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Islands of practice and the Marston/Brenner debate: toward a more synthetic critical human geography Islands of practice and the
Marston/Brenner debate: toward a
more synthetic critical human
geography
Mark Purcell
Department of Geography, University of Washington, Seattle WA 98195, USA
Abstsract: This paper argues that an important obstacle to the continued development of critical
human geography are islands of practice, through which scholars become embedded in a
research and writing tradition that limits their intellectual and political horizons. I use a recent
nondebate in Progress in Human Geography between Sallie Marston and Neil Brenner as an illus-
tration of how islands of practice can stifle intellectual exchange. The paper suggests that the
best way to dissolve the islands is a methodological program to create a more synthetic approach
that consciously integrates multiple aspects of the critical project.
Key words: collaborative research, critical geography, methodology, scale.
I Introduction
This paper argues for a more synthetic critical human geography. I argue that current
research in this tradition is plagued by what I call islands of practice, through which
scholars become deeply embedded in particular research and writing routines that limit
their engagement with habits and arguments outside those routines. The term practice
here refers to the range of academic labor: data collection and analysis, writing, and
discourse.
1
It refers to both intellectual and political aspects of academic labor. The term
island is used to suggest a metaphorical space that offers some room for maneuver
and exchange, but always within clearly defined and confining limits. Such islands of
practice divide up contemporary human geography in a range of ways: they are
defined by scales (local/national/global); forms of domination (capitalism/
patriarchy/racism/heteronormativity); topical specialties (economic/political/
cultural); aspects of the world economy (north/south); settlement patterns
Progress in Human Geography
27,3 (2003) pp. 317332
© Arnold 2003
10.1191/0309132503ph436oa 318 Islands of practice and the Marston/Brenner debate
(urban/rural); methodologies (quantitative/qualitative); the human-nature split
(economy/ecology) and so on. As my emphasis on practice suggests, I contend that
the divisions in critical human geography are primarily methodological rather than
theoretical. That is, the islands are more a product of habitual research and writing
emphases than they are the product of a theoretical claim that one aspect of social life
precedes or determines the others.
If the divisions are methodological, they are surmountable; rapprochements are
possible through a conscious and sustained effort to broaden habitual research foci
beyond current horizons. Overcoming methodological splits requires explicit method-
ological projects that transcend various islands of practice and fuse their traditional foci
into a more synthetic analysis. To be sure, such synthetic research exists and is under
way, but the predominant methodological approach continues to be analyses situated
within one of the traditions mentioned above (e.g., a focus on capitalism, patriarchy or
racism). The paper contends that it is important to identify and understand islands of
practice, and to develop ways to transcend them, because they represent one of the
most important intellectual and political obstacles to the project of critical human
geography.
In order to explore islands of practice in more detail, I analyse a recent nondebate in
Progress in Human Geography between Sallie Marston and Neil Brenner. The subject of
the Marston/Brenner exchange was the recent debate in geography about the politics
of scale. While I intend for this paper to contribute to the debates on scale and help push
scale theory beyond the Marston/Brenner stalemate, my primary goal is to use the
Marston/Brenner debate as an empirical case study that helps geographers better
understand islands of practice and suggest strategies for creating a more synthetic
critical human geography. I argue that both Marston and Brenner are eloquent and
correct in their main arguments and in their critique of the others limitations. However,
each is unable to either hear or heed the others critique. This inability, I contend, is the
result of particular islands of practice that limit the vision of each author. Brenner s
piece reproduces a common research and writing emphasis on a particular social
process: the productive relations of capital (Gibson-Graham, 1996). Marstons paper is
limited by a near-exclusive emphasis on a particular scale: the household. Each is
calling for the other to realize and transcend their island, and each fails starkly to heed
the others advice.
The failure of two of the most capable scholars in critical geography to realize and
overcome their limits suggests that the problem of islands of practice is both real and
acute in contemporary critical geography. Furthermore, there is much at stake in
overcoming them. One problem is intellectual: the islands not only limit researchers
ability to analyse phenomena outside their particular research focus, but they also limit
their ability to understand the focus itself. For example, it is impossible to understand
the ongoing restructuring of the relations of production without analysing the changing
relations of social reproduction and consumption, since each are bound up inescapably
with the other. Marston (2000) makes this argument in her original paper. Similarly, one
cannot understand a particular scale without analysing its relationships to other scales,
since the meaning and importance of each scale is unavoidably embedded in its
interscalar relationships. This is Brenner s (2001) argument in his response to Marston.
A second problem is more purely political: there are persistent and deep divisions
among critical geographers that impede their ability to critique and construct alterna- tives to domination, inequality and injustice. For example, scholars whose main focus
is capitalism are too often intellectually and politically isolated from scholars of
patriarchy, racism or heteronormativity. Similarly, those who investigate more global-
scale relations too rarely collaborate with scholars of local-scale processes. While
diversity and debate within critical geography is absolutely necessary, there is also a
need for a measure of solidarity that can provide a comprehensive analysis of resistance
to injustice and inequality.
The list of divisions in critical geography goes well beyond the examples in this
paper. Erik Swyngedouw, for example, has argued forcefully that political economy
must do more to engage questions of ecology and environment. Given that the entire
basis of capitalism rests on generating wealth by transforming and commodifying
nature, such inattention to ecological questions is ultimately crippling to a proper
understanding of the global political economy (Swyngedouw, 1997b; 1999). I have
explored the limits of critical state theory in geography, arguing that the analysis of the
state has been constricted methodologically because the analysis nearly always reads
the state in the context of capitalist accumulation and capitalist social relations (Purcell,
2002). Out of habit, more purely political factors such as the legitimacy of the state-
citizen relation, have been ignored. This narrowness has produced an incomplete
analysis of the state. Another example I know well is urbanists who study the global
north. Few would contend that cities and urbanization in the global south are
unimportant and unrelated to northern urbanization, but research practice has created
an insular tradition that studies and debates northern cities almost exclusively (e.g.,
Lauria, 1997; MacLeod, 1999; Purcell, 1997; Smith, 1996; Soja, 1996; Stone, 1989). I
present the Marston/Brenner debate, therefore, as only one among many cases in
which islands of practice stifle intellectual exchange and weaken the project of critical
geography. I focus on one case in order to be able to explore in depth how islands of
practice operate, why they stifle intellectual exchange, and how they might be
overcome.
II The Marston/Brenner debate
Over the last 10 years or so, there has been a proliferation of research and writing in
critical human geography on the question of scale. Revolving around Neil Smiths foun-
dational work in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars such as Erik Swyngedouw, Helga
Leitner, Andrew Jonas, John Agnew and Andy Herod, among many others, have been
developing an increasingly sophisticated approach to scale throughout the last decade
(Agnew, 1997; Delaney and Leitner, 1997; Herod, 1997; Jonas, 1994; Swyngedouw, 1992;
1997a). In a 2000 issue of Progress in Human Geography, Sallie Marston published a paper
that has quickly become one of the canonical texts in this literature (Marston, 2000). Her
argument is that the recent scale work has focused too heavily on the question of
capitalist production.