assume that the views about commitment held by
the various participants in published debates are likewise
complex. But what is curious is how little this sense of
the complexity of commitment comes through in published
narratives. Relevance as commitment requires a
commitment to some object, some set of values, some
political outcome—or some combination of these. Any
call for relevance must confront this aspect of relevance,
if for no other reason than because a commitment to is
a necessary precondition for even beginning to debate
relevance as pertinence.
Relevance as Application
Relevance as application is probably the most common
way of conceptualizing relevance. The preponderance
of Rediscovering Geography (NRC 1997), for
example, is directed toward this aspect. For several AAG
presidents, the importance of relevance as application
follows from a concern for pertinence. And ten of
the twenty-five researchers we interviewed said that, by
definition, relevant research had to result in application
or action of some kind. One researcher, who requested
anonymity, made this argument even as he critiqued it:
Relevant research has to result in some kind of action. It
has to affect behavior in some way. Otherwise it remains
intellectual, which isn’t bad. I don’t know if anything I’ve
done is relevant, and I am not sure that relevance is highly
important to me. But if I am going to define it, that is the
way I would define it. I do think it probably is normative
because it sets certain conventions about behavior.
As in the published discourse, some of our interviewees
saw direct connections between relevance as
pertinence and relevance as application. For Larry Ford,
orienting his research questions around people’s use of
space (which gives it pertinence) means that his research
can be of immediate use for architects and planners—as
long as he communicates the information clearly. The
same is true for David Seamon, who argued that
the first criterion for relevant research is practical usability.
In the case of my work, helping to facilitate actual placemaking
through design.
Seamon’s argument is significant not just for the
linkage he makes between pertinence and application,
but also because he works from a phenomenological
perspective. Phenomenology is one of those approaches—at
least as it developed in geography—that has been
indicted as being either too individualistic or too philosophically
abstract to incorporate directly into policy or
planning. Moreover, phenomenology is in some ways
hostile to the sort of technical rationality that planning
discourse often requires (see, e.g., Relph 1970, 1981),
and that is often taken as the sine qua non of applicable
research. Seamon, however, makes the connection between
phenomenological approaches and design applications
easily.
Even so, relevance as application is not something
that flows organically out of research; if it were, all research
would have a fairly direct application. Indeed,
addressing a perceived paucity of applicable research,
AAG presidents and others have called for changes in
the ways that we, as geographers, ask questions, train
students, and market ourselves. Will Graf may well have
been the most persistent of recent presidents in his calls
for applicable research, and he devoted a considerable
number of his presidential columns to explaining how
this might be achieved. Among other things, Graf argues
that applicable research may require that research
questions be modified to reflect concerns beyond specializations
within the discipline:
Staeheli and Mitchell364
We need to ask the right questions, questions that will
generate answers useful to us as geographers, but also useful
to other natural and social scientists, humanists, decision
makers, and managers. . ..We need to generate questions
susceptible to geographic inquiry that will produce answers
needed by others outside the narrow confines of our dis-
cipline.
—(Graf 1998a, 2)
Graf recognizes the tension between ‘‘what we want
to do and what is needed,’’ but he argues that it is a
waste of intellectual capital to invest in research that
cannot be directly linked to the needs of those who can
use some element of the research; research should have
a direct instrumentality. Graf also warns that it will take
effort on the part of geographers to ensure that the investment
of intellectual capital is made. He argues that
geographers must approach policy makers, rather than
wait for policy makers to approach us. Furthermore,
geographers need to be sure to have something to offer
that policy makers can use (Graf 1998b). In a similar
fashion, Golledge (2000b) argues that we must ask
whether the research we produce and the students we
train have relevance for the needs of business.
