The Suzanne Mackenzie Memorial Lecture: Rethinking the politics of feminist knowledge production in Anglo-American geography

Abstract

It was Suzanne Mackenzie who first introduced me to the radical potential of a feminist mode of knowledge production in geography. In this paper, in Suzanne's honour, I ask how well feminist work in Anglo-American geography is faring in terms of still generating new possibilities of knowledge and of existence. In asking this question I explore the work feminist interventions have done, and not done, in advancing possibilities within the discipline. I examine three aspects of feminist work in geography: looking back to (the collective forgetting of) feminist work prior to the 1960s; looking around at (the limitations of) feminist approaches to methodologies and methods; and looking ahead, in this current era characterized by anxiety and precarity, to (the as yet not undertaken) work on addressing these issues in the academy. I conclude by discussing the future of knowledge production in feminist geography.