Human Geography, Social Science, the Arts and the HumanitiesAuthor(s): Felix DriverSource: Area, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Dec., 2001), pp. 431-434Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of BritishGeographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20004186 .

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Observations 431

Human geography, social science, the arts and

the humanities

Felix Driver Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 OEX

Email: f.driver@rhul.ac.uk

Revised manuscript received 27 June 2001

The foundation of the Social Science Research Council in 1965 marks an important moment in the evolving relationship between social science and government. It would be absurd to claim that British social science was inaugurated by this event, but the form it was to take at the end of the twentieth century was clearly shaped by the new institutional framework. The history of institutional funding and regulation of research is a vital but oddly neglected aspect of the development of scientific fields and disciplines, though it is evidently open to a wide variety of interpretations. The SSRC, for example, was the product of an age in which expertise, government and social welfare were locked tightly together: the management of society required the creation of appropriate institutional arrangements for the development of knowledge about that society. Seen from one perspective, such arrangements might be regarded as entirely benign, the product of a progressive alliance between the academy and the state; seen from another, they might be treated as symptomatic of a culture of government in which the autonomy of both the researchers and researched was ever more regulated. However, whatever the ethical stance, there is something unsatisfying in such summary views, if only because they fail to grasp the provisional and experimental aspects of the history of social science during this period. However one characterizes the 1 960s, the idea of experiment comes quickly to the fore and it is important not to forget that the 'new geography' had a share in this occasionally revolutionary commitment to change (Massey 1993).

In recent years, a more nuanced history of geog raphy's encounter with the idea and practice of

modern social science during the 1960s and 1970s has begun to emerge, notably in reappraisals of the quantitative turn in geography (Philo et al. 1998). At

the same time, closer attention has been devoted to the institutional forms through which geographical knowledge was produced and disseminated during this period -including not only organizations like the IBG or the SSRC, but also influential new academic journals like Environment and Planning (Thrift 1993) or Progress in Human Geography (Davey 2001). Writing the history of institutions presents its own problems, of course, especially

when the institutions concerned have (as they usually do) a stake in the story to be told. At their

most tiresome, institutional histories can become triumphal narratives, in which the institutions them selves are presented as the heroic subjects of a basically evolutionary tale in which only the fittest survive. What gets lost here are the complexities of historical change, as well as its contingency: maybe the subjects of these sorts of history are much less coherent-and, well, less important than they would like to admit.

Michael Chisholm's recollections not only provide an insider's view of a notable episode in the institu tional history of British geography: they also raise questions about the way we write about the recent history of our discipline. This is partly a matter of opening up the sources: in this case, Chisholm's initiative in donating to the RGS-IBG archive what appears to be a key unpublished text ('Human geography in relation to the social sciences') is much to be welcomed. It is also a matter of listening to

many different voices within and indeed beyond the university sector: here there are a variety of stories to be told. One of the striking features of Chisholm's narrative is its emphasis on contingency and differ ence: the new institutional arrangements he writes of

were clearly not inevitable nor universally approved. His emphasis on the scepticism of many British historical geographers raises some interesting ques

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432 Observations

tions, though the portrait that emerges in his account

is not quite that of a set of head-in-the-sand

reactionaries the involvement of figures such as

Dick Lawton and Harold Carter in discussions over

human geography's relationship with SSRC suggests

at least that there were differences in the degree to

which historically sensitive geographers were pre

pared to embrace the new ideas and techniques being advocated within the subject at large. (The first

SSRC human geography and planning panel, chaired

by Chisholm, also included Bill Mead and J. Wreford Watson). It is worth noting here that many of the

most influential human geographers who came to

prominence in the 1 960s and 1 970s had undertaken

substantial historical research at postgraduate level:

these would include, for example, David Harvey,

David Smith and Brian Robson. Certainly, the notion

that 'historical geography' was generally hostile to

the techniques and ideas of social science needs some qualification (cf. Baker 1972).

It is interesting to pause here to reflect on the ways in which the SSRC did and did not matter to human geographers in the decades following its

foundation. In Chisholm's account, human geogra phy is led to 'join' the SSRC much as a nation might

join the European Union. Just as Britain was to take

the plunge into Europe in 1973, so too human

geography was led (in the second round, along with

planning and economic and social history)1 into the

community of social science a referendum in one

case, a circular to departments in the other. Such an

analogy opens up some intriguing questions about the politics of professional life. But it is rather less

convincing when it comes to the constitutional posi

tion, as it were, of human geography with respect to

the SSRC. The SSRC had no monopoly of research

funding in human geography. For example, the influ

ential Centre for Environmental Studies, another

child of the 1960s, was jointly funded by the Ford

Foundation and central government, and in more

recent years other foundations (including Lever

hulme and Wellcome) have played significant roles in the funding of geographical projects. The same

might be said about postgraduate research, even that

funded from the public purse: as a recipient of a DES

studentship myself, I have my own personal recollec tions of the continuing role of non-SSRC public support for human geography. The successors of the

