Making Geography Matter: The Past and Present of a Changing Discipline

What is the purpose of Geography? What do geographers study and why? How do they seek to shape the world they interrogate?

This book addresses these questions by examining the lives and works of individual geographers, both past and present. Like all disciplines, Geography is no more nor less than the collective endeavours of researchers and teachers operating in specific contexts. The contexts both shape, and are shaped by, these individuals. This book’s biographical and autobiographical chapters transport readers to the times and places where geographers have sought to make Geography matter. The result is a more vivid, grounded understanding of the discipline than the many high-level surveys of geographic thought paradigms currently written for university students.

This book’s accessible essays each conclude with a study task. Making Geography Matter is aimed at university students and their teachers who wish to understand the goals, history and evolving practice of Geography. It provides an alternative perspective – both concrete and engaging – to the many student-focussed texts that map out numerous ‘isms and ologies’.

Noel Castree has worked at the universities of Manchester, Wollongong and Liverpool, and the University of Technology Sydney. He is managing editor of the journals Progress in Human Geography and Environment and Planning F. He is author of the books What Future For the Earth? (2025) and Making Sense of Nature (2013).

Trevor Barnes is Professor and Distinguished University Scholar at the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where he has been since 1983. His research is in economic geography and on the post-war history of human geography. He is both a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy.

Jennifer Salmond is Professor Physical Geography at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is a physical geographer whose research interests include urban meteorology, air pollution, climatology and critical physical geography.