The Geographical Imagination

Today the NYTimes provided an incredible example of how they and others like them have the power to reorgazine space, time, and power through the geographical imagination. The newspaper labeled photographs of Michael Bloomberg’s two Victorian residences in New York City and London as the West Bank and East Bank in Diane Cardwell’s “Trans-Atlantic Living in the Bloomberg Style.” The labels given to the two photographs of these urban mansions equated the U.S. and Europe as the center of cosmopolitan upscale living with the Atlantic Ocean as our calm Seine River.  The resultant effect reads like David Harvey’s notion of “time-space compression”–globalization and modern capitalist economies pull us closer and closer together, as if he entire “developed,” Western world was the city around which the “rest’ of the world gathered.  As such, Cindi Katz’s “time-space expansion” comes out as well–when political and economic processes pull us closer together, we push others farther apart and suffer them to further disinvestment.  

The “geographical imagination” is a popular catchphrase in the geographical literature with multiple, often unclear definitions and framings. The concept of the geographical imagination developed from C. Wright Mills’ (1961) “sociological imagination,” a conceptual tool for use by individuals to compare their personal biographies to larger social structures within their specific historical era. David Harvey (1973) coined the “geographical imagination” as he built upon the sociological imagination by also examining politics and geographies at individual and structural levels of multiple scales. As such, Harvey argued it is a tool he developed for social and spatial justice that people could use to compare themselves not only to larger social structures but to see the similarities and differences across spaces and times to fight various forms of oppression. The geographical imagination had grown substantially by the time Derek Gregory (1993) formally re-defined it as the spatialized cultural and historical knowledge that characterizes social groups. Overall, I find that scholars often depend on some combination of three definitions of the term: Harvey’s definition, Gregory’s definition, and/or a simple and literal understanding of the term as how people—often geographers, specifically—imagine and render space.

I framed my investigation of the geographical imagination in three veins: major relevant theoretical framings/imaginings of space which were discussed above; its portrayal in physical images of spaces; and its role in promoting or preventing social justice. Examining the theories, methods, and ethics associated with the geographical imagination proved enlightening. Maps, mapping processes, and images of space are literal and figurative physical representations of the geographical imagination that portray–which provides another side to Gregory’s specifically social framing of the geographical imagination–both individual and shared spatial minds’ eyes. The effects of maps and spatial images on creating, sustaining, or ideas of perceived, conceived, and lived experiences and spaces were a fundamental framework or argument in all of the manuscripts. This reading shows the pervasiveness and powerful impact of the mental forms of spaces.

As the geographical imagination plays a role in producing notions of social and spatial reality, it necessarily plays a role in fighting oppression and sustaining justice, specifically by labeling injustice or helping to enact justice. Virginia Woolf’s (1929/2000) story of being denied access to the Oxford library for being a woman is an instance of labeling injustice. Read within its historic context and applied to other spaces to which people are denied access, her text is a revolutionary reframing of space to consider the possibility that she should be allowed entrance. Geographies were also re-imagined so that spaces or places are altered mentally and/or physically to enact different social and spatial possibilities. A vivid example is the Fed Up Honeys work of hanging stereotype stickers about and providing educational workshops on their limiting, stereotyped status as poor, urban women of color in New York City’s Lower East Side (Cahill 2006). From these readings it is evident that the geographical imagination can be used to understand power dynamics through formulations of space, and it is through interactions with real and imagined spaces that framings of space and overall consciousness are altered.

In my work and readings in other feminist/queer research, I find it is necessary to consider both the “imagined” and “real” elements of space as equally important in characterizing spaces and for relaying individual’s own self-definition related to spaces. Therefore, from these readings and research experiences, I define the geographical imagination as not only the conceptual spatial frame of the mind’s eye and minds’ eyes that can be used to understand power dynamics, connections between identity and space, and the production of meanings and myths of spaces and those individuals within them, but it is also individuals’ and group’s tool for determining their literal and metaphoric place(s) in the world. It is a personal, sometimes shared, portrayal of both imagined and real spaces and places that encompass the logic, emotion, power dynamics, and meaning of spaces in their specific time and era. It is consciously and unconsciously produced, reproduced, and reworked by the individual or social group through reiterated actions within the cultural, economic, political, and historical context of that person or group, and, in doing so, this process is formed by and forms individuals and shared identities. Lastly, it is my position that the geographical imagination is both a concept and tool that encompasses the three major definitions which, in my opinion, comprehensively describe the use of the geographical imagination today as well as fulfill its efforts as a tool for social and spatial justice.