In thinking about the limitations of geography’s potential
for application, many articles and respondents
pointed to the theoretical turn in the discipline. The
sharpest concerns have been that high theory can mask
fuzzy thinking or sloppy research, but other comments
suggest that the business of theorizing distracts from the
business of solving problems; policy makers, it is argued,
do not concern themselves with theory. In his interview,
however, Michael Dear argued that downplaying theory
does not mean abandoning it. Rather, he spoke of the
need to bracket a theoretical framework when addressing
different audiences:
On a day-by-day basis, if I went out and spoke to a bunch of
developers on the west side about how important it is for
them to understand the looming hybridity of spaces around
them, they would not listen to me. If I went out to the
East LA barrio and tried to explain how their postmodern
hybrid concoctions are really interesting to me, they
would just smile and go away, and that would be the end of
that. I think, however, that my whole approach to community
issues is determined by my theoretical apparatus. . ..The
theoretical way I see things colors exactly the way I am going
to do my practice. . ..They seem reasonably seamless to me in
that the way I am going to pursue my research is very much
bound up by the way I see the theory that I use to form the
way I see things. . ..But on a day-by-day basis, I do effectively
bracket certain aspects of that understanding so that it
doesn’t get in the way of effective communication.
Dear’s point is that theoretical work is necessary to the
development of research that can be applied in particular
social settings or to particular problems, but that the
means of communication—the modes of address—will
necessarily be different, depending on the needs of different
audiences.
Changing the mode of address, however, is not easy,
given the structure of the academy. Several untenured
faculty (most of whom requested confidentiality) commented
that the tenure system seems to prioritize theoretical
development and publication in flagship journals
over research that is conveyed to a general audience of
nonacademics or a specific audience of policy makers,
activists, or others who can use the research. One person,
for example, put it this way:
Every publication has an audience, especially the mainstream
press. There are thinking people, working class and
educated people. . .other people who haven’t got college
degrees, and who are out there with shitty jobs. But they do
read things. They do read newspapers and they read magazines.
A lot depends on how you calibrate your argument
for your audience. . ..To get tenure, you need to publish in
the right places. You have to publish in the Annals. The
Annals is a decent journal, but the discipline has a real story
to tell, and it might be good to get that out there, as well. I
publish stuff in [popular progressive magazines], none of
which means a damn in academic thinking. I don’t have
tenure, and it’s not going to help my case.
This scholar’s concern was that publishing in journals
such as the Annals would not have the impact that
publishing in mass-market magazines would have, but
that by writing in these more popular outlets, he would
be deemed less of a scholar. Other researchers noted that
they also write differently for audiences of policy makers
or when making public presentations, but commented
that few in the university seemed to recognize their work
in these venues; this was frequently mentioned by those
who work with community groups or in arenas that are
less visible than those of the policy world at the national
level (see also Gober 1998). Developing applicable research,
that is, may in fact be militated against by the
very structure of rewards—including current tenure
standards—that govern our jobs. Comments that these
activities can be an additional activity or an add-on miss
the point of exactly how much time and effort it takes to
engage in meaningful work with community organizations,
for example. As with questions of commitment,
this is a point that needs specific discussion and debate
within geography and should be confronted head-on
when calls for greater relevance in geographic research
are made.
The Complex Politics of Relevance in Geography 365
Relevance as Centrality
Accompanying many of the calls for contributions to
public policy are statements about the way this will enhance
the centrality of geographical knowledge to society,
to scientific discourse, and to scholarship more broadly.
Relevance can be defined, therefore, not only as pertinence,
commitment, and applicability (as with Dear
1999), but also as centrality. There are several aspects to
relevance as centrality, including being central to specific
inter- and multidisciplinary projects, being central to key
scholarly developments and debates, and being central
to how lay people conceive their worlds. These different
aspects of centrality are not often clearly distinguished.
They should be, however, since each may require tailoring
geographical research in a different way.
AAG presidents have been keen to promote geography
within the broader academic community—making
it central both to multidisciplinary projects and to critical
scholarly debates. Seven of our interviewees also specifically
mentioned the importance of making geography
central in this manner. The implicit argument is that the
more geography is insinuated in scholarly and public
discourse, the more relevant it is. In a Newsletter column,
for example, Susan Cutter (2001a, 3) asked,
[W]hat are we doing (individually and collectively) to
reach colleagues in cognate fields or influence public policies?
How can we impress the intellectual and policy
communities with our theoretical, analytical, and methodological
advancements if we only talk to one another in
highly specialized journals, abandoning the broader audience
for some of our work?. . . We have intellectual capital
that has considerable worth, but we’re just not marketing it
as well as we could or should.
