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地理卓越學術講座系列
Geography Distinguished Seminars Series
The crusading geographical life of a radical American geographer: William Bunge (1928-2013)
Date: 26 FEB 2025 (Wednesday)
Time: 16:00-17:30 (HKT)
Venue: Chamber, Faculty of Social Science, 11/F, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Registration link: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=98837
Abstract:
The crusading radical American geographer William Wheeler Bunge (1928-2013) was never allowed to keep any academic job he had. Nevertheless, he made a series of seminal contributions to Geography. A long-time communist, he was centrally concerned with society’s marginalized, using geographical methods and techniques to empower them, to improve their lot. He believed Geography was an instrument, a means, to better the world, and he directed his considerable energy, intellectual and political, to that end. His first major contribution was philosophical and technical. A graduate student at the University of Washington during the late 1950s, his doctoral dissertation was both a vigorous philosophical justification of geography as spatial science and an exemplification of that approach’s theories and methods. Published in 1962 as Theoretical Geography, the volume is one of the lasting contributions of the discipline's quantitative revolution. The second contribution was quite different, albeit judged equally as innovative and durable. It was his 1971 book Fitzgerald, a study of the one-square mile inner-city neighbourhood in which Bunge lived in Detroit, 1961-1970. It is both a historical account and a contemporary political and economic analysis of racialization and its consequences found in that square mile. As a book there has been nothing like it before or since. His last two contributions are less well known although very much following from the earlier works. The Canadian Alternative (1975), jointly written with Ron Bordessa in Toronto after Bunge self-exiled to Canada, continued and extended Bunge’s expeditionary work in Detroit. And the Nuclear War Atlas published in 1988 deployed novel cartographical techniques to warn about the effects of nuclear Armageddon and thus also serving as a deterrent.
Speaker:
Professor Trevor J Barnes
Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Canada
Trevor Barnes is a UBC Distinguished University Scholar, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC), and Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). He is the recipient of the Canadian Association of Geographer’s Award for Scholarly Distinction, the Presidential Award for Distinguished Achievement by the American Association of Geographers, and the British Royal Geographical Society’s Founder’s Gold Medal. He is highly regarded as one of the world’s 66 key thinkers on space and place. His research and writings have been primarily in economic geography, and the history and philosophy of geography.
Moderator:
Chair Professor of Geography & Associate Dean (Research), Faculty of Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong
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