The Geographical State: The Development of Canadian Geography

Abstract

The purposes of this paper are to discuss the historical emergence of academic geography in Canada, and how it has been tied closely to the nation-state. Canadian geography is not simply a slice from a pre-existing disciplinary block but has been actively formed and moulded by a set of evolving national imperatives determined and coordinated by the state. Justification for this larger argument derives from science studies which aver that context, in this case the national one of Canada, enters into the very lineaments of knowledge. The paper is divided into three main sections. The first is a conceptual discussion drawn from science studies of the relation between national context and disciplinary knowledge. The second sets out the historical development of Canadian geography from the seventeenth century until the inaugural meeting of the Canadian Association of Geographers in 1951. The final section reviews the subsequent 50 years of Canadian geography by focusing on four important moments within the discipline's history, each of which reflects in various forms the nation-state: the quantitative revolution, humanistic geography, the development of GIS, and immigration and the Metropolis project.

Becoming a geographical scientist: oral histories of Arctic fieldwork

“…Against the importance that Johnston attributes to those employed by universities, historians need to maintain a much broader sense of the identity ‘geographer’. This contradicts the arguments of Barnes (2007) about geographical activity in post‐war Canada. For Barnes (2007), Canada lacked geographers when compared to those holding university positions in Britain or the US.…”

“…This contradicts the arguments of Barnes (2007) about geographical activity in post‐war Canada. For Barnes (2007), Canada lacked geographers when compared to those holding university positions in Britain or the US. But geographers existed outside the nascent institutionalisation of Canadian academic departments.…”

“…This passage begins to suggest the growth of networks between the PCSP and the geographical establishment, exemplified in the Commonwealth connections of the RGS. Barnes (2007) has argued for the important influence of state institutions, such as through the creation of Federal mapping agencies, in the development of the discipline of geography in Canada. These reflections complicate Barnes's argument by suggesting the persistence of other complementary and competing networks of allegiance within the embodied constitution of the Canadian state and Commonwealth geography.…”

“…A systematic investigation is undertaken here of the connections between field science in the Arctic and a developing geographical imagination in Canada. Relatively little has been written about the histories of the discipline in Canada, although Trevor Barnes (2007) has provided a recent account that stresses the importance of the role of Federal agencies. This neglect of past geographical practices in Canada is surprising, given the central role of geography in the national imagination (Powell 2005).…”

James Mavor: Forerunner in Canadian geography

“…Mavor is credited with being the first university‐based social scientist in Canada to do what we today call contract research (Drummond , 29). Trevor Barnes argues that the state is important in the development of geography in Canada (Barnes ). Mavor's report on the North West supports that proposition.…”