The strong implication is that isolation breeds irrele-
vance.
Embedded in the arguments about relevance as centrality
are several issues. The first is that geography is
unusual among the disciplines in that it is integrative
and spans the range of academic disciplines. At a time in
which complex problems in the physical and human
realms require reaching across intellectual boundaries,
geography should be well positioned to make a contribution,
or to be relevant, in addressing complex problems.
The reality that geography is not seen as more
central is variously attributed to the fact that we are a
small discipline, occupy a generally weak position within
universities, and the fact that geographers have not been
significant players in large, multidisciplinary research
efforts (Mather 1992; Graf 1998a; Golledge 1999b;
Abler 2000; Martin 2001).
Our interviewees frequently made arguments about
centrality. But they often discussed centrality in terms
different from—indeed, perhaps in opposition to—the
public discourse. For example, many of the researchers we
interviewed worked in multi- or interdisciplinary research
or teaching centers (e.g., Michael Dear, Richard Frankaviglia,
David Seamon, Edward Soja, Neil Smith, Jennifer
Wolch, Terence Young). While published statements most
often discuss the benefits to other scholarly and societal
pursuits that geography’s centrality could provide, these
geographers in interdisciplinary settings instead noted
that working with people from a variety of perspectives
helped to sharpen their own arguments, as the taken-forgranted
could no longer be taken for granted. That is,
centrality is valuable because it improves geography, as
much as vice versa. Furthermore, teaching in interdisciplinary
programs means that geographers are teaching
people who are, or might later become, practitioners, such
as planners or policy makers. Teaching in such a setting
forces researchers to draw connections between fields
fairly directly and in terms that would be understandable
to people outside geography or to those who operate from
different theoretical perspectives.
Yet there are costs that may be associated with interdisciplinarity
that may, in fact, reduce geography’s
seeming centrality. One of these arises because geographers
often mask their disciplinary training in these
initiatives as they fill roles as planners, environmental
scientists, social studies teachers, and so forth (e.g., Monk
2001); true interdisciplinarity requires that scholars set
aside the particularities of their discipline and act as
scientists or scholars in common, searching for discovery,
enlightenment, relevance. Presumably, the value of
interdisciplinary work is that perspectives emerge from
collaborations that are separate from what an individual
might bring, and so it is difficult to tease out what the
value of a specifically geographic approach might be. Bob
Kates (1993, 2) suggested that some people might be
wary of complete integration, pointing to ‘‘many
thoughtful geographers who see in such activities the
weakening of the discipline and the diffusion of intellectual
resources.’’ He argued, however, that this is both
an unnecessary worry and one that would not make the
discipline useful in addressing pressing issues and concluded,
‘‘We should strengthen our place in our institutions,
not behind crumbling wall of uniqueness, but with
a fine web of intellectually symbiotic relationships.’’
Yet there is a tension here, as those who promote
centrality also often promote a ‘‘big G’’ geography—one
in which the disciplinary identity is foremost. Cutter
(2001b), for example, advocated changing the name
of the AAG to the Association for the Advancement of
Staeheli and Mitchell366
Geography as a means of promoting the centrality of
geography. Such arguments, however, seem to shift the
discourse of relevance in a subtle, but important, way.
Relevance seems to be defined as the relevance of the
discipline, rather than a contribution to the solution of
problems. There is an instrumentality in this shift that
appears unseemly to some of our respondents. David
Seamon, for example, worried that the discipline has too
often touted its centrality through the promotion of GIS
technologies at the expense of the more holistic approach
that has been the discipline’s strength. Speaking
specifically about the ways in which geography has been
incorporated in landscape architecture, he argued that
‘‘unfortunately, landscape architects mostly use geography
right now because of its technical stuff. I mean, it
pays for the discipline, but it is really instrumentalizing
the discipline.’’
