Professionalizing Geography - amazonia.fiocruz.br

Professionalizing Geography Video

Review History.

Executive Summary

Meanwhile postcolonial critics have argued more broadly that the same violent processes that produced colonial power Professionalizing Geography produced scientific knowledge. These critics have brilliantly theorized the ways in which science and power were related, but paid less attention to how experts instrumentalized knowledge in particular settings, or to the unintended consequences of scientific research carried out within the asymmetrical power relations of empire. Two new books about Professionalizing Geography agents of empire promise to further complicate our understanding of the relationship between scientific knowledge and modern European imperialism, and to open new avenues for inquiry.

Officialdom in Africa now turned — often grudgingly - to experts to generate the facts needed to rationalize economic policy, and experts responded to the call, but not always with the kinds of facts expected. Her conclusions, stated upfront, are sophisticated and nuanced. Responsible use of science today requires understanding past abuses committed in its name, as well as recovering its occasionally subversive https://amazonia.fiocruz.br/scdp/blog/story-in-italian/the-organization-s-success-with-diversity.php. Professionalizing Geography order to explore scientific and interventionist colonialism, Tilley focuses on the most important intelligence-gathering project of the interwar era, the quasi-official African Research Survey, and its impact on the Professionalizing Geography of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Nigeria and Ghana.

Led by Sir Malcolm Hailey, the Survey operated between and A collection of pro-empire academics, officials in the Colonial Office, and public intellectuals conceived the Survey, to assess the state of knowledge https://amazonia.fiocruz.br/scdp/blog/purdue-owl-research-paper/biofuels-the-best-alternative-for-fossil-fuels.php Africa, develop strategies for further research, and recommend ways to integrate this research into policy-making. She also investigates the patronage systems https://amazonia.fiocruz.br/scdp/blog/purpose-of-case-study-in-psychology/causes-and-effects-of-bullying-in-schools.php professional structures that conditioned the production of knowledge nationally and internationally. Scientists certainly benefited from the unprecedented opportunity to work in Africa that late European colonialism provided them.

Phd thesis chapter 3

But the knowledge they gathered did not only dehumanize the peoples they came to investigate. The book is divided into seven chapters. The remaining chapters provide case studies of groups involved in the Survey. Chapter Three explores how agricultural departments second only to medical departments adopted an ecological perspective to revise Provessionalizing assumptions about the fertility of African soil and wasteful African farming methods.

Here too, European experts began to learn from Africans and reconsider their initial assumptions, albeit without challenging the rights of the colonizer. Chapter Five takes up the question of why interwar fact-gatherers devoted so few of their resources to research on racial difference, given that all colonial regimes were based on Professionalizing Geography foundations. Rather, colonial administrators were becoming wary of the destabilizing effects of racial prejudice, while scientists internationally were questioning the ontological reality of race as biologically Professionalizing Geography.

With Malinowski leading the charge in the s, a new generation of functionalist anthropologists sought to understand and explain existing conditions in African societies — not to freeze them in a timeless present, but to mitigate the destructive impact of Professionalizing Geography capitalism. The history of the African Survey, she argues, proves that all scientific research circulates both locally and globally in ways that its producers cannot control — even when this research is sponsored by imperial governments seeking solutions to problems of colonial governance. Professionalizing scientists in the field could and often did maintain their distance from policy-making: their training Professionaliizing them to they look for the very kind of complexity in human societies that overburdened administrators or their superiors did not have time to consider.

Particular political contexts and historical actors shaped the kinds of debates that occurred, sometimes for the better. Certain experts tried to change this situation by founding such disciplines as colonial geography, colonial history, colonial Professionalizing Geography and economy, continue reading colonial psychology — all with Gography aim to making French imperialism more scientific. A shorter Part Two analyzes the content of these new disciplines. The s and s were a period of university reform and Professionalizing Geography of the human sciences, expansion of commercial and applied sciences, and renewed imperial aggression; all three developments facilitated the institutionalization of these new Geoggraphy. Who taught these sciences, and who financed the new positions?]