Controverse à propos de la venue de Jared Diamond à un énorme congrès de géographie aux Etats-Unis.
https://dl.dropbox.com/s/it55ije6xi4995d/jareddiamond.jpg
La liste de géographie critique s’est enflammée à propos de la venue de Jared Diamond au grand congrès annuel des géographes américains (AAG 2013) qui se tient cette année à Los Angeles.
C’est Jamison Miller, du John Tyler Community College en Virginie (Etats-Unis) qui ouvre le bal :
While I am in the middle of designing the last section of my Intro to Cultural Geography course, I am jollily uploading Jim Blaut’s 1999 article devouring Diamond, and the slew of 2003 articles from the special edition of Antipode on the same lines. I’m still figuring out how to explain how he is welcomed at the AAG to my students.
Is anyone planning to oppose/heckle Diamond’s talk on what we can learn from freaking “traditional societies” at our AAG in LA?
John Paul Catunga, géographe à l’universté de de Totonto poursuit en racontant son expérience (et son dégoût) lorsqu’il a participé au AAG 2007 :
He also gave a keynote talk at the San Francisco AAG (2007) where he talked partly about Papua New Guinea coming into modernity with the arrival of an airport. I was then an MA student and was utterly shocked and livid. It was my first AAG and I was really not sure what avenues there were to voice my displeasure and concern.
It remains one of the ugliest moments of any AAG for me.
Why is he welcomed at the AAG? Probably in no small part because he is appointed to a department of geography and probably because he is well known and therefore “relevant”.
This reminds me of David Harvey’s 1974 piece “What kind of geography for what kind of public policy?” in which he argues that we need to examine what kind of relevance we want geography to play, mentioning of course that Pinochet was a geographer...
With all the commendable focus on geographies of racialization that the AAG has focused on recently, I sure hope we could be more reflexive: why we feature environmental determinist and racist scholarship in marquee events such as AAG keynotes?
Filippo Celata, de l’Université de Rome propose avec une grande sagesse :
...Wouldn’t it be an option to listen to Diamond’s talk and to “oppose” him with critical questions?
I attended to Krugman’s talk at the AAG in 2010 and even if I think his “geographical” theories are limited and dangerous, I have been happy we had the chance to tell him and to listen to his replies....
Lire aussi
Lunch with the FT : Jared Diamond
By David Pilling
▻http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/144fa854-82e2-11de-ab4a-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2P1DsRs8b