Moreover, bemoaning the lack of centrality of geography
often ignores the ways in which geography has, in
fact, been central to innumerable scholarly endeavors
and debates. Work by geographers as diverse as David
Harvey, David Lowenthal, Donald Meinig, Larry Ford,
Will Graf, Julie-Kathy Gibson-Graham, Gilbert White,
Yi-Fu Tuan, James Blaut, and Gillian Hart (to name but
a very, very few) is not just central to a number of wide
intellectual movements and debates, but has actually
established the direction of the movements and the
terms of the debates. Any number of other cases could
be adduced.
Centrality here is not an issue of promotion but of
influence. And influence comes largely from the depth,
breadth, and insight of scholarship, not because geography’s
most influential scholars have dedicated themselves
to solving either narrowly technical issues or
specific problems. As some of our respondents noted, it is
quite conceivable that pushing for greater instrumentality
in geography might work directly against its intellectual
centrality since it will divert resources from the
sort of basic, often long-term, theoretically and empirically
deep research that also leads to intellectual influence.
They argued that if geography is to be a relevant
discipline—relevant in the sense of being central to intellectual
projects—then this sort of intellectual influence
needs to be recognized and the means to support it
need to be developed. The point here is that different
kinds of centrality require different kinds of engagement
with academic, political, and social worlds.
Relevance for Teaching
The final sense of relevance—relevance for teaching—emerged
from our interviews, rather than from
published statements about relevance. Many of our
respondents argued that using research in training
students was an important, although often overlooked,
pathway by which research becomes relevant. Indeed,
one of the most striking aspects of the published statements
is how little effort has been made to link relevance
to the broad, multifaceted goals that college teaching
necessarily entails. To be sure, the issue of relevance in
teaching has been raised, but usually in only a very
specific way. Relevance in teaching is linked to a larger
argument about centrality, in which good teaching plays
a major role; it is often then narrowed to a discussion of
instrumental relevance—the purveying of specific skills
and the linking of teaching needs to business or government
desires (e.g., Graf 1999; Golledge 2000a).
Teaching is important for geographers’ centrality, according
to many AAG presidents, because making geography
a more central part of the curriculum at the
kindergarten through twelfth grade and collegiate levels—and
improving its quality—will help solidify the
discipline’s position within educational institutions; it
will help assure our disciplinary survival. Moreover,
better teaching will presumably enhance the geographic
literacy of government and business leaders, as well
as the general population. Some people argue this
achievement will only be possible if we stress more
technique-oriented teaching (Graf 1999).
The presidents’ columns often seemed to advocate
teaching as a form of advertising for the discipline,
whereas interviewees addressed ways in which faculty
help students draw connections in ways that enable
action. For example, Sallie Marston, like many other
geographers, uses current geographical research in her
classroom teaching and individualized mentoring. She
argues that research becomes relevant by helping students
develop a framework they can use to understand
their experiences. She was not alone: twenty-one of the
twenty-five respondents used research on public space in
their teaching; at least three of the respondents included
service-learning components in their courses; nineteen
of the respondents identified students with whom they
had worked who are now engaged in some nonacademic
practice related to public space (e.g., as planners, developers,
or activists); nine of these nineteen respondents
were not themselves involved in applications of
their research through consulting, advising, or activism.
Thus, while our respondents may not have made their
research directly applicable through their own actions, it
may have become relevant in specific projects through
their students.
While overlooked in disciplinary statements about
teaching, our respondents strongly believed that teachThe
Complex Politics of Relevance in Geography 367
ing was an important means by which research is made
relevant. Students were specifically mentioned as the
primary audience for six of the respondents who wanted
their research to be relevant. Researchers noted that
it was the combined missions of teaching and research
that called them to academic positions and that it
was through students that their work would have
the greatest effect. Significantly, researchers did not
assume that their work would take on broader relevance
through the paid employment of students upon their
graduation. Instead, several people spoke of the hope
that they could give students tools and a framework for
understanding issues that the students could take to
voluntary work or activism—arenas that were not
prominent in the calls for relevance in published articles
and newsletters.
Many of our respondents were also clear that politics
is important when considering teaching as an avenue
toward relevance. Allan Pred, for example, argued,
to me, relevance begins in the classroom. One deals with
hundreds of students every year, and you’re dealing with
them at a period that in many respects and instances is
formative in how they subsequently come to view the
world. Many of these students are going to wind up in
positions of some kind of responsibility and influence. And
so, teaching students is highly relevant. And in my own
mind, teaching is a subversive activity, or should be a
subversive activity. Subversive in the sense that one at least
forces them . . . into dealing with their own take-forgranteds.