DES responsible for postgraduate grants in the

humanities (the British Academy, and latterly the Arts

and Humanities Research Board) have continued to

support human geographers. Taking the last 35 years

as a whole, the proportion of the total number of

human geography postgraduates in British Higher

Education who have actually received support from

SSRC or ESRC (or indeed any of the Research

Councils) must be relatively small. Of course, the

agenda of the SSRC and its successor has clearly had

a big influence on research and research training

within human geography, so that today its influence is proportionately much greater than the volume of

research it actually funds: nonetheless, it remains one

organization amongst many. Perhaps the relationship between human geography and the SSRC might

better be conceived as one of engagement than one

of membership: in this perspective, it is less a matter

of human geography joining this or that funding

body than of geographers gaining access to its

resources on certain terms. What those resources

were, and the precise terms of the bargain, is a much more complicated question, which has frequently

been a subject for robust debate in the pages of this journal (Smith 1981 1983; Robson 1982;

McKendrick and McCormick 1993; Hoggart 1999).2 The fact that historical geographers and others

continued to receive funding from bodies other than SSRC, including bodies whose primary purpose was

to fund humanities research, suggests that the incor

poration of human geography within the SSRC

model was not only contested (as Chisholm points

out) but was also incomplete. One of the grossest

simplifications of standard narratives of the 'quanti tative revolution' or the 'new geography' peddled in

the 1 970s was the tendency to treat intellectual

change in either-or, before-after terms: goodbye regional geography, hello positivism, and so forth.

Such versions of what actually happened to geogra

phy and geographers in the second half of the

twentieth century failed to acknowledge not only the

continuing heterogeneity of the field (both within

the English-speaking world and beyond it) but also

the various interactions between different traditions

and approaches. Looking back, it is clear that the

comparative health of human geography over the

last 1 5 years has owed as much to its engagement with the humanities and to the arts, as to its relation

ship with the 'social sciences' (Cosgrove 1 982; Lowenthal 1992; Driver 1 993). Far from being immu

table, these categories have themselves evolved over time. Indeed, the distinctions on which they depend (between for example interpretation and analysis, pure and applied research, individual scholarship and

teamwork, or reflection and explanation) have been

profoundly challenged by intellectual developments

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Observations 433

across the academy since the 1 960s. Nonetheless, it is very difficult to account for the development of human geography in the last 20 years without acknowledging the debt to ideas and models of research commonly associated with disciplines in the humanities and the creative arts, including for example history, anthropology, literature, philosophy, theatre, art and design.

Intellectual shifts are one thing; institutional arrangements another. In a sense, this is the key

message of Chisholm's recollections: the fortunes of a discipline depend on the mobilization of influence and support as well as the pursuit of knowledge for itself. Equally, changes in the way research is con ceived and conducted may reflect more than simply institutional priorities. This poses a particular chal lenge to research funding bodies, especially where questions of remit are concerned. The need to carve up the cake of public funding on an administratively convenient basis may dictate one solution; the evolv ing pattern of intellectual inquiry another. Hence the continual effort to demarcate the sorts of research that bodies such as ESRC, NERC and AHRB will fund,

when intellectually it is clear there is a large amount of overlap between the remits of these bodies. There is no neat solution to this problem, which is merely

one variant of a wider feature of developments across the sciences, social sciences, arts and humani ties. Indeed, there is a good case for arguing that

much innovation not only goes on across boundaries between conventionally defined disciplines and fields, but may actually bring those boundaries into question.

The foundation of the SSRC provided an oppor tunity for human geographers to exploit the potential of a new institutional configuration. Chisholm expressed just this view in a paper published in the very first issue of Area in 1 969: 'If, in the Darwinian sense, survival depends on adaptation, we must recognise the nature of the new influences to which one should adapt, among which, of course, the SSRC is only one' (Chisholm 1969, 9). It seems appropriate therefore to conclude this commentary by noting the challenges posed to geographers within and indeed beyond the University sector by the establishment (in 1998) of another new funding body in the UK: the Arts and Humanities Research Board. The similarities and differences between these two moments intellectually, institutionally and politically provide much food for thought. But for the present let us follow the spirit of Michael

Chisholm's recollections and consider what geogra

phers have to gain by engaging with the AHRB, a

body with substantial resources at its disposal and a significantly wider remit than its predecessors. In its first three years of operation, the AHRB has not only established an extraordinarily broad and inclusive agenda for researchers within the humanities and the creative arts: it has also quite explicitly incorporated aspects of human geography within its purview, including interpretative, imaginative and creative dimensions of cultural geography, historical geogra phy and the history of geography. This presents exciting opportunities for geographers and the signs are that they are being taken up. Geography in general, and human geography in particular, has never simply been a social science: let us make the most of the opportunity to show why.

