On the Trail of Transformative Ideas: Geographical Political Economies of Ideation

The multifaceted relationship between “ideas” and transformative social, political-economic, and institutional change has proved to be a complex and sometimes confounding one, defying reductionist or parsimonious explanation. It is said that ideas matter most in times—and places—of crisis or accelerated change; in-between, they may be taken for granted, or become commonsense. But how to tell? Some researchers choose to work from the “inside-out,” from thinkers, theories, and texts outward to imputed effects and echoes in the world. Others opt to work from the “outside-in,” deciphering ideational signs and signals from the cacophony of events and experiences. Both approaches yield valuable insights, but neither comes close to substituting for the other, and rarely do they meet in the middle. On the other hand, the fact that the “lives” of ideas—with their origin stories, travels, and translations—so often seem to be tangled up with or embedded in particular situations, contexts, connections, and sociospatial constructions suggests that there are distinctive contributions for geographers and their allies to make, some of which are now being made. The lecture will explore some of the methodological, interpretative, and political implications of tracing, exploring, and mapping ideas, principally from the perspective of geographical political economy, where there is considerable promise, but much still to do.