. ..When the issue of political relevance is addressed
to me, I always say it begins with teaching.
Not everyone will agree with this assessment, but Pred’s
point connects back to the issues of pertinence and
commitment in a way that forces a broader consideration
of how, why, and for whom research becomes relevant. It
requires a consideration of more than ideas, or of
training in specific skills, but also of knowledge, including
knowledge for whom and for what ends.
Yet there are worries that theoretical work in geography
may undermine geography’s relevance in the
classroom and its ability to induce the kind of transformative
experience Pred talks about. The following
exchange with David Seamon, who teaches in an architecture
program, is indicative:
DS: Most of [my] students will end up in an architectural
or landscape architectural firm.
DM: And can you see the kinds of thing that you’ve talked
about in class or meetings with students or so forth affecting
the way they go about their practice?
DS: Well, it’s very difficult because in architecture as in
geography, [with] the poststructural rage right now, you
know it’s very fashionable for young architects to believe
right now that they are artists and their major aim is to
shock people in their design. So, I’m having a fairly hard
time here right now because our younger faculty have no
interest in what I talk about, and some of them are openly
hostile.
As Seamon and Pred make clear, no less than relevance
as commitment, or relevance as application, relevance
for teaching entails a politics: a politics of ideas and a
struggle for respect within suites of competing discourses
and political positions. How we use our own and others’
research in the classroom, how we reflect on it with our
students, and how we help them to understand are all
important aspects of the sociology of relevance. Relevance—or
at least some important aspect of it—resides
exactly in learning.
The Complexity of Relevance in Geography
There is a broad commitment to making geography
and the work of geographers useful in addressing problems
facing the world. This commitment is clear in the
statements from AAG presidents, in published commentaries
and reports, and in the personal statements of
scholars. But, too often, we do not appreciate either the
multifaceted nature of relevance or that the complexity
of relevance makes it a deeply political issue. Our goal in
this article has been to draw out this multifaceted nature
and to reflect on the political issues that it entails. We
have tried to indicate that relevance is always a social
issue, rather than a purely personal one. As experience
in the classroom indicates, what constitutes relevance is
a function of users, of those who read or hear our research,
learn from it, and use it. Understanding how
different audiences—students, activists, policy makers,
lay publics— read, learn from, and use our research is an
issue that requires a much clearer sense of what we mean
when we are talking about relevance. In this sense, relevance
can be intended—can be an attitude, perhaps—
but not a neatly defined product.
The implication of the preceding pages is that recent
debates over relevance in geography have generally
adopted a too narrow view of where relevance is located
or enacted. There is a strong focus on policy and business
and with the promotion of either an instrumental relevance
as application or a kind of relevance as centrality
that may be little more than disciplinary advertisement.
Thinking seriously about relevance for business and
government is of course important; these agents have
enhanced power to effect change, to redistribute reStaeheli
and Mitchell368
sources, to shape behavior and rules, to launch wars and
remake geopolitical maps, to push toward either environmental
sustainability or environmental destruction,
and to produce the spaces within which we must all live.
If one can change the way that actors in government and
business think and act, the relevance of geography to
society will be obvious. And even though many of us
worry that linking our work too closely to business or
government may only reinforce the status quo, several of
the scholars with whom we spoke were explicit in their
desire to bring progressive, even radical, politics to their work
with policy makers and business groups. Relevance as
commitment drives such scholars to think hard about
the best ways to effect the social changes they hope for.
Simultaneously, thinking about relevance as commitment
encouraged many of those with whom we spoke to
identify with grassroots activists and to attempt to shape
social policy and public debate through community or
other activist groups and through their work with students.
Many of them wanted to give activists and citizens
the tools to speak for themselves so that their voices
would be heard directly. Indeed, the importance of
bringing citizens and policy makers into dialogue was
mentioned—unprompted—as a goal by fourteen out of
twenty-five interviewees. Through attempts to enable
and foster dialogue, the work of geographers could be
quite important, yet relevance here might well be indirect
and perhaps untraceable.
