Becoming undisciplined

Sayer, Andrew (2026) Becoming undisciplined. In: Geographical Journeys : Geographers tell their stories. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 269-278. ISBN 9781032888651

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Abstract

The chapter describes how, having started out as a geographer, the author came to shift into what he terms ‘postdisciplinary social science’. It contextualizes this change and presents his defence of it. Initially this was prompted by the realisation that understanding the geography of cities and regions required deep dives into political economy, sociology, politics and even philosophy. Coincidentally, the experience of working in a university whose teaching and research were designed around interdisciplinary studies as much as single disciplines was transformative. The author argues that restricting oneself to any individual discipline in explaining the social world leads to reductionist explanations that underestimate the importance of processes that lie outside its borders. While geographers tend to be less disciplined than members of other academic subjects so that many have gone beyond the conventional limits of the subject, the institution of the academic discipline restricts them from fully participating in research and debates about the concrete issues that interest them. It concludes that we need to redraw the ‘map of learning’ so it is organized around concrete issues like inequality or environmental crisis rather than disciplines like geography, economics, politics, etc.