Theme issue: What next?

摘要

The papers assembled in this issue of Environment and Planning A were written in response to a call for commentaries on the topic of 'What Next?', which also formed the title of a paper session at the 2002 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Los Angeles, California (the session and this special issue were coorganized by Mitch Rose). The question was intended to provoke reflection on the pasts and futures of geographical theorizing in light of some thirty-plus years of scholarly encounters with critical social theory. These engagements―or 'lines of flight' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) if one reads them as disengagements―are well-known: initially involving Marxism, feminism, and phenomenology in the 1970s, they grew to encompass critical realism and structure - agency theories in the mid-1980s, and were followed by the rise of post-structuralist approaches in the 1990s. So, as we entered a new decade without a clear successor to poststructuralism, it was reasonable to expect that our question was posed with an anticipatory air: what new, cutting-edge theory could further facilitate geography's shift away from a naive scientism and towards a reflexive, grounded problematization of the discipline's ontological and epistemological traditions?