But does ‘‘fostering dialogue’’ really constitute relevance?
Or does research only become relevant when it is
directly instrumental to some practice? The published
literature and some of our respondents support the idea
that it is ultimately through practice that research becomes
relevant. Yet there is disagreement as to what
constitutes the practices that make research relevant. By
thinking of relevance as multifaceted, as being defined
by shifting combinations of pertinence, applicability,
commitment, centrality, and teaching and by understanding
that assessments of relevance always entail
normative stances, we can see that there should be
disagreement over appropriate practices among those
who intend their work to be relevant.
Those aspects of the research-reception process that
we can at least partially control—language, theoretical
orientation, research foci—exist within a set of structural
opportunities and constraints, including structures
central to academic work, such as tenure, processes
through which merit raises are awarded, shifting demands
on work-time, and so forth. Whatever these
constraints may be, it seems clear that geographers do
work to bring their research to wider audiences than
those composed of other scholars and students. Seventeen
of our respondents reported that they have taken
their research to nonacademic audiences. They engaged
in discussions with policy makers and sat on policymaking
boards, gave interviews and wrote articles for the
popular media, were engaged in paid and unpaid consulting,
and participated in political activism. There was
a strong desire to speak directly to the public, and occasional
success. This desire was voiced particularly as a
desire to reach an educated lay public who might have
progressive tendencies or who could be swayed in that
direction. The evidence from our interviews, all this is
to say, indicates that many calls for greater relevance
are not just too narrowly drawn. Geographers already are
engaged in the hard work of trying to make their research
relevant—whatever the sociological constraints
on their own intentions may be—and already devote
considerable time and energy to the issue. They hope to
be relevant.
Involved as they are in activities to make their research
and knowledge relevant to wider audiences, most
of our respondents felt, at best, only marginally successful
in their goal of influencing public discussion and
debate; many believe their efforts have failed. Several
people, for example, had hoped that the books that they
wrote would be read by an educated lay audience, but
were frustrated that they had not been successful in
reaching this audience. But contra the arguments in the
published discussion of relevance, theory and language
are only some of the difficulties they faced. Finding an
audience and having a platform is another problem.
Compared to European countries, for example, a robust
intellectual periodical press—a press that takes the debates
of scholars seriously—really does not exist in the
U.S. The outlets for intellectual debate—the number of
pages in national newspapers and magazines devoted to
intellectual debate, for example—are exceptionally few.
Being a ‘‘public intellectual’’ in the U.S. is not an easy
proposition. As Will Graf has argued in his presidential
columns, geographers need to be creative, proactive, and
persistent in trying to reach an audience. Yet, as our
interviews with untenured scholars indicated, the reward
structures of the academy and the limited opportunities
afforded by the media, often mitigate against expending
the considerable energy such creative persistence
requires.
In fact, almost all the people we interviewed mentioned
that institutional barriers exist to making research
relevant—an issue rarely mentioned in the disciplinary
discourse. These barriers include lack of credit or recognition
afforded to policy, consultative, or advising
work, the prioritization of publishing in scholarly rather
than more popular journals, and messages that scholars
The Complex Politics of Relevance in Geography 369
should shy away from political issues. For pre-tenure
researchers, the messages to stay away from efforts to
take research beyond the academy were very strong, but
they also affected more senior scholars. Indeed, promotion
and tenure committees were frequently—if jokingly—mentioned
by researchers as their primary audience
for their research. This joke masked further issues, too:
the relative undervaluing of teaching in tenure and
promotion decisions at many universities often divert
scholars’ energies from exactly the place where they can
(and, many would argue, should) make the biggest difference—the
classroom. So, the pressures to prioritize
academic publication are keenly felt across the academic
ranks, and simply calling for more relevant work does
nothing to address those pressures or to change the ways
in which research is evaluated.
