In the context of class and culture wars over the social purpose of the university, it is time to revisit a pivotal question: to whom is the discipline of geography accountable and for what? In the spirit of looking back to look forward, we wonder to what extent and in what ways historiographies of geography that critically interrogate geographers' statements on the discipline's social mission might help and guide us at this hour? Specifically, we work to extract added value from the so-called relevance debates which animated anglophone geography in the 1970s. Characterising the present historical conjuncture as a Gramscian moment of interregnum when the ‘old is dying and the new cannot be born’, we tender the provocation that it is the responsibility of geographers to advance the cause of a ‘progressive populism’. To prosecute this public mission, it will be necessary to recentre the discipline around the figure of the geographer as scholar policy activist, immersed in and a progenitor of a vigilant, contestatory democracy. We conclude that whilst the relevance debates failed to theorise, codify, professionalise and valorise such an academic identity, these debates did bequeath logics and legacies that can fast track this work now.

中文翻译：

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地理学的相关性辩论和学者政策行动主义的新形式


在关于大学社会目的的阶级和文化战争的背景下，是时候重新审视一个关键问题了：地理学学科对谁负责以及为了什么负责？本着回顾过去、展望未来的精神，我们想知道批判性地质疑地理学家关于学科社会使命的陈述的地理学史学在多大程度上和以何种方式可以帮助和指导我们？具体来说，我们致力于从所谓的相关性辩论中获取附加价值，这些辩论在 20 世纪 70 年代激发了英语地理学的活力。我们将当前的历史形势描述为葛兰西式的空位期，即“旧的正在消亡，新的无法诞生”，我们提出了这样的挑衅：地理学家有责任推进“进步民粹主义”的事业。为了履行这一公共使命，有必要重新审视地理学家作为学者政策活动家的形象，沉浸在警惕的、争议性的民主之中，并且是这种民主的先驱。我们的结论是，虽然相关性辩论未能对这种学术身份进行理论化、编纂、专业化和价值化，但这些辩论确实留下了可以快速推进这项工作的逻辑和遗产。