This is only my initial framework for the geographical imagination which is the major framework for my research projects and cultural analysis.  My ideas around and definition of the geographical imagination will continue to grow through future work in order to make this conceptual tool more robust and useful for society at large as well as the discipline of geography.  Pdf copies of my reading lists can be found below.

Gieseking - Orals Reading List - The Geographical Imagination

Gieseking - Orals Reading List - Intersections of Gender, Sexuality, and Space.pdf

I define environmental psychology as how people relate to and define spaces and places, and how spaces and places relate to and define people. I take as my starting point Lefebvre’s argument that “[social] space is [socially] produced.” We produce space / space produces us; this falls under an interactionist approach to human-environment relations whereby what is of interest to the researcher is the interaction between humans and environments. The field was founded in 1968 with the first program at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Geography is the study of spaces, places, and the people, groups, cultures, societies, systems, institutions, and political economies within them. Since Eratosthenes defined the discipline some time around 200 BCE, geography has historically been divided–primarily by Anglo-Westerners–into four interrelated trends: maps and what they are about, characterizing a place, tracing the interaction between humans and the environment, and the study of natural processes regarding physical objects (Pattison 1964). As a geographer, I consider myself a

• human geographer - studying human-environment interactions
• feminist geographer - studying the spaces of women, issues of gender and space, and using feminist theories and methodologies to create more encompassing ideas of scale, power, and authority
• queer geographer - studying the spaces/lives of queers & using queer theory to upend harmful spatial binaries
• economic geographer - studying the connections and breakdowns between economies and spaces and the mutual production of each
• cartographer - studying and producing maps

That’s all well and good but still you wonder: what’s the difference between environmental psychology and geography? The former does its best to consider humans and their environments with equal interest, while the latter makes space primary in its study. I tend to move between the two frameworks because I see a great importance in placing people and/or the spaces first according to demands of the research, but I identify foremost as a geographer.

Welcome. My name is Jen Gieseking and I am a geographer and Ph.D. Candidate in environmental psychology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

The primary purpose of this blog is to work through the question of and findings from my dissertation research project: to understand how lesbian/queer women’s everyday spaces and their associated economies in New York City have remained the same or changed over generations since 1983, and how they could do so while facing severe oppression. From a study performed in 1983, Manuel Castells (1985) argued that gay men in San Francisco developed a physical and social place/community by geographical gains intertwined with both unintentional and intentional cultural and economic shifts and decisions. The majority of research done on LGBTQ spaces since this period assumes geographical territorialization as a key tactic for gaining rights for LGBTQ people and a way of everyday queer life that creates communities of recognition and acceptance. My research begins where Castells leaves off in 1983 and, furthermore, seeks to fill the gap the literature has created by not examining how modes of oppression and resistance have shifted over time/generations in place rather than one specific LGBTQ space at one moment in time/generation. I use the terms “time” and “generation” often simultaneously because lesbians/queer women most often develop their identities as lesbians and/or queers under the tutelage of other LGBTQ person, and/or through LGBTQ music, art, literature, movies, etc. Therefore, a coherent, organized, and diverse history of most aspects of LGBTQ life has often been impossible to gather as of yet. I am specifically interested in lesbian/queer women’s spaces as these studies have been significantly less in number than studies of gay men’s spaces, and at times speak both to the oppression of women and/or queers in general. It is the aim of this research to discover the shifts in the overall oppression of and tyranny toward the lesbian/queer women population, and what forms of resistance over time/generations and which conditions for such resistance have been useful in fighting such oppression.

This blog also provides an open forum to discuss my other research interests including: the geographic concept of scale; mental mapping methodology; social/spatial (in)justice around issues of identity; social and physical campuses and their colleges; and the intersections of public space, identity, and neoliberalism. Other interests will develop over time and I will list each of these as categories on this blog, particularly methodologies of interest, aspects of pedagogy, and important news, media, and art events, stories, and works that relate to my work.

I frame my research through the theoretical concept of the geographical imagination, which is most easily defined as the spatialized cultural and historical knowledge that characterizes individuals and social groups and helps to configure how people imagine and render space. The geographical imagination can be used a tool for spatial and social justice as individuals use it to compare their personal biographies to larger social, political, and geographical structures within their specific historical era to see the connections between people across spaces and times. While I built this comprehensive definition from the readings within my second doctoral exam / orals, I seek to extend and test this definition to make it more robust and useful throughout my discussion of my research projects.

I welcome you to comment in order to provide feedback on my dissertation, research interests, and the other content I will include that is essential or closely tangential to my work.