forthcoming article by manuel aalbers and ugo rossi

Sheila has been corresponding with Manuel and Ugo in connection with their article, "Beyond the Anglo-American Hegemony." Manuel's home page at the University of Amsterdam is here, and he has a link to the paper here. Their article is really useful for Americanists as well as geographers because it discusses the uneven distribution of power in an academic discipline across boundaries of language and national and institutional context.

Some earlier articles that dealt with this topic in geography are by Lawrence Berg--one is in the special issue of Geoforum (35.5, pages 553-58) that Sheila's in as well, which grew out of the critical geography conference in Hungary. The article is available if you have online access to Geoforum, but they annoyingly don't seem to allow linking to their journal pages directly. The other is: Berg, L.D. and R.A. Kearns. 1998. America Unlimited. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space. 16 (2): 128-132. I would link to it but my university doesn't have access anymore (!). See also Rob Kitchin's latest in the new issue of Social & Cultural Geography (oops! I don't have access to this one either--maybe Hokkaido University is canceling geography journals. Some nice person post the link as a comment?). People with good online journal access, don't take it for granted!

Why is it that the dominance of native English speakers is so naturalized and unchallenged in so many academic fields, not only in American studies? As somebody once said, of course American studies is dominated by Americans--it's their country after all. Hmm... Ergo, of course geography is dominated by British and American scholars--it's their planet after all???