Geography and a Geographer: Reimagining the Discipline After Ron Johnston brings together contributors whose work speaks to the geographies Johnston helped to shape. It offers an invitation to revisit Johnston’s body of work and consider its relevance for the future of the discipline. Across the volume, authors reflect on Johnston’s intellectual legacy, the evolution of human geography, disciplinary history and memory, mentorship, collaboration, and collegiality. Other chapters respond to calls to decolonise and pluralise how geography is narrated and practised, and encourage fresh thinking about the role of quantitative approaches in human geography.
Thought-provoking and forward-looking, this collection reflects Johnston’s passion for geography and celebrates his extensive contributions to the discipline. It pays tribute to his scholarship through engagement with the ideas and concepts he developed in his research, and reflects on where his work can take us next.
Richard Harris is Professor of Quantitative Social Geography at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), with interests in quantitative methods, socio-spatial inequalities and segregation, geographies of education and the education of geographers. He co-authored Ethnic Segregation Between Schools: Is It Increasing Or Decreasing in England? with Ron.
David Manley is Professor of Human Geography at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. His work focuses on exploring neighbourhood effects, investigating how households locate in residential space and understanding how segregation develops and is maintained over long periods of time. As a result of many conversations with Ron, he also has a side line in political geography.
Robert Mayhew is Fellow and Senior Tutor at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is an Honorary Professor of Historical Geography and Intellectual History at the Universities of Cambridge and Bristol. Robert is a historian of geographical thought with particular interests in 18th-century geography, demography and migration. His latest book is Debating Malthus (2022). He is a Fellow of the British Academy.