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The ‘International’ in Geography: Concepts, Actors, Challenges

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A Geographical Century

Abstract

This chapter critically interrogates the notion of the ‘international’ in the discipline of geography. Drawing on interdisciplinary conceptual debates about internationalisation strategies in higher education, the analysis compares the geographical reach of the four International Geographical Congresses (IGCs) in Paris 1984, Sydney 1988, Cologne 2012, and Beijing 2016. This chapter shows that between the last decade of the Cold War and the greater geopolitical multiverse in the first decade of the twenty-first century, geographical knowledge production and exchange not only diversified and decentralised on a global scale but also experienced a profound shift from a distinct Anglo-American internationalism towards a more complex multicultural internationalism. Consequently, I argue that the international nature of geographical knowledge production and exchange is relational because international conference experiences vary by the geopolitical, socio-economic, cultural, linguistic, and academic positionality of the event and its participants. Policy-relevant conclusions highlight the great value of the IGCs for facilitating international experiences for growing numbers of attendees from the events’ host countries; they stress the important politics of choosing host cities in different world regions and offering flexible conference delivery formats and registration options; and they call for a greater emphasis on the development of intercultural skills to achieve more equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in geography.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Analysing the national reach of two academic conference series in urban and regional planning in Brazil from 2004 to 2013 has shown that the geographies of these biannually organised cyclical centres of circulation decentralised on the national level over time, but that this process varied in regard to the conferences’ material, social, and intellectual dimensions (Momm and Jöns 2020). Materially, the conference locations of the mobile event series focused on state capitals in coastal states and that of the immobile conference series on a medium-sized city in the most southern state. Socially, the workplaces of conference paper authors acquired national reach but clustered in the scientifically most resourceful and productive southeastern and southern regions. Intellectually, geographical knowledges and imaginations communicated in conference presentations showed the widest geographical reach within the country but were shaped by similar east-west and south-north disparities as the authors’ workplaces.

  2. 2.

    The 34th IGC in Istanbul, scheduled as an in-person meeting in August 2020, was first postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic by one year and then held virtually from 16 to 18 August 2021. For details, see Turkey Geographical Society (2021).

  3. 3.

    The data sources used for the analysis list conference participants: Comité International d’Organisation (1985, 204–208), International Geographical Union (1988, 61–94), Butsch (2021) on checked-in participants at the IGC Cologne 2012 (see also Butsch 2015, 136–137 on registered participants before the conference on 15 July 2012), and Geographical Society of China (2016, 4–5).

  4. 4.

    This methodology of a comparison of countries with at least ten participants was applied in reports on the IGC Paris 1984 (Dalmasso 1986, 157) and the IGC Beijing 2016 (Geographical Society of China 2016, 4–5). Different numbers of participants at one and the same IGC may be linked to varying pre- and post-conference registration numbers (Kish 1972, 35). At the IGC 2012 in Cologne, 310 of 2,864 registered conference participants (11%) did not visit the congress (Butsch 2015, 136), but this chapter analyses checked-in candidates. The terminology suggests that the published lists of participants at the IGCs in Paris 1984 and Sydney 1988 and the statistics on participants at the IGC 2016 in Beijing also refer to actual conference attendees (see note 3).

  5. 5.

    The COMECON participants of 1984 worked in Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the USSR, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia, whereas in 1988, out of these ten COMECON countries, delegates did not participate from Cuba, Romania, and Vietnam.

  6. 6.

    The IGC 2012 in Cologne replaced the Biannual Meeting of German Geographers scheduled for 2011 and thus encouraged a large contingent of domestic geographers to attend.

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Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the support of Bruno Schelhaas who kindly made available materials from the Archive for Geography at the Leibniz-Institute of Regional Geography in Leipzig when it was inaccessible during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sincere thanks are also due to Carsten Butsch, for his exemplary generosity of sharing statistics on the IGC 2012 in Cologne, and to Federico Ferretti, Vladimir Kolosov, and Bruno Schelhaas for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this text.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK

    Heike Jöns

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  1. Heike Jöns
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Correspondence to Heike Jöns .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

    Vladimir Kolosov

  2. Department of Humanities: History, Geography and Art, Carlos III University of Madrid, Getafe, Madrid, Spain

    Jacobo García-Álvarez

  3. School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Michael Heffernan

  4. Archive for Geography, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, Germany

    Bruno Schelhaas

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Jöns, H. (2022). The ‘International’ in Geography: Concepts, Actors, Challenges. In: Kolosov, V., García-Álvarez, J., Heffernan, M., Schelhaas, B. (eds) A Geographical Century. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05419-8_6

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