27 FEB 2026 (FRI) 14:00-15:30

Geography Distinguished Seminars Series

The Case for a More Critical Geographical Take on Widely Accepted Regional Conceptions

Date: 27 FEB 2026 (Friday)

Time: 14:00-15:30 (HKT)

Venue: CLL, Department of Geography, 10/F, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Mode: Hybrid

Via Zoom: Zoom link will be provided upon successful registration

Registration link: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=105212

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Abstract:

As a discipline concerned with spatial arrangements and understandings, one of geography’s signal contributions is to promote critical thinking about regions. Yet geographers have been largely silent in the face of the growing tendency to embrace global geographical imaginaries that divide the world along generalized socioeconomic lines or meso-scale regional imaginaries grounded in generalized historical or cultural conceptions. In a related vein, the growing use of AI has the potential to direct attention away from critical thinking about regions because AI queries about regions tend to reflect the blind spots and problematic assumptions that infuse much general thinking about regional arrangements and divisions. Examples from different scales (substate, continental, and global) point to the challenge of promoting critical thinking about regions at the contemporary moment. Recognizing and drawing attention to this challenge could offer geographers new opportunities to draw attention to why geographic thinking is needed in the fast-changing world we inhabit.

Professor Alexander B. Murphy

Professor Emeritus of Geography, The University of Oregon (USA)

Visiting Research Professor, Department of Geography, HKU

Alexander B. Murphy is Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Oregon (phased retirement, 2019-2024), where he held the James F. and Shirley K. Rippey Chair in Liberal Arts and Sciences from 1998-2019. He specializes in political, cultural, and environmental geography, with regional emphases in Europe and the Middle East. He was elected to membership in the Academia Europaea in 2014, he is a Past President of the Association of American Geographers, and he is currently Senior Vice President of the American Geographical Society. He co-edited Progress in Human Geography for eleven years, and Eurasian Geography and Economics for eight years. In the late 1990s he led the effort to add geography to the College Board’s Advanced Placement Program. In the early 2000s he chaired the National Academy of Sciences — National Research Council Committee charged with identifying “Strategic Directions for the Geographical Sciences.”

Alexander Murphy is the author of more than 100 articles and several books, including The Regional Dynamics of Language Differentiation in Belgium (University of Chicago, 1988), Cultural Encounters with the Environment (edited with Douglas Johnson; Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), Geography: Why It Matters (Polity Press, 2018), Human Geography: People, Place, and Culture 12th ed. (with Erin Fouberg; Wiley, 2020), and The European Culture Area, 7th ed. (with Terry Jordan-Bychkov and Bella Bychkova Jordan; Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Fulbright-Hays Research Grant in 1985, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1991, a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in the mid-1990s, a National Council for Geographic Education Distinguished Teaching Award in 2001, Gilbert Grosvenor Honors for Geographic Education from the Association of American Geographers in 2008, a Queen Mary (University of London) Distinguished Visiting Fellowship in 2009, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency Fellowship in 2011, a University of Oregon Thomas Herman Distinguished Teaching Award in 2012, and the Association of American Geographers’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014.

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