"John Short has written a 'baffling geography,' appealing to all who know that the word 'student' is always an honorific, and to those who revel in their own, multiple, and self-aware 'positionalities'. Short's essays on the academic world will produce laughter in some and scar tissues on others. This is a book to be enjoyed with chuckles between moments of deep and serious reflection."—Peter Gould, author of Becoming a Geographer
Description
John Rennie Short maintains that the “new world order” is neither new nor orderly. His book, New Worlds, New Geographies, connects global change, urban transformation, and scholarly integrity.
The disintegration of the comforting illusion that the present is just a continuation of the past demands a closer evaluation of how to live one’s life in the fragmented, chaotic world of postmodemity and the current distrust of rationality and progress.
In a personal yet analytical style, Short elucidates the struggles of governments and individuals to situate themselves within changing nation states and the restructurings of urban spaces into a kind of global village.
Short insists that it is the responsibility of academics to help make order out of the chaos of postmodemity and make sense of the relationships between people and the environment, the social and the spatial, the structural
and the personal.
From the restructuring of a “new world order” to the reappraisal of the role of academics, this accessible collection of essays calls for a “progressive human geography” to help cope with the political changes of a postmodern age. New Worlds, New Geographies represents a reluctant postmodernist and resident alien’s attempt to make sense of a changing world.
About the Author
John Rennie Short was a professor of geography at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. He is the author of The Urban Order, Imagined Country: Society, Culture and Environment and The Humane City and the editor of Human Settlement.
March 2000