Thinking Geographically: Globalizing Capitalism and Beyond

Eric Sheppard

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2015, vol. 105, issue 6, 1113-1134

Abstract: In the spirit of strengthening its intellectual foundations and clarifying its contributions to making sense of Earth, we should resist any inclination to treat geography as a club—a discipline with boundaries to be policed and defended. I advocate for the strengths of thinking geographically, a way of being in the world open to all. This means attending to the geography of knowledge production; how spatiotemporalities shape and are shaped by socionatural processes; the emergent more-than-human world; the variety of ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies underlying knowledge claims; and the world not only as it is but also as it should be. Thinking geographically about globalizing capitalism can problematize the particular sociospatial positionalities from which commonsense understandings of capitalism have metastasized. Europe did not invent capitalist practices but became globalizing capitalism's center of calculation, catalyzed by the spatial dynamics of colonialism elevating Europe relative to its predecessors. Thinking geographically undermines the mainstream account of globalizing capitalism emanating from Europe, that of a rising tide capable of lifting all boats and bringing prosperity to all hard-working and responsible individuals and well-governed territories. Indeed, such body- and place-based accounts obscure how asymmetric connectivities between places and interscalar dynamics, coevolving with uneven geographical development, coproduce unequal sociospatial positionality and conditions of possibility for those propagating and encountering globalizing capitalism. Capitalism also cannot be understood, or practiced, simply as an economic process; its economic aspects are co-implicated with political, cultural (gendered, raced, etc.), social, and biophysical processes, in ways that repeatedly exceed and undermine any “laws of economics.” Thinking geographically necessitates acknowledging space for alternative, more-than-capitalist experiments and trajectories, enriched by peripheral experiences of and encounters with globalizing capitalism.

Date: 2015
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DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2015.1064513

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