But equally important to those kinds of structures is
the way in which ideas are received. At some level,
reaching a broader audience—or even tailoring a project
into a fundable research project—might mean having to
change the ways in which issues are framed or couched,
and this, in turn, might raise conflicts with the value
of commitment. Commitment is unavoidably a part of
relevance, not a by-product of it or something that can
be somehow set aside for the time being. Making an idea
understandable to a different community than the one
within which it was developed might mean changing the
idea in ways that are incompatible with the moral and
political values that are the basis for relevance. The
boundary between research and its context is a hazy and
shifting one, but it, nonetheless, it is determinant. It is a
struggle for ideas, but researchers are not guaranteed
of winning that struggle or even necessarily guaranteed
of being able to control the conditions under which ideas
are produced.
And it is here that the complex pathways by which
research may become relevant can be understood. Most
of our researchers were committed to using their research
to achieve a particular vision of society. But in the
face of attitudes within society that did not always recognize
the importance of the issues that animated the
researchers, some sought to make their research pertinent
through teaching functions of various sorts—
through their courses, public speaking, working directly
with students, or working with other activists. Note the
phasing here: researchers sought to make their research
pertinent. Pertinence is not only a function of fitting research
to preexisting agendas but also can be a function
of direct political intervention. As Jennifer Wolch suggested,
a primary aim of many researchers is to reach
below the surface and bring to light issues and ways of
thinking that might change how people understand
problems or evaluate what is important. While researchers
might ultimately hope that their research will
be applicable, their commitment to a particular vision of
relevance for a just society requires a longer-term view
and a greater appreciation for the indirect pathways of
relevance than most of the debates about the issue allow.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by National Science
Foundation grant BCS-9819828; that support is greatly
appreciated. The article has benefited from the comments
of anonymous reviewers, the patience of Audrey
Kobayashi, and, of course, the insightful comments of
our respondents. As authors, we are equally responsible
for this article.
Notes
1. What follows is a summary of developments in human geography.
We leave it to others to trace the development of
physical geography and its changing relevance to other sciences
and society at large. What is obvious, though, is that
something akin to the revolution in theory that has transformed
human geography and placed it at the center of so
many critical social-theoretical debates, has been paralleled
by an impressive growth of physical geographic theory and
techniques that have likewise reasserted the centrality of
physical geography to environmental sciences.
2. One can argue that the mainstream of debate in SSK, especially
as represented by the so-called Edinburgh School,
has had little to say about ‘‘relevance as such.’’ That may, to
some extent, be true, but what is at stake is how we use the
ideas from SSK and related discourses in order to develop a
frame for interpreting discourses of practices of relevance in
our own field. Indeed, the whole point of the development
of the field of social studies of science has been to create
a means to turn a critical eye on the social practices of
knowledge production. In geography, concerns about, debates
over, and practices of relevance have been a central
part of our social practices. And while Edinburgh School
sociologists of science may not have interested themselves in
‘‘relevance as such,’’ they, and their interlocutors like Latour
(1987, 1996, 1999), have been deeply concerned not only
with how scientific (and other) knowledge is produced, but
also how it is used.
3. As noted, these interviews were conducted as part of a larger
study of public space in which the production of knowledge
(in its diversity) was a central concern. We set out to interview
all academic geographers based in the U.S. who have
published public space research on U.S. topics in the period
1945–1998. Thirty-three scholars were identified as fulfilling
these criteria. One person refused to be interviewed, six were
unavailable for interviews during the period we conducted
the research, and one had died. Respondents were given the
option of maintaining confidentiality. Six people maintained
their right to confidentiality; no names are associated with
quotations from these individuals. While our own research is
Staeheli and Mitchell370
related to public space, we did not interview each other: our
views on the topic will be apparent enough in this article.
4. Susan Hanson was one of the few AAG presidents to talk
about this issue in her columns. Her columns were also notable
for the references she made to her family. These references
suggest an additional sense of relevance in her
presidency—that our personal lives are relevant to the ways
in which we operate as a discipline.
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Correspondence: Program on Political and Economic Change, Institute of Behavioral Science, 487 UCB, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO
80309-0487, e-mail: lynner@colorado.edu (Staeheli); Department of Geography, 144 Eggers Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244-
1090, e-mail: Dmmitc01@maxwell.syr.edu (Mitchell).
Staeheli and Mitchell372