Notes

1 As the SSRC itself put it in its first Newsletter: 'When the

SSRC was first set up it was concerned immediately with

training in the social science subjects which were rela tively easy to delimit and on which the transfer of

postgraduate awards could be made fairly quickly. These did not include human geography, planning or economic and social history' (SSRC 1967, 1 1). For a more general

account of the politics of the establishment of SSRC, see

King (1998). 2 Readers unfamiliar with these debates, which emerged in

the context of the restructuring of higher education during the early 1 980s, may find the exchange between

Smith (1981) and Robson (1982) particularly interesting. Smith argued that the human geography committee of the SSRC was reinforcing a state-sponsored technocratic and positivist approach to research, a claim dismissed by

Robson as an emotive appeal to academic freedom. The

SSRC was renamed the ESRC with effect from January

1984. On the wider political debate over the SSRC in the

early 1980s, see Flather (1987).

References

Baker A R H ed 1972 Progress in historical geography David

& Charles, Newton Abbott Chisholm M 1969 Social science research in geography

Area 1 8-9 Cosgrove D E ed 1982 Geography and the humanities

occasional paper 5 Loughborough University of Tech nology, Department of Geography

Davey J 2001 25 not out Progress in Human Geography 25 1 -3

Driver F 1 993 Back to the future of geography Environment

and Planning A anniversary issue 22-5

Flather P 1987 Pulling through: conspiracies, counterplots and how the SSRC escaped the axe in 1982 in Bulmer M

ed Social science research and government CUP,

Cambridge 353-72

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434 Observations

Hoggart K 1999 Worries on disciplinary trends Area 31

373-6 King D 1998 The politics of social research: institutionaliz

ing public funding regimes in the US and Britain British journal of Political Science 28 415-44

Lowenthal D 1992 Geography misconstrued as social science Area 24 158-60

McKendrick J and McCormick J 1993 Postgraduate condi tions and the ESRC's postgraduate training guidelines

Area 25 1 7-29

Massey D 1 993 The different sides of the 'sixties Environ ment and Planning A anniversary issue 10-1 3

Philo C, Mitchell R and More A 1998 Reconsidering

quantitative geography: the things that count Environ ment and Planning A 30 191-201

Robson B T 1982 SSRC: David as Goliath Area 14 61-4

Smith D M 1981 SSRC rules: a critique of the new

postgraduate training scheme Area 1 3 263-7

1983 SSRC and the demise of human geography Area

15 42-4

Social Science Research Council 1967 New SSRC subjects SSRC Newsletter 1 11-12

Thrift N ed 1993 Anniversary issue Environment and Plan ningA 1-103

Working at the coalface: contract staff,

academic initiation and the RAE

Nicola Shelton,1 Caitriona Ni Laoire,7 Shaun Fielding,3 David C Harvey,4 Mark Pelling5 and Oliver Duke-Williams6

'Mother and Infant Research Unit, University of Leeds, 22 Hyde Terrace, Leeds LS2 9LN

Email: midnjs(medphysics.leeds.ac.uk

2NIRSA, NUI Maynooth, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland

3Park Consulting, Smithfield House, 12 North Street, Leeds LS2 9LN

4School of Geography and Archaeology, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4RJ

5Department of Geography, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3BX

6School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT

*AII authors are Members of the Committee of the Contract Research and Teaching Staff Forum of the RGS/IBG

Revised manuscript received 4 October 2001

Introducing the issues

Ideally, one's initial years in academia should be a period of reflection and growth, stimulated by the exposure to varied and challenging intellectual and professional experiences. For many staff, this initia tion is a relatively unproblematic process, but changing structures in the academic labour market increasingly mean that this period becomes either never-ending or so fraught with difficulties that academic careers are undermined or abandoned. Of course, very few teaching or research contracts are necessarily 'destructive', but the increasing prolifer ation of fixed-term contracts is very real, and so too is the casualization of academic labour that goes

hand in hand with this process. There is a prevailing sense of doing one's time at a dark coalface before being accepted into the profession. The aim of the Contract Research and Teaching Staff Forum (CRTSF) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) is to raise awareness of the implications of fixed-term contracts in Geography and to provide support for those who are engaged on such contracts. In this short paper,

we aim to stimulate a debate around contract work ing with particular reference to the role of the

Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and to outline some guidelines for best departmental practice.

The use of fixed-term and short-term contracts in higher education has been steadily increasing over

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